The Party Is Over

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By David Michael Green (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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I know, I know, it’s weird. But, just the same, Americans just don’t seem to want economies plummeting, debts exploding, cities attacked by terrorists, other cities drowning, endless wars based on lies, cronyism, nepotism, looting, environmental disasters, alienated allies, wrecked national reputations, or snarling vice presidents on their television sets. Nor do they want congressional legislation, enacted by a president flying across the country to sign the bill, that tells Americans how to handle their individual family medical tragedies. Like I said, it’s weird. I guess Americans are just quirky that way.

Well, okay. Then it would seem like the logical thing for the GOP to do would be to move away from the baggage of its radical albatross and return to the days of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, back when the right wing of the party was considered scarier than a 3-D Hollywood horror movie even by the other members of the same party. Well, it would seem. But, you see, that’s the GOP’s second gigantic problem. It cannot do the one thing that could possibly save it.

Indeed, not only can it not, but it doesn’t want to. And not only doesn’t it want to, but it doesn’t even get that it must, or even should, if wants to have any hope of surviving. It’s truly amazing. I’ve talked to, and read pieces written by, regressives who seriously argue that the GOP’s problem is that it hasn’t been conservative enough. Indeed, I saw one young lady from the Heritage Foundation make the argument that neither George W. Bush nor William F. Buckley were real conservatives. That’s pretty hysterical if you think about it (something regressives never want you to actually do). But consider the main programmatic commitments of the Bush administration: wars overseas, huge military expenditures, lopsided bias in favor of Israel, arrogant unilateralism towards the UN and all other countries, massive tax cuts, anti-gay legislation, Social Security privatization, deregulation, anti-abortion policies, blocking of stem-cell research, environmental degradation, massive expansion of the wealth gap, erosion of the separation of church and state, and so on.

Which of these, I’m curious, don’t come right out of the contemporary conservative (pardon the obscene oxymoron there) play book? Sure, you could say that regressives are upset because Bush expanded Medicare (although the more accurate way to put it would be that he expanded the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies through the vehicle of Medicare), and that he doubled the national debt (which is kinda inevitable if you massively increase expenditures whilst slashing tax revenues; See Reagan, Ronald W., and the Tripling of the Debt). But let’s be serious, shall we? No one can credibly argue that George W. Bush was not a conservative. No one, that is, except the certifiably insane freaks on the right, who, mercifully, are finally becoming again the laughingstocks they once were in American society, and for precisely this reason.

Nevertheless, they continue their relentless march to the Land of the Ludicrous. I mean, just how amazingly silly is it to claim that George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative? How insane do you have to have become to argue that this is why the party is losing elections? How completely bonkers do you have to have gone to prescribe a turn further to the right in order to do better from this point forward?

The Specter purge - and make no mistake, though it was his decision, it was no more 'voluntary' than the choice to exit a burning building – would represent the leading edge of a departure trend that would rock the Republican Party, except for one small problem: There is really hardly anything left of a moderate wing of the party anymore. Specter would be leading the disaffected droves out of the party, but there are none left to speak of, at least at the national level. It is not unfair to say the Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both senators from Maine, are the only remaining moderate Republicans in Congress today.

At least one of them is really unhappy, too. Snowe penned an article in the New York Times this week, entitled "We Didn't Have To Lose Arlen Specter", in which she vents a bit of her anger at the radical right for driving Specter and, a decade ago Jim Jeffords, out of the party. Specter's own announcement speech was even more hostile, and remarkably candid for a politician. He spoke clearly about how the Club For Growth and other orthodox elements of the radical right have made it almost impossible for center-right Republicans to survive in office. Even if they can survive the threat of a far-right challenger in the primary, or the indifference of the party base such as greeted John McCain last year until he brought on the Palin abomination, they are then too wounded to win in the general election.

Snowe takes aim at social conservatives for purifying the party right down to its unwinnable essence. But what is most remarkable is that she – an angry moderate – gets her party's crisis almost as wrong as the looney fringe. Reacting to the capture of the party by the social conservatives, she writes:

"It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, 'We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.' He continued, 'As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.'"

Quite laughable stuff, really. It’s as if the only sin of the right has been its insistence on emphasizing abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research as key Republican issues. Imagine how far gone these people are when even their moderate champion, writing in anger about the far right, doesn't begin to address their core dilemma. Yo, Olympia, I have some really awful news to give you, to go along with the bad news you've already received. Here it is: You guys have been wrong on EVERYTHING!!

Do you really think, Senator, that if you just let up on abortion but continued to manufacture millions of unemployed homeless people out of the former middle class that you would start winning elections again? And do you really think that you would be allowed to let up on abortion by your party’s base – the same nice folks who were getting ready to purge Arlen Specter – even if you could make that deal?

Do you really think, Senator, that if your party could somehow drunkenly stumble its way into a humane and science-based position on stem cell research at home, while continuing to lie its way into disastrous wars abroad, that the American public would rally to your cause? And do you really think your base of reactionary voters would let you do it, anyhow?

Is it really your belief, Senator Snowe, that if only the GOP would let the queers have their freakin’ marriage certificates that the party could then continue to win elections on a platform of planetary destruction via environmental catastrophe? And do you think your lovely base of nice Christian conservatives would allow you to do this, anyhow?

What Olympia Snowe doesn’t get is how far gone it all is now. And what she also doesn’t get is how desperate the party is when it continues turning to Ronald Reagan to solve their problems, as if he were Jesus’s kid brother.

More and more Americans – especially the young, tolerant, left-leaning ones – don’t know Reagan from James K. Polk, and the GOP’s constant appeal to worship at the shrine of Saint Ron strikes them as exactly what it is – living in the past.

And it’s a mythological past, anyhow. Reagan raised taxes after he slashed them. He had a huge recession. He tripled the national debt. He signed a very liberal abortion bill in California. He sold missiles to Iran. He shredded the Constitution. He didn’t defeat the Soviets and end the Cold War, though I must admit, he did kick ass on Grenada (right after the hundreds of Marines he had stuck in Lebanon for no reason got wiped out, of course).

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), (more...)

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