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November 8, 2008
The coming Republican civil war.
Andrew Sullivan has been linking to many articles and blog posts that document the bitter recriminations, finger-pointing, and outright panic among the wreckage of the Republican party in the wake of their second consecutive crushing defeat.
It's all very entertaining reading.
The absurdity of Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy appears to have been the final straw for conservatives who are actually interested in ideas and reasoned arguments (see George Will, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Chuck Hagel, and Sullivan himself); however much I may disagree with them—which is nearly always in the case of the first three—they advance positions that are usually grounded in reality.
These relatively non-insane conservatives now see a Republican party that's quickly being abandoned by moderates and independents, inhabiting a shrinking geographical territory, and—most worryingly—reliant on our very own Taliban Lite to fill its rallies with pom-poms and chanted slogans (and to turn out reliably on election day). Hardcore evangelicals have become Republican Party's crystal meth: a cheap and potent rocket fuel that eventually turns them into a toothless social pariah.
Here are two excerpts from good essays that Sullivan has linked to recently.
This is not a cosmetic problem for the GOP. This is systemic...That is what is so damned entertaining about the short-term circular firing squad- it really symbolizes how deep in denial some of these folks are. These guys are delusional if they think the problem was an insufficient number of Red State mugs on the Palin plane and inadequate fealty to the cause. The problem is not inadequate adherence to unnamed “principles,” the problem is that they simply have no principles. They have slogans. Nothing symbolizes the slogan driven tactics over strategy GOP quagmire quite like one of my favorite episodes from the last election- the tire pressure gauge imbroglio.
There was nothing that really summed up the idiocy of the GOP quite like Rick Davis and company passing out tire pressure gauges in an attempt to mock a common sense approach to dealing with one of many aspects of the energy crisis. I am sure it will surprise no one that the brain trust at Red State was issuing action alerts for this, too.
In short, America got seduced by the Republican sweet talk, we took them home into our bedroom for some good times, and instead of performance, it turns out the Republicans have a serious case of electile dysfunction. Rather than hold true to their “principles,” they chose to sit on the edge of the bed for eight years and tell us how good it was going to be, and we lost interest and fell asleep.
How...could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.
