The Anti-American Republican Party
I don’t use “Tea Party” any more because the fact is the Republican Party is staffed and run by members of what was once called the Tea Party. I also don’t use “treason” very much. Perhaps because during the run up to the Iraq war it was overused, and made meaningless, by those who argued that opposition to President Bush’s lamebrain adventure in Iraq was treasonous.
Nevertheless, whether you use John Carney’s ‘Tea Party’ to give your Republican friends an “out” or you use “Republican” to describe the vandals in the House of Representative, one thing is clear. Modern Republicans have changed the country for the worse. As Bloomberg points out:
These tactics have long-term costs. If the U.S. defaults on its debt because a handful of Republican legislators don’t like a law vetted by all branches of government, the damage will go beyond a much lower credit rating. Something else — a sense that the U.S. is, for all its differences, united — will have been lost.
As vandals, I’m very sure the Republicans don’t give a flying fuck about the fact that (for all of our differences) we are were united. In fact, defunding the ACA can be seen as a convenient ruse. The real end game is American disunity. Even if they lose every other thing they claim to want, they will have won disunity. It was their ongoing project since Kennedy – and now they have it.
The Republicans are certainly burning down the house, the stakes are huge in this fight. And yes, we are disunited and I expect will remain that way until a generational change heals some of the deep divides. As noted the Republicans have been on this crusade for decades, but now their getting desperate as their hard core supporters die off. It’s not going to be pretty and there is no real answer for what ails us a nation.
I’ve been having a very long back and forth with a friend, whose theory is that Harry Reid is completely driving the Democrat’s strategy train on this thing. He thinks that Harry banished VP Biden and is often the voice of the Dems because he is fighting for tradition. The tradition that laws and budgets get passed in the usual order of the Congress — not by taking hostages. This mirrors his position on the filibuster — he is working to maintain some normal working order. I still don’t think that the filibuster needs to be around, but I get preserving a (fairly) orderly way of doing business. And that order is that the minority party doesn’t get to write an agenda or make excessive demands or have any expectation that they can get everything they want by just stopping the government and threatening the world economy.
But the disunity. This is the cynical me speaking, but I don’t think that this group of people won’t be happy until businesses are people (and the people who are rapidly losing their place in the world are people) and the rest of us are 3/5 of a person.
OK cassandra, this one
Harry Reid is completely driving the Democrat’s strategy train
Just makes me feel like the opening few minutes of a bad SF movie.
Here’s the thing about the division where I believe some people are missing it: while the Tea Party is obviously the cause of this particular crisis, I think the tea party’s existence is symptom rather than cause. I think, as far as the deep division in this country goes, the roots go back as far as the late 1960s-early 1970s. It intensified in the 1980s to an extent, but even Reagan did not court evangelicals to the extent that the GOP would in the 1990s.
And in many ways it was division right down the middle of the white part of the Boomer generation, a fact that was obscured by the intense loyalty to American institutions in the “Greatest Generation” of WW2 vintage. If you graph it, the division appears to increase as two variable go in different directions–the Greatest Generation dying off and the Boomers hitting middle and then late middle age. This is also the demographic that the GOP rode so successfully for 25 years.
To use an (admittedly strained) metaphor from the 19th Century–in the first 40-50 years of that Century the leadership of the country could be considered John C Calhoun (slave south), Henry Clay (mixed midwest), and Daniel Webster (free north). For all their failings these men were larger than life and genuine statesmen and political thinkers. By 1850 they had been replaced by Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglass, and William H. Seward–men of far less imagination and intellect, and far more driven by ideology than by love of country. We had a civil war ten years later in part because these guys couldn’t do compromise and change like their predecessors. We seem to have hit 1850 right about now.
Steve, I saw a map not too long ago that restated the fact that the GOP’s power base and electoral strength is concentrating in the South, with some of its traditional Western states increasingly purple. Wish I could find that.
But the conversation about Reid’s strategy train is absolutely limited to the government shutdown and debt ceiling business and preserving a way of doing business that does not hurt so many people. I don’t think that he is driving the larger D train. I’m not sure who is. Nominally, I suppose Obama is, and I think I’ll know for sure once the 2014 election season is here.
