Republican Follies
I took a busload of students to New Hampshire last week to observe
the Republican primary campaign process up close and personal.
Alright, alright, I know what you must be thinking: “Damn, Green,
you sure must be a dedicated professor to do that!” As it happens,
you’d be partly right and partly wrong. In fact, the students are
great, the trip is fun and a little unpredictable in nice way, and there
really still is a wee bit of genuine candidate accountability remaining
in the New Hampshire retail politics process.
That said, however, it’s absolutely true that the field of GOP
candidates is stunning in its sheer capacity for selfishness,
dishonesty, and plain old meanness, and that listening to them for too
long without wearing noise-cancelling headphones could surely burn off
both of your ears. It’s the political equivalent of staring at the sun,
and the cult-like gaga-bots one can observe among these audiences seem
to have spent quite some time doing just that. If you know just a bit
about history, just a bit about context, or just a bit about the dark
arts of rhetorical legerdemain, listening to a speech by Rick Santorum
or Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney will leave you wanting to pop up just
about every half-sentence and loudly disclaim “That’s a lie!”, “That’s
wrong!”, or “That’s complete bullshit!” It’s a truly painful experience
in that regard.
Moreover, given that American politics has now been reduced to a
‘choice’ between two gangs of nearly identical corporate water-carriers,
yet still masquerades as a genuine election in a democracy, I feel more
than a little complicit in the fleecing of the country just by
attending these events and thereby implicitly helping to legitimize this
kabuki process. It’s not like my individual presence matters a bit, of
course. On the other hand, what if no one came, boycotting the entire
process as an insult to our intelligence?
In any case, up we went, and we got ourselves an education. A good
hot shower upon our return helped a lot at disinfecting the slime
factor, as does a creeping sense of hope I’ve experienced over the last
year or so, reinforced by New Hampshire. Indeed, reflecting upon the
Republican presidential field does, oddly enough, provide one with
reason to think things might actually be looking up a bit in America,
notwithstanding the fact that one of the sick puppies we heard up there
could actually be the next president of the United States. On
reflection after returning from New Hampshire, I see multiple reasons to
believe that the GOP – or, since parties can often be quite malleable,
let us say the GOP as we know it today – might be headed toward
implosion. What’s more, only some of that opinion is based on wishful
thinking…
The most obvious indicator of the current state of the party is given
by a quick look at the presidential field. Even Republicans – even, I
think, the vast majority of Republicans – are dismayed by the quality of
candidates they have to choose from. You could get several careers
worth of stand-up material from the likes of Trump, Bachmann, Palin,
Cain, Perry and the rest, but last I checked your party’s leading lights
are meant for other purposes than cheap comic fodder. But – too bad
for the GOP, and too good for the rest of the planet – they are what
they are. And what they are is an endless procession of witless
buffoons, shoddy charlatans and societal rejects. It goes without
saying that you could do better in terms of intelligence and integrity
just by randomly choosing ten individuals out of the phone book for any
given American city. But I’ll go further. I think you could do better
by randomly choosing ten individuals from any given sixth grade civics
class. Or perhaps even ten crooks from the mellower wings of any given
medium security prison.
Nobody epitomizes the scraping of the bottom of the GOP barrel right
down through the Earth’s crust better than Newt the Gingrich, until just
recently the candidate du jour among desperate Republican voters. He’s
a big beached whale of an alleged humanoid, but it’s still almost
unimaginable that anyone could’ve possibly stuffed so much hypocrisy
within the confines of a single epidermal sack. One of my favorites
concerns Gingrich’s recent lament that he was roughed up unfairly by his
competitors in Iowa. If one were to make a list of the most
destructive politicians and political operatives of the post-war period,
Gingrich would certainly be among the top five, along with Joe
McCarthy, Dick Nixon, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. (Note that for all its
other pathetic qualities, the Democratic Party can at least rightly
claim that it does not begin to compete in that particular ugly
contest.) It has therefore been amusing in the extreme to see him turn
into a whining crybaby as hardball politics, funded by unrestrained
corporate money no less, was used to unravel his presidential
aspirations once and for all. Golly, it almost seems like Newt has
different ethical standards for the practice of politics, depending on
whether he is giving or receiving. But that would be disingenuous.
