On November 10, 1994, the day after the Republicans swept the Democrats from power, Richard Cohen reflected on the state of the nation (no link).
On the weekend before the midterm election, Newt Gingrich, the likely speaker of the next House of Representatives, associated the murder of two children in Union, S.C., with Democratic policies. He suggested that parents would no longer kill their children if the GOP ruled the land — a coupling of psychotic behavior with political ideology that is without logic or precedent. I note only that in 1892, when Lizzy Borden took an ax and gave her parents 40 whacks each, the president, Benjamin Harrison, was a Republican.
Gingrich has made other such statements. He called Woody Allen, a person with some parenting problems, “a perfect model of Bill Clinton Democratic values” and has suggested, in a variation on the same theme, that the president does not represent “normal” people. These occasional witticisms suggest that beneath Gingrich’s affable surface, not to mention his formidable intellect, lurks a man who sees his opposition as less than honorable and, indeed, more than a little sick.
Gingrich, however, is not the odd man out in the new Republican Party. The GOP is fueled by the energy coming from its zealously conservative constituency. On Tuesday, 25 percent of Republican voters told exit pollers they were fundamentalist Christians. This self-identification can mean many things, but one — if not the paramount — leader of that movement is the Rev. Pat Robertson. A futurist in the way he sells his message, he is nonetheless a man steeped in grizzled conspiracy theories. He believes, among other things, that the Masons, those charitable folks with their harmless rituals, want to control the world’s finances and, in case you didn’t know it, probably hired John Wilkes Booth to kill Abraham Lincoln. You can, as they say, look it up — in Robertson’s own book, “The New World Order.”
Political correctness, supposedly a social disease of the political left, has in fact benefited the political right. The journalistic tendency to report all crackpot theories and statements as just different versions of the truth has obscured the fact that it is the GOP that is in the throes of a political psychosis. It is now triumphant, temporarily at least, but it faces a dire problem: It does not speak for the average person.
Most people are not implacably opposed to abortion, do not really want to gut government (certainly not middle-class entitlements) and are not engaged in hand-to-hand combat with modernity. They are, instead, in an economic doldrums, with real income either declining or stagnant. For that ailment, the GOP has no prescription — and no way to fullfil its vow to reduce taxes, increase military spending and, somehow, leave the middle class in a swoon for Republican policies. The purported fight against creeping homosexuality is hardly going to put a dime into anyone’s pocket.
The upshot is that a militantly right Republican Party is going to put Bill Clinton back where he said he was all along — the center, if he can find it and if his own party will permit it. (The Democratic center has also taken a battering, and the party is even more beholden to its urban base.) Of course, the president will move that way himself and will reinvent himself for the umpteenth time in his political career. The White House is fashioning a strategy of reform, taking on Congress — which now means the GOP — intending to deal with such issues as PACs and campaign spending. These are measures congressional Republicans obstructed in the past, but politically it will be harder to do so in the future — and still claim to be speaking for the people.
Cohen foresaw the catastrophe to come. Twelve years later the country may be on the verge of snapping out of its love affair with a party run by the Geryon of religious fundamentalists, corporate executives, and defense contracters.
We have seen plenty of psychotic behavior, from the relentless pursuit of conspiracy theories: Vince Foster, Whitewater, Paula Jones, Trooper Gate…to the decision to impeach Clinton over a dalliance, to Robertson and Falwell’s blaming gays for 9/11, to the Terry Schiavo case.
Twelve years on, we are closer than ever to seeing abortion outlawed, military spending is through the roof, the deficit is astronomical, we still have no universal health care and costs are skyrocketing, college tuition has doubled and doubled again. We have done nothing on global warming, nothing on energy independence, nothing about cleaning up corruption and getting a better functioning government.
The GOP has brought us a war on modernity, and has stolen our treasure and our children’s treasure to maintain a corporate friendly economy and a rapacious military that must devote its resources to safeguarding central Asian mineral wealth.
1994 was a disaster for the country and for the world. May 2006 be the beginning of the end of this sad chapter in our national history.
