Jonathan Chait wrote a nearly perfect piece back in February for New York Magazine. It was an attempt to explain the strategy (and a bit of the psychology underpinning the strategy) that the Republicans adopted in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Why go for total obstruction? Why move to the right on immigration? Why nurture the most far right elements of the party? Why embark on a massive voter suppression plan? Chait covered it all, and I think he nailed it. At its simplest, they know that the America they once knew and dominated is slipping away. They know that the GOP, as it has existed since 1980, is going to have to adapt or die. But they decided they should roll the dice on one more chance at glory. If they could pin the economic downturn on the president and gin up enough racial and class resentment, they might be able to take back the House in 2010 and the Senate and White House in 2012. With the trifecta for at least two years, they could make their last stand and perhaps stall the coming progressive revolution for a decade or more. Here’s a particularly good part of Chait’s piece:
Last summer, Obama was again desperate to reach compromise, this time on legislation to reduce the budget deficit, which had come to dominate the political agenda and symbolize, in the eyes of Establishment opinion, Obama’s failure to fulfill his campaign goal of winning bipartisan cooperation. In extended closed-door negotiations, Obama offered Republicans hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts and a permanent extension of Bush-era tax rates in return for just $800 billion in higher revenue over a decade. This was less than half the new revenue proposed by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission. Republicans spurned this deal, too.
Instead the party has bet everything on 2012, preferring a Hail Mary strategy to the slow march of legislative progress. That is the basis of the House Republicans’ otherwise inexplicable choice to vote last spring for a sweeping budget plan that would lock in low taxes, slash spending, and transform Medicare into private vouchers—none of which was popular with voters. Majority parties are known to hold unpopular votes occasionally, but holding an unpopular vote that Republicans knew full well stood zero chance of enactment (with Obama casting a certain veto) broke new ground in the realm of foolhardiness.
The way to make sense of that foolhardiness is that the party has decided to bet everything on its one “last chance.” Not the last chance for the Republican Party to win power—there will be many of those, and over time it will surely learn to compete for nonwhite voters—but its last chance to exercise power in its current form, as a party of anti-government fundamentalism powered by sublimated white Christian identity politics. (And the last chance to stop the policy steamroller of the new Democratic majority.)
That is a B-I-N-G-O, right there.
I’d argue that the Republicans’ dedication to total obstruction had become obvious by the time the budget deal was under discussion. The administration wasn’t fooled into thinking John Boehner could deliver on his promises, so they were free to make as generous an offer as they wanted. The game was to highlight the Republicans’ intransigence, which required pissing off the Democratic base. That’s not to say that there won’t be a deal that the Democratic base doesn’t like, but it won’t ever be half as generous as what Boehner walked away from last year.
The more important point is that the Republicans haven’t made any deals, and haven’t made any concessions to women or gays or Latinos or blacks or scientists or environmentalists because they want one last shot at governing without any of those folks. They are thinking about the future in an apocalyptic way. They can’t stop armageddon from coming, but they can put it off for a little while. The modern GOP is on death’s door, but it can have one more shot at governing the way it wants to govern.
In a way, it has been a giant gamble. Every demographic trend that is working against the GOP has been exacerbated by their strategy of total obstruction, opposition to immigration reform, gay and women’s rights, science, and their pursuit of voter suppression. But the strategy worked brilliantly for them in 2010, and it hasn’t completely flamed out yet this year, although things are looking bleak. There was some rational basis for what they did. At least, there was until they decided to vote en masse for the Ryan Budget and then put the man himself on the ticket. That was the equivalent of a Berserker attack. Here is a visual demonstration of what went wrong with the Republican leadership’s brilliant plan:
Any questions?
