The Fortnightly Rant for April 9, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 14, retroactively posted on Saturday, January 15, 2011.
According to the traditional Norman Rockwell version of American democracy that used to be taught in high school civics classes, when a political party is out of power it makes every effort to induce the public to ask itself, “Why didn’t we elect those guys?” The most common method for achieving this goal is to propose rational programs of legislation and articulate to the public why such programs would yield better results for the nation than the programs of the party in power. A methodical approach such as this would seem to be especially advisable in the wake of the George W. Bush administration.
Lately, though, the Republican Party seems to have abandoned its adherence to such tried and true methods to take a radically different approach. Once represented by stout, sober, phlegmatic men in gray suits, droning on in language that could have been formulated by a team of accountants, the Party has undergone an extreme makeover. It now offers, for example, Glenn Beck: a pudgy, unstable little man who could hardly be any more excitable if his hair were set on fire. And it gives us Sarah Palin: a linguistically-challenged woman who wore, during a recent appearance beside a stuffed replica of her ex-running mate John McCain, a tight-fitting garment made of black leather and accessorized with prominent zippers. It looked as if once the event were over she was going to a job interview at a lesbian bondage club in West Hollywood, California.
David Frum, for many years one of the GOP’s less-deranged stalwarts, had the audacity to bring up this phenomenon in an article he published online last month, titled “Waterloo.” Frum noted that the Party had been following the lead, not of its brightest minds, but of its loudest and angriest mouths. As an example, he pointed out that the core of the Democratic health care reform plan, which Republicans have been cursing as the spawn of Satan, had been, in fact, developed fifteen years ago by the resolutely-conservative Heritage Foundation. He also predicted that without a change in course, the GOP would face a tougher election this November than they expect.
Frum seems to have gone over the line, though, when he asserted that the Republican Party’s “real leaders are on [Fox] TV and radio,” and that they are mobilizing the Party’s supporters through the use of “hysterical accusations and pseudo-information,” despite having “very different imperatives from [Republicans] in government.” This accurately describes a situation that has been developing since the mid-1990’s. Firebrands like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay gained control of the GOP by dint of their energy and more-conservative-than-thou credentials. Prestige and status within the Party were awarded to those who positioned themselves the furthest out on the conservative limb. This scramble for conservative credentials provided a steady supply of fresh fodder for the talk radio blowhards and Fox News, thus creating a poisonous political feedback loop.
Now the inevitable seems to have come to pass: they are running out of limb. After Fox News’s Sean Hannity referred to a group of his followers recently as “McVeigh wannabes,” they responded with cheers. Glenn Beck, Hannity’s colleague at Fox, has been advising his audience that, if their pastor so much as mentions the filthy socialist concept of “social justice,” they should evacuate the church. And in Oregon, a candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction is so enamored of his Second Amendment rights that he named his two sons Remington and Winchester.
All David Frum did was state publicly something that is irrefutably true: for all practical purposes, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and his zany cast of crackpots are the ideological dictators running what was once the Party of Lincoln. It’s an ugly truth, Frum was performing a valuable service to his party in saying it.
Frum’s employers at the American Enterprise Institute saw it differently, though. They saw an opportunity to demonstrate yet again the truth of the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.” They told Frum he could keep on working there if he wanted to, but they were done paying him.
Frum was fired for telling the truth, but Michael Steele seems safe in his job as Party Chairman. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with letting your underlings approve the expenditure of thousands of dollars of donors’ money at lesbian bondage-themed private clubs. It reminds us of a bumper sticker sometimes seen on certain four-wheel drive vehicles: “It’s a Jeep thing … you wouldn’t understand.” This must be a conservative thing ….
The worst damage here is being done to the Republicans, by the Republicans. But it’s kicking a leg out from under the two-party system, too. There’s nothing wrong with a little sane opposition to the Democrats.