Some historical perspective

I’m not usually a huge fan of Joe Klein’s feelings about how this or that politician ought to act in this or that situation, but he’s definitely a savvy political observer. This article gives some great insight into the state that nihilism has left the Republican party in:

To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don’t Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.

GOP as cult

Someone sent me this piece as well, by Independent (UK) columnist Johann Hari:

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed — with a straight face — that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

…

These claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Steven Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn’t be here without the NHS." Frank Laffer, the right-wing economist lauded by David Cameron, claimed on CNN that it would be a disaster if the government got its hands on Medicare, the program providing healthcare for the elderly, paid for entirely by… the government.

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed, as one Republican congressman put it, that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and all the world’s climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It’s fun to think of them as a cult, but the truth is a lot scarier: there’s no center to this — not even when Bush and Rove were pulling strings. These people freaking out are doing so as a result of ingesting tons and tons of multi-flavored nonsense for decades; political, religious, pseudo-relgio-ethical (I’m looking at you, Ayn Rand, and spitting on the floor), economic. It’s been a steady diet of denial and hate made credible by people who trade in statistics and nice-looking logos and websites and 24-7 cable opinionews. A poison pablum, as engineered for tastiness to the brain as a Big Mac is to the gullet, has turned the GOP faithful into a legion of zombies.

That can’t be good for American democracy.

One Response to ““The GOP is going downhill” — news meme of the week?”

1. Richard Catron says:

   September 15, 2009 at 10:00 pm

   It is especially scary when the zombies are from among one’s own kin. Usually, the arguments that filter down through the various media to the level of tea party revelers lack even the comparative sheen of Egoism. I don’t think the cult analogy is too far off the mark. It may be more helpful to think of it as a sort of massive, memetic call and response hymn in which a few simple buzzwords are capable of eliciting a predictable set of ululations from the zealous flock.

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