The Washington Post reports that there are divisions within the Republican Party about whether or not they can effectively use a threat to destroy the country’s credit rating and cause a global recession to extract spending cuts from the Democrats. If they did it before, why not do it again?
Meanwhile, the New York Times focuses more on the big picture divisions like immigration, women’s rights, gay marriage, and letting the NRA dictate the GOP’s policy on guns.
In both cases, it is really a divide between conservatives and Republicans. The near-total capture of the GOP by conservatives has created a situation which has now come to a head. They call it the Conservative Movement for a reason. They have places to go. The problem is, the American people do not want to go there. The conundrum presents itself in stark terms in the debate over the debt ceiling. Countless Rush Limbaugh fans and Fox News watchers have been seduced into an alternative reality where they are both the good and the aggrieved. But they don’t want to see the party destroy the country’s credit rating, millions of jobs, and the value of their nest eggs, all in the name of reducing the worth of their earned benefits and eroding their retirement security. The conservatives carried the ball so down the field that people are in the shadow of the goalposts. And they don’t want to score.
Something similar is going on with their strategy of stoking white resentment, anxiety and religious tribalism. It holds whites within the coalition who would otherwise split, but not enough of them…not anymore. Ralph Reed explains their predicament:
“The Republican Party can’t stay exactly where it is and stick its head in the sand and ignore the fact that the country is changing,” said Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and onetime leader of the Christian Coalition.
“On the other hand, if the party were to retreat on core, pro-family stands and its positions on fiscal responsibility and taxes, it could very quickly find itself without a strong demographic support base.”
Their aggrieved white base may not be big enough anymore, but without it the Republicans collapse into oblivion. And, yet, what better way to dissolve their aggrieved white base than to make a deal on immigration or to vote to raise taxes or to agree to gun restrictions or to soften their stance on gay marriage or reproductive choice? Compromising on those issues will feel like a cynical betrayal to Fox Nation.
The truth is that the conservatives like feeling aggrieved more than they like exercising authority. They are happiest in the minority and least happy having to govern (especially if they have to make compromises from a position of weakness). Republicans, on the other hand, exist to win and hold power. Newt Gingrich understands this distinction. He was the one who realized how the conservatives could seize control of the party and win back the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He was the one who came up with a strategy that could break the conservatives out of their lethargy and acceptance of permanent minority status. Gingrich was a hybrid, and it’s no surprise that he is telling the House Republicans to change strategies and stop threatening people over the debt ceiling.
On the other hand, Speaker Gingrich quickly discovered that movement conservatives were more interested in blowing up the government than in governing it slightly differently. After two government shutdowns, two bad election cycles, and the reelection and subsequent impeachment of Bill Clinton, Gingrich was gone. What was left behind was a party that looks nihilistic from one angle and overzealous from another. It was a party built for graft that simultaneously railed against pork barrel spending. It was a coalition that had to sustain itself through an ever-increasing series of delusions and denials and lies. More and more dependent on the white angst and resentment of social conservatives, the party began to denounce evolution and plate tectonics and climate science. It invented a War on Christmas and a threat of creeping Shariah Law. It lost any trust or investment or even connection to academia. It retreated into a cult for home-schoolers.
And when it all blew up in their faces…when Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqis met us with IED’s instead of flowers and chocolates…when starving the government of revenues didn’t create economic growth…when the Republican congress proved more corrupt than their predecessors…when lack of Wall Street oversight led directly to economic collapse…when the country reached it’s lowest level of effective taxation since the Truman administration…that’s when they launched the Taxed (T) Enough (E) Already (A) Party. Has anything more stupid ever happened?
The disastrous culmination of a 28-year campaign to make the rich richer and the middle class poorer was interpreted as the perfect time to launch a tax revolt on the behalf of people who had never paid lower taxes. At the peak moment for government spending, they launched a war on the only available economic stimulus that might save them their job, their home, and their savings. It was no surprise that the whole venture was financed by plunderous plutocrats in their desperate (and successful) attempt to cause a distraction big enough for them to evade accountability for their actions.
The conservative movement is too stupid to live, but the Republican Party is too advantaged by law to die. It would like to remake itself into a party that reflects the values of enough Americans for them to win. But conservatives would rather wallow in their own impotence and rage than change their core beliefs. The GOP will remain bitterly divided for quite some time. The splits will grow when we debate guns and when we debate immigration and when we debate climate and energy. The coalition cannot hold. The most reactionary of the bunch have the advantage of being correct about one thing. Without race-hatred and religious tribalism and gay-bashing and attacks on women’s rights, the GOP has no coalition at all. It would simply scatter to the winds. So, they will persist.
