After seeing a bit of the Conservative Political Action Conference on CSPAN, I've concluded that the only thing Democrats have to fear is Democrats themselves. Admittedly a big fear, that, but CPAC was almost a parody of how out of touch, out of ideas and full of hate "conservatives" have become (the one exception being, perhaps, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman). It would be a parody if these activists didn't still have the power to make mischief.
Watching Rush Limbaugh's keynote address was particularly arresting. A man who once marketed his own line of neckties, stood at the podium in an outfit that looked like a bathrobe, rambling on like an over-the-hill Third World dictator to the cheers of the true believers still down in the bunker. Of course, he wants Obama to fail -- nevermind the damage to the country. How else can reactionary politics rise again? It will require Obama's failure -- or decades of faded memory as to what the Republicans did to bring on the worst calamity in decades.
I was actually vaguely sad. I listened to Rush in the early years. He was funny. His blowhard personality held a wink of self-parody. The songs made me laugh. He often took listeners to an intellectual plane -- albeit a right-wing one -- that has remained missing from all the Rush copycats down through the years. When I've tuned-in in recent years, most of those redeeming characteristics are gone, especially the humor.
As the "conservatism" he spent his life championing manifestly failed, as his own life fell apart, he became the hate-monger his critics always charged. It's made him rich. He's "the leader of the opposition." But it's ultimately a tragedy. He was always smarter, funnier and a more gifted radio personality than almost anyone on the air. Too bad he couldn't have used some of the independent thinking he always urged his "mind-numbed robot" listeners to use.
So we are left with a Republican Party that has jumped into the DeLorean, flipped on the time machine, and raced back to the reactionaries of the Great Depression. The often-unfairly maligned Herbert Hoover was the most activist domestic president in U.S. history, before FDR. But around him were Republican politicians and business leaders who believed government should do nothing. Nothing, except protect the prerogatives of the elite, balance the budget, etc. This is pretty much the prescription of GOP Rep. Paul Ryan, writing in a much-hyped op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: "A Republican Road to Recovery." This is all the "party of ideas" has left -- all discredited by history, both in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as experience over the past eight years.
This, and the hope of Obama failure. This, and the hope that Americans really won't get it that this is the party that wrecked America, with deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, an unending policy war on the middle class and an elective war in Iraq that will cost trillions. But the true believers -- they don't care. This was brought home to me in Arizona, when I was asked to speak to a Young Republicans club. Somehow the issue of providing opportunity for all Americans came up. A young woman was having none of it. What if people take to the streets if downward mobility continues, I asked. "Mow 'em down," she barked, and she wasn't joking. (To be fair, a few of the YRs in the room were embarrassed). At that moment, I realized this was not the party of Goldwater or Reagan -- but the revolution eats its own children.
Republican members of Congress fear this activist fervor -- this is why they won't support Obama's rescue measures -- even when they secretly agree with them. They fear a primary challenger to the right. State by state, the true believers have taken over. What's left -- now that the party's ideas have resulted in calamity -- is a Southern/rural plains and Western party. A party based on nihilism and radical individual license. A minority party destined to stay in the wilderness.
Except for one thing: The business interests that profited so much from the policies of the past quarter century are much more powerful than anything FDR faced. They have gained more political influence than at any point in American history. They expect to profit from poisoned peanut butter and poisoned credit default swaps, moving jobs overseas, swapping your pension for a worthless 401(k), jacking up your drug prices and cutting your health care. Nothing personal. It's just business.
They do not want Obama to return to the regulatory and tax policies that ensured American prosperity and opportunity for decades. These right-wing activists will be their useful idiots, to use Lenin's phrase -- and they be richly rewarded. Forget their rhetoric about 'liberty.' It's all about the money. All about "I got mine." So beware. The battle has only begun.
Karl Rove's base strategy was a stroke of genius in that it galvanized some less efficacious fundamentalist voters who along with more traditional GOP voters managed to give Bush a couple of narrow victories. But over the long term, the strategy has borne toxic fruit. The tribalism and exclusionary fervor of the GOP base makes recapturing a majority of voters an uphill climb. But as Rush, Michelle and Ann show, it's more fun being righteous than effective. That partly explains why Rush attacked Newt Gingrich for suggesting the Party needed better policy positions.
Going on 40 years of age, the Southern Strategy made culture war political gold. But it was Reagan who made the grand coalition of culture warriors and greedheads possible. Without Reagan, the base simply looks deranged. CPAC is just a rowdy mob of True Believers who want a fight to the death regardless of the battle. It doesn't matter if there's a grave economic crisis, what the other issues are, or even what the polls say. When the tribe of white Christianist "conservatives" convenes, nihilism isn't far behind.
