[PAA-Discuss] Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

[Sarah Gonzales]

This is a must read, albeit a long article written by MIke Lofgren,  
Republican Congressional staffer for the past 30 years. He recently  
retired this summer. He held a few positions during his tenure, the  
most recent as a staffer for the Senate Budget Committee office.

Don't let the title fool you, no ideologies or political parties are  
spared in this article. It sums up quite well my views on the current  
state of our government and our Republic. It's quite sobering.

It's something we must address as a nation or we may just lose it all.

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"

Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double  
Indemnity" (1944)

Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of  
the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are  
rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the  
political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a  
presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be  
competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to  
corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will  
be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank  
capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order  
to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven  
surrender to Big Pharma.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats  
have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen,  
egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention  
to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt  
ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican  
Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any  
political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like  
Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers  
of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King,  
Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul  
Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The  
Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent  
that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional  
staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I  
could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would  
use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure  
that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to  
concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use  
that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the  
US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of  
political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal  
Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction  
workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact,  
forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is  
that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the  
FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral  
actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible  
actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the  
hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be  
obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional  
pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms  
of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement  
over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt  
ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they  
might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of  
many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It should have been 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. This trend has several implications,  
none of them pleasant.

In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that  
it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be  
absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should  
be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include  
unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative  
machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US  
Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative  
body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any  
given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that  
contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality  
and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance,  
the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high  
functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was  
legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current  
Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet  
having legislated the Bill of Rights.

Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for  
Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject  
to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder  
that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus  
the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the  
Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a  
disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of  
democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

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."

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 are also complicit in this phenomenon. 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.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right  
in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt  
ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big  
loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined:  
"Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how  
bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the  
next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their  
tremendous magnanimity." Note how the  pundit's ironic deprecation  
falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who  
precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He  
seems 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.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out  
of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low- 
information voters, means 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.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only  
cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the  
Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the  
very federal government that is the material expression of the  
principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is  
not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government;  
I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and  
Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely  
uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections  
by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self- 
incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the  
unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated  
population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably  
opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center  
for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center  
for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead,  
they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually  
help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly,  
like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by  
feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we  
shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self- 
government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this  
technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of  
unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always  fall  
short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New  
Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to  
fall back. 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 university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed  
direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress  
pointed toward more political participation by more citizens.  
Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing  
other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy  
(albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature  
policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want  
those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not  
likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who  
are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays.  
Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like  
the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their  
extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in  
the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object  
to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is  
constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is  
deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the  
Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists.  
Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may  
change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to  
need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this  
reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But  
they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low- 
information political base with a nod and a wink. During the  
disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, 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. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure  
forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of  
the birth certificate.

I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP.  
While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that  
no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans  
also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice  
fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy  
theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been  
Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in  
2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther  
myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.

The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP  
operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is  
more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw  
material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America  
since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle  
class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and  
health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating  
in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary;  
their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing.  
Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among  
the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that  
outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent  
most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity  
politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too  
illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white  
working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be  
sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most  
energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage  
immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux- 
populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization  
that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of  
that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that  
do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the  
minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a  
defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory  
bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field.  
Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are  
posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and  
Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No  
wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the  
Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at  
the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why  
didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that  
theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even  
Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative  
sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly  
claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned  
benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll  
taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats.  
Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message:  
it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid  
that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion  
fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept  
out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that  
politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated  
farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very  
accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting  
him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt  
little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not  
the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled  
greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting  
expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of  
wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is  
the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At  
"Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide  
unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those  
economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or  
the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death  
panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which  
stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than  
Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important  
indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is  
increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise  
and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl  
Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign  
strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes  
in three principal tenets I have laid out below. 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. Their caterwauling about deficit  
and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President  
Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are  
highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform  
the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP  
refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one  
percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch  
brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits  
billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective  
rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that  
had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! -  
than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all  
costs our  society's overclass.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for  
billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond  
of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of  
an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether  
Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower  
rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job  
creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable  
quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in  
cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up  
for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than  
to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the  
wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP  
dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment  
to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small  
businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de  
minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be  
small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy  
Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of  
total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment  
than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development  
(OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans  
are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the  
effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular,  
they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being  
confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower.  
Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove"  
that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the  
rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half  
of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave  
out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are  
millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute  
payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But  
according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow,  
they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust  
funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes  
apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying  
necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a  
millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular  
culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC  
for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another.  
More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have  
been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values  
voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons  
(which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation  
as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for  
the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous  
provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public  
companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation,  
including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only  
require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this  
provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the  
public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own  
incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the  
Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says,  
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my  
view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the  
banks."

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. McCain wanted to  
mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's  
conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now,"  
a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been  
persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria.  
And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading  
"defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows.  
About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of  
the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same  
Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased  
spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation.  
To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives  
meaning to their lives.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more  
complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of  
bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to  
it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of  
Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly  
uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases  
nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego,  
are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But  
there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is  
negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon  
than it receives back in local contracts.

And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more  
fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget  
creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long  
gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor.  
Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost  
research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits  
little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out  
padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of  
political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway  
construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million  
dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs  
argument is ultimately specious.

Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological  
predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This  
undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and  
dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly  
hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same  
psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both  
foreign and domestic.

The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the  
Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous  
both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less  
prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism  
and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to  
abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch  
Republic and the British Empire.

3. Give me that old time religion.

Pandering to fundamentalism is 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. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988  
Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in  
the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll  
more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on  
questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the  
existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to  
the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere  
by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly  
reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti- 
intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that  
defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de  
facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are  
encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith"  
in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren  
dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to  
debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of  
course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor  
of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs -  
economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism -  
come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower  
Republicanism?

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism  
(which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in  
America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the  
Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of  
beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all  
three of the GOP's main tenets.

Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and- 
claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If  
not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale  
may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the  
prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the  
fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of  
slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and  
enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired  
genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the  
jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem  
to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of  
the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short  
step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of  
thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once  
writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their  
belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them  
to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some  
evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a  
suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of  
domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most  
adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem  
was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What  
does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently  
abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic  
perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the  
religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am  
not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction  
the two factions 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. In any case,  
those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums  
of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought  
not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican  
could have written the following:

"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.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional  
Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a  
Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is  
not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self- 
immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the  
manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of  
failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce  
Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans,  
like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to  
this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven  
incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.  
And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having  
gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of  
their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value,"  
the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up  
their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the  
GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under  
the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather  
than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't  
after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of  
your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax  
cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be  
"forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing  
those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you  
worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco  
reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's  
disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further.  
Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political  
actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar.  
Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars  worth  
of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have  
stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global  
reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US  
interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is  
successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy  
disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and  
America's status as the world's leading power.

Footnotes:

[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the  
Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected  
illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative  
Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts  
"model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft  
legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby,  
which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.

[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his  
foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the  
greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so  
that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch  
McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest  
legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial  
system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His  
top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president.  
Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his  
country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing  
McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less  
visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen

[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that  
outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant  
labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will  
be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a  
downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to  
mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no  
good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable  
result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a  
high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.

[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years,  
I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of  
Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book,  
"Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that  
the left fears, the right hates.

[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the  
one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a  
natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent  
sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand  
exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who  
felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance  
of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who  
enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have  
to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic  
officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his  
offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming  
his kid "Rand."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://paa-tx.org/pipermail/discuss_paa-tx.org/attachments/20110904/3afb5349/attachment.htm>