For your metaphor to work, though, you’d have to put a D in leadership on your 2013 list who is completely committed to ideology over compromise. You’ve read here long enough to know that in this space, many of us think that the D’s are far too willing to compromise, dragging the entire party further and further to the right. What the D’s have not been so good at is smart compromise, rather than the theater of compromise.
cassandra I admitted up front the metaphor was strained, but I would argue that Obama represents a distinct step down from Bill Clinton in terms of political acumen (although you could make the counter-argument that Obama, not Clinton, actually got health care passed).
I think that what has happened over the past 20-30 years in the Democratic Party has not been ideologically driven, but has worked the other way. Instead of gravitating toward extreme ideology the’ve gravitated toward extreme pragmatism. I think that’s what the earlier post you put up about fanaticists vs compromisers indicates.
I think you could show the same absence of statesmanship as an overall standard in the Democratic Party due to excess pragmatism (New Democrats, remember them) while you have it going on in the GOP due to excess ideological fervor.
Which is not to try to create an equivalency here in terms of damage to the body politic. Compromisers will damage the body politic by never achieving as much as they might aspire to, and in driving the whole machine toward mediocrity. The machine sputters but does not die.
Ideologues have the potential to kill the machine by (another bad metaphor) pouring sand into the machine rather than the cheap, low octane gas the compromisers were using.
I do think that Clinton is probably the politically smartest guy of my lifetime. The difference between Clinton and Obama is that Clinton largely gave up big initiatives once the House changed in 1994 and Obama keeps trying for big agenda deals (for better or worse). Clinton was very good at making Clinton look good and making the GOP sputter. That was fun for horserace observation, but Clinton could also coast along in an economy that was going gangbusters for awhile. Which is better it up to each of us to decide — I’m a sucker for the guy who keeps doing the work, although I concede that just trying to get the work done isn’t good tv. Your last two paragraphs are spot on, though. I’m glad that building the transcontinental railroad or the interstate highway system or NASA did not depend on the vision of this bunch of legislators.
The thing that I think will be the same for both Obama and Clinton (and I hope I am wrong about Obama) is that they will leave a D party infrastructure that isn’t of much use to the rest of the party.
I do think that Clinton is probably the politically smartest guy of my lifetime.
As a politician (and I do not mean that negatively) who had the best understanding of using media and the art of the deal to his advantage (with media defined as the media available in his day), I would argue that in the 20th Century only FDR could have a case made that he was better (and that’s real close to apples and oranges).
That’s why I thought it was so painful watching Bill campaign for Hillary in 2008; social media had not even been on the field during his presidency, and he didn’t understand it, and he was overall (at least in public, probably not in raising money or in the back rooms) a liability. He looked confused … and old.
Oh, and I don’t think you are wrong about Obama on the last point. “Big” leaders, right or left, don’t tend to build really good benches because they don’t personally feel like they need them.
Reagan didn’t leave the GOP with much of a bench, either.
A generation ago Americans had to fight off Karl Marx’s Communism. Now we have to figure out how to escape another ideology – Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Ideological extremism kind of sneaks up in history. At first, it looks so nutty nobody pays attention. Then all of the sudden you realize there’s a serious enemy within.
So if you wonder why there’s a government shutdown, why anyone would want to see default, monetary system failure, it’s because of a cult like devotion to an ideology. There really is no paved road to Ayn Rand’s utopia. The Rand revolution requires collapse of the welfare state.
Don’t underestimate what is going on here. History tends to take a while to sink in. We are in the grip another bad ideology. Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Cruz, the whole gang all see themselves as disciples of Objectivism. And when you are a disciple of something, channeling the very Founding Fathers, you don’t worry about rules. The ends justifies the means. That was the mantra with the Marxists, so it is with the Tea Party.
The Heaven’s Gate Cult founded by Marshall Applewhite convinced 39 otherwise sane Americans to commit suicide in order to reach an alien spaceship following the Comet Hale-Bopp. The Ayn Rand Tea Party cult trying to seize control of our Government is even more of a threat.
TIme to get tough, speak out, fight hard is now.
With all of that in mind, did you see the Booker debate Lonegan?
Lonegan is obviously crazy, and Booker needs to destroy him in this special election.
It is go time in NJ – GOTV !
And Sarah Palin is flying in this weekend to campaign for Lonegan. So… there you go.
Cue the Wicked Witch of the West theme.
This is genius — The House GOP as the pigs from Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Just Go.