Nevertheless, that story is actually small potatoes when it comes to
the competition for first prize among the panoply of Gingrich’s rampant
hypocrisies. My favorite has to be the moral finger-wagging of the
candidate directed at the rest of us, while he is on his third marriage
(not to mention his third religion, about which we also have to be
lectured by the candidate). His prior two marriages crashed over his
infidelities. At the same time, of course, that he was impeaching a
president of the United States and Leader of the Free World for the
heinous crime of – wait for it now – infidelity. That’s a good one
alright, although taking almost two million bucks from Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac for his services as an “historian” (Hey, you guys, look over
here! I’m a really great political scientist, and I’ll provide my
amazing academic wisdom to you for a mere one million!) while
simultaneously lambasting these organizations for wrecking the economy
surely rings in at a close second place on the Newtonian Hypocrimeter.
And that’s just for starters. The truth is that, when it comes to the
Gingrich Follies, we could go on and on forever here. There are the
bald-faced lies, the government shutdowns, the temper tantrums, the
money scandals and more.
But enough said. You can get most of what you need to know about the
current state of Republican Party politics just by stopping for a
second to realize that a month ago this fool was the favored candidate
among GOP voters to be the next president of the United States. Before
Rick Santorum, that is, a guy who doesn’t have a problem with the
government outlawing birth control (no, as a matter of fact, I’m not
joking), and who left Congress with no money but somehow miraculously
became a millionaire with a couple of years. Now Gingrich came before
Santorum, but after Herman Cain – stay with me here – who might have
seemed to you a lot like a guy with a severe zipper problem, but of
course that critique was just a ‘high-tech lynching’, don’t you know.
And Cain’s 15 minutes of fame followed that of one Rick Perry, last seen
skipping down the Yellow Brick Road whistling a certain tune about
cognitive organs on holiday. And, of course, Perry came after Michelle
Bachmann, who…
Well, you get the picture. But not quite. A little historical
analysis suggests that the tawdry state of the Party’s current
leadership choices is less anomalous than Republicans might like to
believe. Ronald Reagan (The Name Which Must Be Spoken Every Thirty
Seconds By Republicans Everywhere), who, like John Kennedy, was a lot
less a great president than a subsequent fabricated religious icon for
the party faithful, was at least a strong presidential candidate (though
not one who was at all above the use of ugly tactics). Look at what
the party has thrown up since then: Bob Dole, John McCain, and two guys
(Whose Name Must Never Be Spoken By Republicans Anytime Anywhere) who
go by the oh-so-appropriate appellation of Bush. Even leaving aside the
abhorrent politics, these candidates are to national politics what
Reagan was to acting: strictly B-rate.
But let’s be bold and actually talk about the Bushes, shall we? It’s
ever so instructive to do so. Bush the Elder was the first victim of
the wholesale sanity purge that has infected the GOP in the Age of
Reagan. He broke the cardinal rule – in truth, the very raison d’etre –
of the party by raising taxes, and so they turned on him and both
destroyed and embarrassed him by helping Democrats show him to the door
after a single term. That was Poppy. On the other hand, his son, the
Boy Wondering, is actually guilty of precisely the opposite sin.
Republicans these days can never stop telling you how conservative they
are and how much they revere Ronald Reagan. Conservative, conservative,
conservative. Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. Which makes for a bit of a
mystery (for six seconds at least): If that’s true, how come they
never, ever, mention the guy who was the most conservative president in
American history, who was more Reagan than Reagan, and who happened to
have been in office only just the other day? Hmmm. I wonder why that
could be?
The answer, of course, is that Bush’s rodeo clown presidency
demonstrates precisely what are the fruits of pursuing conservative
(actually, kleptocratic) policies. Those choices were disastrous, and
we are only beginning now to even realize how much damage was caused.
So today’s Republican Party candidates have to pretend that Bush never
happened, and that we’ve never had a very good and very recent empirical
test of what would happen if we followed their identical policy
prescriptions. Someday, of course – perhaps in a decade or two – they
will try to give W the same makeover they’ve given to Reagan, but right
now even the otherwise all too idiot-prone American public can’t yet be
fooled into remembering how much they liked 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Katrina, No Child Left Behind, global warming, global hatred, torture,
Constitution shredding, polarized politics, doubling the national debt,
massive wealth concentration, global depression and TARP – all the gifts
of a single president.