Posted by: soleri | March 02, 2009 at 04:12 PM
Mr. Talton, this is an excellent post. The Republican Party is a sick toxic joke. It is terrifying that anyone votes for Republicans. They are the party of predatory capitalism, of outsourcing jobs, forcing Americans into crap jobs (because there is nothing else), of lost pensions, worthless 401(k), and ultimately starvation. I don't see how 40 year-olds who are laid off now will survive when they get older -- our country will just "mow them down" instead of having compassion and feeding penniless old folks who tried to work and save for retirement.
Your description of Rush Limbaugh is spot-on. It is absurd that this caricature is actually viewed as a leader, or as verbalizing any political message that makes any sense. Perish the thought. He's a clown, and a demagouge.
Posted by: Mick | March 02, 2009 at 06:14 PM
"...Forget their rhetoric about 'liberty.' It's all about the money. All about "I got mine."..."
Not a contradiction for these folks. "Money is freedom," and all of that. It's that "freedom for all" thingy they keep pushing back at. Sounds too much like "money for all"...
Anyway, a great synopsis of the state of the GOP. It is shadenfreudelicious, with a dash of bitters.
Posted by: Petro | March 02, 2009 at 06:40 PM
Here's to your continued good health and intellectual vigor, Jon Talton!
Keep writing!
Posted by: Steve | March 03, 2009 at 01:27 AM
"Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot."
Posted by: eclecticdog | March 03, 2009 at 08:39 AM
It's frightening how Republicans have merged Evangelical zeal with political philosophy. It's as if Jesus returned only to write the GOP planks -- they are apparently holy writ. I'm quite sure Luther would have been appalled.
Posted by: Matt Self | March 03, 2009 at 10:55 AM
Jon, you are absolutely right that (progressive) Democrats have more to fear from (corporate lackey) "Democrats" than they do from the cavalcade of buffoons remaining in the dying husk of the GOP. The ownership class is busily turning the Democratic party into a wholly owned subsidiary as we speak. For example, legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to write-down mortgages (would reduce forclosures by an estimated 20% and at no cost to taxpayers) is being watered down by a group of conservative Democrats at the behest of the banks.
As for Limbaugh, I suppose that whether or not one found anything redeeming about him at any time is a matter of perspective. This is a man who likened Chelsea Clinton to a dog back in 1993. That was around the same time he mused that the sole purpose of feminism was to allow unattractive women access to the media. He extolled the virtues of sexual harassment in the workplace in one of his early books. So I'll take your word for it that he was once funny or self-deprecating or whatever. I hadn't noticed, since his misogyny has always gone full-bore.
Posted by: Donna | March 03, 2009 at 11:58 AM
USA Today recently published an alarming front page story claiming that Wall Street had no faith in Obama because his budget had revealed him to be "way off to the left" of Bill Clinton.
These sentiments were revealed, however, exclusively by quotes from two hedge-fund managers, who -- though the article failed to mention it -- are slated by that budget not only to experience a slight increase in their marginal income tax rate, but also to lose the special capital gains tax break currently enjoyed by them (and by private equity managers).
The story did end with a paragraph expressing "Wall Street's" feeling that confidence in the markets would be restored if only the government took MORE DECISIVE action. The Arizona Republic, which carried this story, edited out these final paragraphs, leaving readers with the strong impression that the sentiment actually prevailing on Wall Street was a complete lack of confidence in the ability of government, per se, to address the crisis.
This is at least the second time in the last week that the Republic has done this. Another recent story (again, very similar to a USA Today story) reported only that the feds intended to rewrite the 287(g) agreement (between local law enforcement such as MCSO, and ICE) because of "insufficient guidance".
The Arizona Republic, unlike nearly every other periodical covering the story, excised all explicit reference to the fact that the feds' chief dissatisfaction in the implementation of 287(g) was the abuse of it in targeting ordinary undocumented immigrants rather than the serious criminal aliens (drug smugglers, coyotes, etc.) who were the intended targets of the agreement. Revealing such a fact, however, would be tantamount to reporting that Uncle Joe Arpaio is not in compliance -- rather a touchy subject for him at present.
I'm afraid, then, that I'm not a sanguine as Mr. Talton regarding the threat from conservative propaganda. Its adherents have always been cranky, and frequently buffoonish, but the rub is that they are also loud, persistent, and have the ear of the mass media, since ownership of that media is increasingly concentrated in the hands of wealthy investors.
A minor quibble: there is no record of Lenin ever having actually used the term "useful idiots":
"In the spring of 1987, Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, said "We have not been able to identify this phrase among [Lenin's] published works."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | March 05, 2009 at 12:51 PM