During the early portion of the Bush/Cheney administration, progressives got organized online to fight back because the Democrats in Congress were showing no fight. We revitalized the party, even if we didn’t fundamentally change it. Something similar is happening on the right with the Tea Party movement, but it isn’t quite the same. No one could plausibly accuse the Republicans in Washington of backing down from a fight with the Obama administration. Even before the president was sworn in, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided on a scorched-earth opposition, using every procedural hurdle in the book. That the president has compiled an astonishing record of legislative achievement (in historical terms) despite this opposition doesn’t change the fact that McConnell and the Republicans have stymied the president on closing Guantanamo, on addressing climate change, on tackling immigration reform, and held up so many judicial nominees that there are now a higher percentage of Republican judges than when Obama took office. If you are a conservative who opposes the president’s agenda, you can’t fairly say that the Republicans have failed to fight for you.
So, why are rank-and-file Republicans throwing their bums out in primaries all over the country?
I think, obviously, the starting point in explaining this has to be the trauma of George W. Bush’s failure both on policy and politically. Whatever ‘compassionate conservatism’ was supposed to mean, it wound up meaning a bigger role for the federal government in education, a much bigger Medicare entitlement that now includes prescription drugs, and yawning economy-killing deficits. That might have been easier to swallow if Bush had delivered more for conservative causes, but his main contribution was simple cronyism and corruption and lax regulation. It might have been good for some high donors in the short-term, but it was no model for the future. The Republican voter isn’t asking for a return to the Bush years. They’re looking for a party that actually follows through on its rhetoric about the government being the problem, not the solution. They seem to have wised up to the fact that the GOP fat cats have been feeding them a line of shit.
Which leads me to the second explanation. The rank-and-file have been indoctrinated, literally. They’ve consumed so much of this shit from Fox News and hate radio that they actually believe in it. And one of the things they believe is that our institutions are not trustworthy and they’re not worth a damn. It’s hard to argue with them about that; it’s just that everything they’re doing is making things worse. By making it harder for the government to function and making it harder to do the things that need to be done, the right-wing creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. We ought to close Guantanamo Bay, but the people are too frightened and, so, no one has the president’s back to make that decision. Congress denies him the funds. The same is true on a host of other issues, most notably stimulus spending, climate change, and immigration reform.
Does anyone think our immigration policy doesn’t need reforming? Making that impossible doesn’t help anyone.
Republicans are getting thrown out of office because they aren’t crazy. But that’s because they’ve been teaching their base to be crazy for so long that they’ve finally started to demand that their representatives be crazy, too.
And no one can get control of this beast.