If I could put the current crop of Republican presidential candidates
on the spot and ask them a single question, I would have them rate the
Bush presidency and indicate how theirs would be different. They’re all
slick as an oil spill, of course, so they’d find a way to finesse the
question. Surely they’d say that they’d balance the budget, but of
course, so did Reagan and so did W. It turns out that trying to do so
while cutting taxes, spending more on the military, and without
borrowing is … what did that one guy call it? … voodoo economics. But
here’s the central point, even if it requires multiple iterations for
Americans to learn it: The so-called conservative policies advocated by
the Republican Party today are manifestly disastrous. They have been
precisely so under every president – most definitely including Clinton
and Obama – since Reagan, and they will continue to be so in the
future. Even KenDoll Romeny knows that tax cuts for billionaires, war
with Iran, environmental destruction and putting Christ back into
Christmas won’t revive the country. It’s just that he doesn’t give a
shit. Getting to be president is all he cares about.
Beyond this nightmare of its pathetic leading figures, the GOP is
also in trouble demographically. It has painted itself into a narrow
corner such that its primary appeal is to pretend pious old white men
who are fearful of everything (and thus constantly act as though they
are fearless), but most especially afraid of independent women. It’s
funny to watch these guys rail against Muslim religious fanatics in
Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, without the slightest sense of irony or
recognition of who they’re looking at in the mirror each morning. No
matter. They’re finished. The young generation coming up in America
today is far less sexist, far less homophobic, far less racist, far less
xenophobic, far less religious, far less conservative and far less
Republican than the ones headed for P.T. Barnum’s “This way to the
Egress” sign over the next couple of decades. The GOP will face some
wrenching choices as it becomes increasingly unelectable with time.
Likely there will be a civil war between those who demand ideological
purity and those willing to compromise for electability. Quite probably
the Romney-versus-the-rest motif we’re witnessing in the current cycle
is already the opening salvo in that war.
One could argue that Republican Party orthodoxy is already under
assault from the Ron Paul campaign. It’s truly amazing what Paul is
saying on questions such as the astonishingly destructive war on drugs
campaign, or American foreign and military policy, which he rightly
describes as imperial in nature. He’s far to the left of any namebrand
Democrat, let alone compared to the chickenhawk cowardly hypocrites (as
he himself accurately calls them) of the GOP, like Bush, Cheney,
Gingrich, Romney and all the rest. More importantly, much of what he
says on the campaign trail is jarringly truthful for any prominent
American politician circa 2012. If only his economic prescriptions
weren’t so dishonest and just plain bizarro (and if only he didn’t have
that stinky racist, Bircher, background), I could honestly get excited
about Paul, despite even his party affiliation. But Ron Paul is far
more a strange mutant aberration in the Republican Party today than the
leader of one of the warring camps likely to define the party in the
coming decades. That battle will be between (alleged) moderates and
hard-liners – between Bush 41 and Bush 43, if you will – and Paul is
neither. He is far more a Libertarian than a Republican, but he’s also
strategically smart. Millions more people are being exposed to the
Republican candidate’s radically heterodox and absurdly truthful
critiques of American government than would never hear them if he was
running instead for the Libertarian Party’s nomination. In any case, by
telling such truths right in the belly of the beast, and by attracting
so many votes, Paul makes life that much harder for an already besieged
Republican Party.
In addition to its candidates and its demographics, the GOP has
another problem, as well: Itself. I’m shocked that anyone else is
shocked at what’s going on within the party right now as the various
candidates scramble for advantage. Of course Gingrich and Perry and the
others are saying anything in order to take down the front-running
Romney. What the hell else would you expect from an ideology which has
been peddling extreme individualism, unfettered greed, filthy campaign
practices, and endless deceit at least since the era of Joe McCarthy?
Of course they are eating their young. Why wouldn’t they? Because of
moral qualms? Concerns about integrity? Putting the needs of the many
ahead of the needs of the one? Very funny, people. Very funny.
