Reading through the papers, blogs, and mags this morning, two pieces leapt out at me. The first was a Washington Post opinion piece by David Ignatius and the other was an American Conservative article by W. James Antle III. Both pieces address the disarray of the Bush administration and the effect it is having on the Republican Party.
Starting out with Ignatius, we see some pretty choice quotes.
If you want to hear despair in Washington these days, talk to Republicans…Republicans voice the bitterness and frustration of people chained to the hull of a sinking ship.
I spoke with a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives this past week, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, and I heard the same devastating critique: This White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to President Bush, just as it once tuned out the hapless Jimmy Carter; the president’s misplaced sense of personal loyalty is hurting his party and the nation.
“This is the most incompetent White House I’ve seen since I came to Washington,” said one GOP senator. “The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can’t even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It’s the weakest Cabinet I’ve seen.” And remember, this is a Republican talking.
A prominent conservative complains: “With this White House, there is loyalty not to an idea, but to a person. When Republicans talked about someone in the Reagan administration being ‘loyal,’ they didn’t mean to Ronald Reagan but to the conservative movement.” Bush’s stubborn defense of Gonzales offends these Republicans, who see the president defiantly clinging to an official who has lost public confidence, just as he did for too long with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Ignatius chooses Gonzales as his point of departure, but he might as well have started with the war in Iraq. And that is what Mr. Antle does. Antle addresses the strange phenomenon of ardently anti-choice, anti-gay Republicans cuddling up to Rudy Guiliani, and wonders about the appeal of John McCain (who voted against Bush’s tax cuts) for supply-siders. He paints a frightening picture of the average Republican primary voter.
Litmus tests must go. That is the rallying cry of those who believe Republicans should drop their insistence that the party’s 2008 presidential candidate toe the line on taxes, abortion, guns, or immigration. Wartime, the argument goes, is no time for conservatives to demand ideological purity. Or, as Noemie Emery put it in an emblematic essay for The Weekly Standard, “in a time of national peril, the test is a luxury [conservatives] cannot afford.”
We might see Ms. Emery’s exhortation to heterodoxy as mere advocacy that does not reflect the feelings of Republican primary voters. But then we have to look at the polls that show Guiliani with a double digit lead. Obviously, the primary voters are already thinking beyond social issues. The old litmus tests might be replaced by a new one based more on xenophobia, Islamophobia, and fear. [Ed. note: this is basically a fascist appeal].
Of course, commentators like Emery wouldn’t really do away with litmus tests—they would just create a new one. Her take is that it all comes down to “The War, Stupid.” Iraq “overwhelms everything as the major issue in the eyes of the base.” While Giuliani is pro-choice, he should be preferable to conservatives because “[t]hey see him as a more ruthless George W. Bush.” Giuliani “would have taken Falluja the first time,” for example, or “would not have been fazed by whining over Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo, and would have treated critics of the armed forces and of the mission with the same impatience he showed critics of the police in New York.”
And there is more.
“For a majority of the GOP primary electorate, it is the war, the war, the war,” wrote talk show host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, allowing parenthetically that judges are important too. “No fight, however, matters as much as the one for our survival,” Andrew McCarthy maintained on National Review Online. “No one will fight that fight better or smarter or more zealously than Rudy Giuliani.”
And more.
Jonah Goldberg wrote in his syndicated column, “Taken together, terrorism, Iraq, and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue.” Social conservatives will embrace candidates like Giuliani not because “pro-lifers are less pro-life” but because they “really, really believe the war on terror is for real.” Emery argued similarly that the war appeals to “the need to use force when one’s country is threatened; the need to make judgments between good and evil; the need to protect and assert the moral codes of the Judeo-Christian tradition; the need to defend the ideals of the West.”
What we’re witnessing here is quite frightening because it amounts to a fairly massive display of false consciousness. Fear of Muslims and fear of terrorism is becoming a raison d’etat, which will inevitably lead to the loss of civil liberties, along with increased xenophobia/racism, and militarism. George W. Bush has failed in everything, but he has succeeded in turning the GOP into a proto-fascist party. Those that Antle quotes are merely the intellectual vanguard of a nationalist front party.
They are a different breed than the people anonymously quoted by Ignatius. Ignatius’s sources are inside the Beltway, already in power, and watching that power slip away from them. They’re not afraid for their lives, their afraid for their party’s continued viability within a two-party system. They understand that the GOP is being systematically stripped down to its most nativist and unattractive components. And they blame the President.
The spectacle of Alberto Gonzales’s Department of Justice (staffed by Pat Robertson’s Regent University alums) is laying bare the real rot within Bushism.
Meanwhile, even social conservatives like Mr. Antle see the work they have dedicated their life to going down the drain with the catastrophe in Iraq.
To say that conservatives can compromise on first principles but cannot disagree about how best to wage the war on terror is to urge the abandonment of the issues that built the Republican majority in favor of the issue that tore it down. Conservatives who surrender on every other fight in exchange for the single-issue hawks’ promises of victory are accepting a fool’s bargain.
The question is, can business interests rebuild a viable Republican Party after it has cracked up on the shoals of the Persian Gulf? With social conservatives abandoning their goals in favor of proto-fascism, and moderates leaving the party in droves…how will Wall Street again learn to cobble together majorities? Let’s hope they don’t opt for the fascist route.