I often bemoan what has happened to the Republican Party - a party that once had many social moderates and rational fiscal conservatives. Indeed, it is the political tradition that I was raised in and which led me to be a city committee member for eight (8) years a number of years ago. But that was in the past. That political part no longer exists and, in my opinion, to be a Republican nowadays requires that one either a racist, motivated by greed and keeping as much of "what's mine" as possible, a homophobe, a religious extremist or some mix of the foregoing. In a lengthy review of a new book entitled "Rule And Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party" The New Republic pinpoints the insanity and sickness that has overtaken the GOP. Here are some highlights:
[T]here is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination.
IT HAS TO DO WITH the strange and sad fate of Republican moderation. After all, moderates, or at least relative moderates, do continue to exist in the Republican Party. They merely do not exercise power in any meaningful, open way. They provide off-the-record quotations to reporters, expressing unease over whichever radical turn the party has taken at any given moment. They can be found in Washington and elsewhere rolling their eyes at their colleagues.
FIFTY YEARS AGO, the conservative movement, far from holding a monopoly on acceptable thought within the GOP, was merely one tribe vying for power within it, and not even the largest one. Geoffrey Kabaservice’s fine book tells the story of the slow extinction of the party’s moderate and liberal wings. The conservative movement, he shows in often gruesome detail, took control of the party in large part due to an imbalance of passion. The rightists had strong and clearly defined principles and a willingness to fight for them, while the moderates lacked both. Meeting by meeting, caucus by caucus, the conservative minority wrested control of the party apparatus.
The moderate Republican tradition had always leaned heavily on elitism, which abhorred demagoguery and the crude appeals to self-interest that they correctly identified with the machine hacks and Southern racists of the Democratic Party. Nixon’s strategy of counting upon white resentment began to identify the party as a less congenial place for thoughtful, educated people.
[T]he conservatives won out by packing meetings, staying until everybody else was exhausted, and other classic methods of organized fanatics. The moderates lacked the ideological self-confidence to wage these fights with equal gusto, and battle by battle they lost ground until finally there was nowhere left to stand within the party. Republican moderates in the early 1960s held a place of influence and comfort within their party that is hard to imagine today.
The transformation is now so complete that Rick Santorum can proudly announce “we will never have the elite, ‘smart’ people on our side”—“smart” referring not to native intelligence, but to those who aspire to a certain level of intellectual respectability. The party’s ideological and sociological evolutions have run in tandem, driving a progressively wider gulf between the Republicans and the technocracy.
What remains of “moderation” within the party has taken on a definition very distinct from the meaning that it held originally. Unlike the moderate and liberal Republicans of yore, today’s “moderates” generally identify themselves as conservative. They are simply less so.
Columnists such as David Brooks, Michael Gerson, and Ross Douthat have formulated a serious and often stinging critique of the GOP’s radical direction, and, with varying degrees of seriousness and specificity, laid out an alternative path. What they have failed to do is to face up to the cold reality that the alternative they propose diverges wildly from the actually existing Republican Party.
By the time the rightward migration of the party has finally halted, the definition of Republican “moderate” will likely have corroded beyond all recognition. Already the extremism of the party has advanced to such a point that its most fervent elements are identified less by their ideology—which is nearly impossible to distinguish any more from that of the mainstream—than by the degree to which their detachment from reality departs from paranoia as a mere figure of speech and approaches actual, clinical
paranoia.
It [Romney's 47% statements] was a horrifying peek into the intellectual state of one of our two major parties, but only a peek. The changes in a party remain largely obscured when it is out of power. . . . . the final results awaiting only the party’s chance to exert power once again.
Far too many Americans who do not follow politics daily simply do not realize that the Republican Party has become the home for lunatics and extremists. It is not the party it once was and the sane and rational have largely fled the party voluntarily or have been forced out as the inmates took over the asylum. Should Romney/Ryan win next month, we will all soon learn just how sick and deranged the GOP has become.
No comments:
Post a Comment