I have been deeply puzzled by the nihilistic turn politics have taken in the US in the past few years. Leading this charge have been the new republicans. It has become evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. But what really lies behind this new face of the once proud party of Abraham Lincoln. Small parts of these answers are emerging slowly into the public domain. Now a former staff member of the Republican party has written a blistering attack on the policy and the strategies of this now increasingly nihilistic party.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
The Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
3. Pandering to fundamentalism is now a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets. Also around all of this is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.
How do these belief systems- if you can call them that- work out in real life and in the republican strategies today.
Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. "A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner." A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media have now unbeknown to themselves also become deeply complicit in this phenomenon. A complicitness made explicitly clear in the Fox news channel and the slowly insidious takeover of Wall stree Journal and even the once proudly independent Washingtpost. And implicitly in the lack of political courage in the main stream media. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'" The media seem oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.
Indeed it almost seems that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
The republicans have not stopped there and have started adopting tactics that are even less savory. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise not only university students but the old, the poor and the infirm. Republicans may be among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy but domestically, they don't want those people voting.
Indeed if one looks at the record of the republicans in the past few years, one is struck by how closely their tactics resemble that of the communist party- the same willingness to undermine all organs of the state by declaring them anti people, the same use of threats and blackmail, the same solid block voting on issues following a party directive, capturing of voting booths and denying voters their right to vote but really ensuring that those who vote only vote one way, and the identical cloaking of blatant grab for power by pious pratings of people power or love of the constitution.
Underlying all this is also a fact that no Republican thinks that any Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Remember that the Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected. The disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, which many Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth is a modern version of racism. Then came the myth of the "other" or "who is Obama". Now the new myth being assiduously being peddled by the republicans is that "the president is out of his depth".
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.) How far has the present day republican party fallen!
Some liberal writers have opined that there are two different wings of the republican party- there is the "business" wing of the GOP and then there is the religious right. And that after the primary elections, the "real republican party"will assert itself. But the fact is that there is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two wings of the party want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials.
Indeed if one looks at the record of the republicans in the past few years, one is struck by how closely their tactics resemble that of the communist party- the same willingness to undermine all organs of the state by declaring them anti people, the same use of threats and blackmail, the same solid block voting on issues following a party directive, capturing of voting booths and denying voters their right to vote but really ensuring that those who vote only vote one way, and the identical cloaking of blatant grab for power by pious pratings of people power or love of the constitution.
Underlying all this is also a fact that no Republican thinks that any Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Remember that the Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected. The disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, which many Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth is a modern version of racism. Then came the myth of the "other" or "who is Obama". Now the new myth being assiduously being peddled by the republicans is that "the president is out of his depth".
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.) How far has the present day republican party fallen!
Some liberal writers have opined that there are two different wings of the republican party- there is the "business" wing of the GOP and then there is the religious right. And that after the primary elections, the "real republican party"will assert itself. But the fact is that there is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two wings of the party want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials.
All democrats ignore this at their peril. Indeed all Americans too.
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