The reaction to those Republican candidates criticizing Romney for
his career as a vulture capitalist is extremely telling, of course, just
as was the Catholic Church putting Galileo under house arrest. In
neither case did the offended institution bother asking whether the
ideas being floated had any merit to them. No, my friends, neither the
Catholic Church nor the Republican Church have any interest in the
dissemination of truth. Quite to the contrary, their interest is
precisely the opposite. Hordes of Republican blowhards (pardon the
redundancy there) have been savaging Gingrich and Perry for mounting
‘Democratic-style class warfare’ critiques of Romney, never stopping to
actually inquire as to what Bain Capital actually did under his
stewardship. Of course, they don’t need to ask. They already know.
What’s critical is that you never do.
All in all, the GOP is in deep trouble, at least over the long haul.
I think they know it, too. They’re all standing around at this point
waiting for a Reagan to come rescue them. That’s not gonna happen, not
least of which because even Reagan was never “REAGAN!”. Like Bernie
Madoff, the Party’s lies and schemes are beginning to catch up with it.
And as with Madoff, it is the rest of us who will principally pay the
price. The real questions are why this hasn’t happened sooner, why the
party was able to resuscitate itself relatively unscathed from the
disaster of actually governing under its avowed principles this last
decade, and why it has a good shot at the White House this year?
Those are, of course, easy questions to answer. If the top ranks of
the Republican Party are of a quality that would be considered pathetic
anywhere outside of Zimbabwe, the leading lights of the Democrats are
equally dismal. You have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then
there’s… Joe Biden? Harry Reid? Andrew Cuomo? It’s quite amazing
really. Add up all the prominent Democrats in Congress, in the cabinet
and in statehouses, and there isn’t a single one – regardless even of
their politics – who remotely inspires. Moreover, if we’re honest about
Obama and Clinton, it’s patently obvious that they are almost entirely
notable for who they physically are, not what they’ve done or where they
stand. Take away his skin tone and her genitalia, and you’re left with
a pair of two-dimensional cardboard B-rate political nothingburgers.
History will record Obama’s sole claim to fame as getting elected. No
one will ever know what he really stands for, other than maintaining the
status quo so that he can comfortably tuck the one percent into bed
each night. Her only genuine political commitment in life (at least,
that is, before she and her husband were completely coopted by the
plutocracy), seems to have been a devotion to the controversial idea of
taking good care of our children. Wow. Now that’s bold.
Obama and his party are failures for the same reason the GOP has been
failing for so long. They all serve the same master, and I got news
for you, pal: It ain’t you, me, or the 300 million people in America’s
99 percent. This isn’t complicated stuff. You can put away your slide
rule. It’s simple: If you are governing to advance the interest of
predators, and doing so at the expense of the people, the predators will
prosper and the people will suffer. By design. What, you don’t like
that? No problem, you can simply vote for the other party, the one
that’s not in office. Just one problem, though. They have exactly the
same economic policies as the one that is.
We live in the strangest of times. Our politics have hardly ever
been more strident, and yet we fight over almost nothing. We have
enormous problems facing us, ranging from rampant and structural
unemployment to broken empire to climate holocaust, and yet we’re
consumed with trivia. Our candidate running on the platform of hope and
change could not possibly be more beholden to the special interests who
have robbed an entire global economy of hope in order to prevent change
and fatten their already bulging wallets. The political party that led
the country and the world over the cliff for a decade came back to win a
stunning victory just two years later, and is poised to possibly win
another one again. The people who created a massive national debt can
somehow plausibly score endless political points complaining about that
same debt. One of the worst things you can be accused of is trying to
turn America into a ‘European socialist state’ at exactly the moment
when the true European socialist states are precisely the countries
providing the best quality of life, most economic security, and the most
stable economies for their citizens of any in the world. Here at home,
we have very clear empirical evidence from two post-war periods – one
each of liberal and conservative economic policy prescriptions – of what
happens when you go either of those directions, and no one recognizes
that the experiment was even conducted. The list goes on. Rod Serling,
you’re way overdue on the set, baby. Dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee dee…
Hunter Thompson was certainly right. When the going gets weird, the
weird turn professional. But we’re beyond all that now. America has
fielded its All-Century Team when it comes to nutty politics. The good
news, though, is that some people are finally starting to wake up to
what we’re facing, and just who is diddling whom.
That can’t be good news for the Geriatric Obfuscating Pathology otherwise known as the Republican Party.
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