David Brooks, behind the firewall, makes a few points that I have been making for a while. Do the Republicans have any sense of self-preservation? Evidently not.
At the University of Chicago there’s a group of scholars who are members of what is called the Rational Expectations school of economics. They believe human beings tend to anticipate unpleasant future events and seek in advance to avoid them. Their teachings do not apply to the Republican Party.
Brooks then details a familiar narrative about the 2006 midterms, etc. Then he gets to the meat of the problem.
On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along…
They are like people quietly marching to their doom.
What’s interesting about Brooks’ column is that he attempts to explain why.
First:
Anybody who offers unorthodox tax policies gets whacked by the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform. Anybody who offers unorthodox social policies gets whacked by James Dobson.
Second:
Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness.
Third:
Conservatives have allowed a simplistic view of Ronald Reagan to define the sacred parameters of thought. Reagan himself was flexible, unorthodox and creative. But conservatives have created a mythical, rigid Reagan, and any deviation from that is considered unholy.
And fourth:
Republican morale has been brutalized by the Iraq war and the party’s decline. This state of emotional pain is not conducive to risk-taking and free and open debate.
Brooks concludes by saying something about the GOP that can be applied with even greater accuracy to the President and Vice-President and their war in Iraq.
In sum, Republicans know they need to change, but they have closed off all the avenues for change.
By defining the war in Iraq as the defining struggle of our generation, and by defining any withdrawal from Iraq as a defeat that will have catastrophic consequences for our nation, and by rejecting the collective wisdom of the Baker-Hamilton group…the GOP has driven itself over a cliff.
The people are concerned about Iraq and the consequences of chaos and instability in the Middle East. But they also know that there would be a draft, and tax increases to pay for a total national effort, if the status of Iraq were truly as important as it is portrayed by Republican fire-breathers.
The GOP/administration are like the boy who cried wolf. Even if there is a real wolf lurking out there, the people stopped listening to false alarms a long time ago.
But, from a political perspective, the most interesting thing is precisely this total lack of any instinct for self-preservation we are seeing from congressional Republicans. Their collective tolerance for the continued service of Alberto Gonzales is merely the most visible manifestation of a greater problem.
If they were sensible they would get out in front of the problem and admit that we cannot make any progress on fixing our problem in Iraq until we have new leadership and that we can’t wait until 2009. If the Republicans force us to wait until 2009, there may be very few Republicans in office when the 111th congress take their seats.
And, as a Democrat, I admit that this is good for my party. But it is not good for the country. Republicans should save themselves by admitting what a growing majority of Americans already know: our current leadership is unfit for office.
This front-page LA Times article continues the theme.
The longer the fool is in charge, the greater the chance we will be harmed because the dangers lurking out there are increasing in a logarithmic rather than a linear fashion.
And, as a Democrat, I admit that this is good for my party. But it is not good for the country.
I disagree. As cold-blooded as it sounds, I think the debacle in Iraq and the enormous disaster it represents for the United States — not the least of which is likely a substantial and permanent reduction in the international stature of the US — is a very small price to pay for the annihilation of American conservatism.
First of all, an unelected “international leadership” is just a polite way of referring to imperialism. Imperialism abroad always leads to despotism at home.
And secondly, conservatives are a powerful internal movement against everything America stands for and ought to stand for. There is no freedom to which the Republicans are unopposed. There are certainly no new freedoms they wish to introduce. It is not for nothing that they have been called the American Taliban. The evangelical plutocracy they want to create here is something I would gladly take to the streets with a rifle to fight.
In a very real sense, we are fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them over here. If we can defeat American neo-fascism in Iraq, at the cost of a few thousand lives, it is preferable to the domestic civil war the Left Behind-reading lunatic core of the GOP ultimately wants to fight here.
I don’t think so. These people are not going away. Do NOT be confused by the disarray of the current crop of morons, idiots and dead-enders in Washington. They are back-peddling furiously, saying things like “Bush isn’t a conservative”.
This country is still very conservative, and if you don’t think so, you should go out of whatever city you live in and go to the country. Most all states in this Union are blue in the city and red-red-red from the suburban fringe and out.
I’m well aware the country is very conservative, and it happens that I live sixty miles from the nearest urban cente. The biggest annual event where I live is Mule Day.
Conservatism is simply not compatible with a liberal democracy, and it seems that everyone but liberals are aware of this. They aren’t trying to undermine the constitution and implement a fascist-corporate state with a thin veneer of Christian dominionism for nothing. I was paying very close attention to the annihilationist rhetoric coming from the right over the last dozen years.
Republicans aren’t just the loyal political opposition; they are a subversive fifth column. We ignore that fact at our peril.
I read the Brooks column with a strange sense of deja vu. I would bet five dollars that you can find an identical column by him from, say, 2003, in which he writes the exact same thing about democrats…no new ideas, out of touch, about to become irrelevant.
Brooks loves to pretend he’s a deep thinker, but he never says anything interesting. Today’s column is just an example of the phenomenon that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
you really have to wonder why the ratpugs appear willing to go down with the ship. not that it’s necessarily bad thing, mind you, but if you stop and think about it from a bit outside the box of the beltway….there has to be more than cognitive dissonance at work here…fear, comes immediately to mind.
fear of exposure, vilification, losing their place at the trough.
aWol learned the craft of political assassination at the foot of the master when he was part of bush 41’s campaign…Lee Atwater, he of Willie Horton infamy and death bed conversions. jr. was a good soldier then making his bones during that period as an enforcer.
a few years later, he finds god, and hooks up with karl, [who was too far gone even for poppy] who brought his own brand of Machiavellian strategies to the win at all costs, no quarter given approach. their MO, throughout their joint campaigns has been one where dirty tricks and behind the scenes maneuvering are employed in a manner that leaves them just beyond the reach of those who would expose them…deniability, plausible or not.
anyway, what l’m sensing here is that they’ve [aWol, cheney, rove] got a lot of unpleasant and potentially ruinous things on everybody in a position to make a stand against them within the party…the reasoning being that at the end of the day they’ll lose ground in 08 by playing along..[or they’ll be exposed. exposure of all the corrupt and probable amoral activities of these people would in all likelihood, cause the complete annihilation of the GoP as it exists today] while still maintaining an overt sense of unity, which may, or may not enable them to make a comeback in the midterms and in 2012. this scenario is not much of a stretch, given the fact, on the ground, that the next president is going to inherit the Iraq misadventure.
sort of a if l go down, you’re going with me… suck it up or go the way of the whigs….politics in the good ol’ us of a…a blood sport.
my 2¢
Good riddance to bad rubbish. The economic interests that have underpinned the Republican Party since the days of John Adams have gone through three parties–Federalist, Whig and Republican. They will rise again in a new party, perhaps holding on to the old name, because those interests require a voice in the American polity. I’m not too worried about them. But the present gang has got to go, and if this means 15 years in purgatory, all the better for the rest of us. To hell with them.
We may end up owing George W. our ironic thanks- his incompetence and overreaching have totally discredited the republican party. We are going to wipe them out in 2008.