Extreme GOP: Right OR Wrong for America?

The Republican Party’s messy divorce from sanity is a good thing for the country in both the short term and the long term.

JESSICA BADER: The message the Republican Party seems to have taken from its drubbing at the polls last November seems to fly in the face of the choice made by the American public. Rather than making efforts to win back the moderate voters it alienated by pandering to its extremist base, the GOP seems to have decided that its problem was that it didn’t go far enough to the right. So far, we’ve seen a handful of Republican governors beating their chests about rejecting federal funding to expand unemployment relief in their states, a threat from the national party to support a primary challenge against Arlen Specter because he voted for the economic stimulus bill (even though Specter losing to Pat Toomey in a primary would effectively hand his seat to the Democrats in 2010), 2008 presidential candidate John McCain (aka the guy who wasn’t conservative enough for much of the base) paying his respects to Herbert Hoover by advocating a spending freeze in the midst of a recession, the ritualistic bending over and grabbing of ankles that follows any GOP elected official offering the slightest criticism of Rush “I want [Obama] to fail” Limbaugh, a freshman Representative introducing legislation designed to pander to conspiracy theorists who think the President was born in a foreign country, and the RNC chairman facing a firestorm of criticism for statements deviating from the religious right positions on abortion and homosexuality. The party seems to marginalize itself further on a daily basis, strengthening its appeal to the Sarah Palin fan club as it pushes everyone else away. Is this the end of the American political system as we know it?

Most likely, the answer is “no.” In the short term, the insanity of the positions the Republicans are putting forth should make it easier for Barack Obama to sell the parts of his agenda that still need selling. The unpopular (who wants to keep giving money to the big banks?) but necessary (if those banks go under, we’re all screwed) financial stability plans that Tim Geithner gives underwhelming speeches about would be even tougher to generate public support for if the conservative opposition consisted of something more sensible than Richard Shelby going on the Sunday shows to talk about just letting the big banks die. In the long run, the impulse towards ideological purity could lead to the end of the Republican Party as a force in national politics. Major American political parties have withered away before (the Federalists and Whigs being the two best examples), their coalitions splintered and some of their ideas taken up by existing or new parties. It could be said that the splintering of the Republican coalition is already well underway, with those who hold moderate positions on social issues having largely been pushed out of the party and those near the center on economic issues well on their way to the same fate. It is not inconceivable that a split over whether to support – or from which direction to oppose – the Obama administration’s foreign policy could be the straw that breaks the elephant’s back.

This is not to say that the death spiral of the Republican Party would lead to permanent Democratic governance, however. With the Democrats already showing signs of factional bickering on the President’s budget, attempting to absorb refugees from the right could push party unity to its breaking point. In fact, I can envision a day in the not-too-distant future where some of the moderate Republicans, left behind by their party in the days of its waning relevance but too attached to some conservative principles to switch sides, join forces with some Blue Dogs and other conservative Democrats to build a coalition more formal than the one that joined forces to slice and dice the stimulus and seeks to do the same on cap-and-trade, one that’s to the right of the current political leadership but would serve to shift the locus of political debate leftward if it were to replace the GOP. A Susan Collins / Evan Bayh ticket in 2016 seems like a crazy idea, but crazy ideas may be what lay the groundwork for it.

In a two-party system, one party of crazy is a terrifying thing.

HOWARD MEGDAL: I would love to believe that Jessica is right, and truly, she has some strong historical arguments to support her point of view. But I think both the past eight years, as well as the current extreme circumstances we find ourselves in, simply don’t point to a moderate alternative to the Democratic Party.

The scariest part is, all it might take is one more extremist government to bring this country down.

While Jessica rightly points out that the Republican Party, as presently constructed, would have trouble appealing to a majority of Americans on its own agenda, we find ourselves in terrifying times. The economy continues to fall into complete disarray, and worse yet, nobody seems to have any idea how to fix it.

So when AIG’s bonuses became public this weekend, we saw the firstorm quickly escalate. Finally, in a miasma of unapproachable figures, people had something to grab onto.

Now Republicans have not been using cheap populism- but this has nothing to do with responsible attempts as governance, but rather a complete failure to put together a coherent message. By coherent, incidentally, I don’t mean intellectually sound. The 2004 Bush re-election campaign was a coherent message, but intellectually dishonest. The Republicans simply haven’t had a rallying point.

Come 2010, and 2012, the party will, of course, be defined in large part by opposition to Barack Obama. Truly, without herculean efforts to get in its own way, both elections will be about Obama and the Democratic Congress. In such a climate, should the economy not recover, what the Republicans believe or advocate almost won’t matter. Take a look at the work Steve Kornacki has done on the 1982 election. In the midst of a recession, Americans voted for a liberal Democratic agenda they’d rebuked in 1980 and would rebuke even more convincingly in 1984.

But in order for Kornacki’s analogy to be fully realized, the economy will need to pick up sometime between 2010 and 2012. Otherwise, simply by being the de-facto other in a binary choice, Republicans stand to benefit for as long as the economy is down. And by many measures, both the fall of the economy and the haziness of just what will bring it back to health are more significant than back in 1982.

And add to that, of course, that the 1982 Democrats weren’t advocating such things as ignoring climate change as it accelerates, fomenting war with Russia, or any of the multitude of crackpot ideas that routinely bounce around the Palin/Limbaugh region of political thought. We’re just too close to the edge on too many issues- in part because a government based on those ideas ran the country for eight long years.

So much as I enjoy seeing news that Sarah Palin is the headliner for the largest Republican fundraiser in 2009, it also makes me fearful. In the party as presently constructed, people like Sarah Palin will win nominations for national office. And that means until the realignment that Jessica describes comes to pass, every time the Democrat cheats on his wife and it comes to life, crazy wins. Every time the Democrat has $90,000 in the freezer, crazy wins.

And maybe, in an economy this bad, when the entire election becomes a referendum on the party in power, crazy will win, too. When Richard Shelby goes on TV and talks about “letting the banks die”, he’ll be describing President Palin’s economic agenda.

Tags: Arlen Specter, Barack Obama, Democratic, Evan Bayh, John McCain, Know-Nothings, Pat Toomey, Republican, Richard Shelby, Sarah Palin, Susan Collins, Whig

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 12:05 am and is filed under News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.