Panic

Why do Republicans react like a 2 year old denied candy when they lose? Is it because they have all the intelligence and maturity of a 2 year old? A 2 year old knows how to lie to get what they want. Remember that Bill Cosby “Himself” stand up comedy skit where Bill catches his 2 year old in the cookie jar? The child lies that he was getting the cookie for Bill. We laugh, but that is precisely what the Republicans are doing right now. They are lying.

They want to be in power. They are out of power. They are upset about that. So they are lying about the President and what he plans to do. Reeducation camps? Gun bans? Tyranny? The loss of rights?

I think “thereisnospoon” at Daily Kos diagnoses the problem exactly:

The answer is simple, for there is only one word that can explain this sudden collapse of intellectual fortitude [on the right]. Panic. Sheer, unadulterated panic. The sort of panic that comes over a person when their oxygen supply is suddenly cut, or over a criminal when the cops come closing in.

It is a panic caused by an inability to fight by other means. Some might argue …. that these are people who have become accustomed to the trappings of power; that the sudden loss of the Executive and Legislature has reduced them to a state of temporary infantility from which they should recover in due time. And yet, [it might be argued], such is politics: simple minority status cannot explain the depths of this self-imposed fall from grace and dignity.

And [they] would be right. The panic we are seeing from the GOP goes far beyond the shock of minority status. It is caused by a profound sense of powerlessness that comes not from a temporary electoral setback, but from a realization that previous methods of political survival have been rendered impossible.

I argued long before the election that an Obama victory would provoke a sea change in American politics. Put simply, the GOP’s battle for the entire past century has been to roll back the New Deal of FDR. They were largely unsuccessful until the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, when the anger of poor and middle-class whites against upper-class whites was successfully transferred to minorities who were supposedly taking their tax dollars, and libertine women supposedly upending God’s social order. Every argument made by the right wing–from welfare to taxes to foreign policy and everything in between–was a coded appeal to punish minorities, libertine women, scary foreigners and the supposed social engineering experiments of white liberals. But especially minorities. Remember this quote from Lee Atwater, Karl Rove’s mentor:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—-r, n—-r, n—-r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n—-r”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

The entire principle of Republican politics was predicated on the notion that an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama could barely get a fair shake at catching a cab or getting an apartment, much less winning the presidency and a 60% approval rating. To some, the notion remains so impossible that it must have been the work of a massive shadow conspiracy.

The ascendancy of Barack Hussein Obama (and, to a lesser degree, Hillary Clinton) to the highest stations of political power in America represents, in a final sense, the rejection of that brand of politics by a majority of Americans. Ignore the specific arguments and concerns of 2008 and examine the broad spectrum: it means that a majority of Americans have moved past all that. That conservatives will have to establish an entirely new paradigm to attempt to win elections.

In this context, the fact that conservatives find themselves unable to be taken seriously when complaining about deficit spending; that they have shown themselves completely incompetent in the realm of warfare and foreign policy; that an entire American city drowned helplessly on their watch; that their economic philosophy was responsible for the collapse of the world economy and provides no answers in the face of the current crisis; all this is mere icing on the cake. National political parties can pivot from such things easily enough by taking advantage of circumstance and their opponents’ mistakes.

On a fundamental level, conservatives have nothing to say because they don’t know what to say. Even if they dared attempt to use the same political strategies as before in spite of their obvious failure, they would be immediately called out as the race-baiting garbage they have always been, due to sensitivity about Obama’s own race. They’re completely flummoxed. It takes time to develop entirely new paradigms, and they don’t have them right now.