Discussion for article #241620
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Central to his and his co-author Thomas Mann’s examination of Washington dysfunction is that Republicans were more to blame for the gridlock than Democrats – an idea that is anathema to Beltway centrists and many political reporters. Reviewing the last few decades of American politics, the two experts identified a sea change for the GOP during which lawmakers decided they were willing and even eager to risk harm to the country in pursuit of their ideological goals.
What is this “Beltway centrist” of which you speak, Tierney? Either you carry water for these guys or you don’t. It’s pretty simple, like Pablo Escobar’s open offer in “Narcos”: plata o plombo (silver or lead). Alternatively, you could conceive of a wider neoliberal blanket of what Noam Chomsky refers to a “manufactured” consensus, whereby the idea of party is obsolete as all these Beltway people exists to serve the interests of those that help them pay their mortgages (pretty radical for TPM, though). What this may also be is just the breakdown of the right alliance between capital and nativist politics. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and to a lesser extent other countries in Europe are seeing the right fragmented as what the right wants is different things. Some guys want all the marbles and even better crowd control, while the nativists want what they thought they had earlier, which were historically outlying conditions that conferred pretty good living standards relative to their talents and now feel obliged to lash out at anything blamable because that deal has been taken off the table.
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“I can’t afford to lose access.” - Generic D.C. Political Journalist
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“Damn straight I (feel vindicated),” Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview with TPM late last week. “But I would have rather been proven wrong – honest to God – because we’re talking about the fucking country that is at stake here.”
Man, I love this guy. Except for the fact that as a keen and honest observer of Washington, he gives a bit of a fig leaf to his otherwise loathsome employer, AEI.
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and two years ago, dethroning previous Leader Eric Cantor in a primary.
Uh, no.
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Is this similar to the demise of the Whig party? I remember reading about them on TPM several years ago. I just can’t remember what exactly lead to their downfall.
It took twenty five years of hate politics to wind up where we are today. Remember Newt and the Contract for America. Norquist, Rush, Hannity, and don’t forget Fox News have all had a big part in the hate.
It isn’t any accident that this has happened. Sane people have been expecting this for a long time.
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I guess the real agenda of the right is to prove that democracy doesn’t work which puts them somewhere close to the North Korean way of seeing things. I wonder if they will start getting rid of folks like McCarthy by shooting Stinger missiles at them?
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What the Beltway calls “centrist” is really right wing. The authors’ American Enterprise Institute calls iteslf “non-partisan” yet is is clearly right wing. This article grouped the Weekly Standard, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and the National Review into the “centrist” category though they are all right wing. What gives?
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“Hey Cletus. What would you do if you saw a train barreling down the track in the path of another train?”
“I’d run home and get my brother. He ain’t never seen a train wreck before!!”
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Ultimately, it comes down to a choice between government by the will of the people and government by suicide bomber.
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What I haven’t quite figured out yet is how Norm has been able to speak with some intellectual honesty and truthfulness about this and not get fired from AEI (yet). Poor guy is getting pretty lonely over there with Ross Douthat and David Frum (neither being quite crazy even if they aren’t quite as intellectually strong or honest as Norm).
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Here was something Joan Walsh wrote last year:
Kraushaar is one of the leading (if less able) members of the Beltway Centrist Fetishist Caucus, who believe there’s a reasonable middle ground somewhere and if Obama could only have found it, he’d have been a two-term marvel of accomplishment, the next face on Mount Rushmore.
So perhaps Beltway Centrists do exist? Like people who like smelling old shoes and then become sexually aroused. I suspect Real McCoys are very rare, however.
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It’s relatively simple. The Republicans sold their collective soul to the devil in order to get the majority. And now he’s come to collect it.
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Whigs only existed for about 20 years and party evaporated over extending slavery to territories. It is similar to current mess in way: Whigs ceased to exist when a faction put their foot down and wouldn’t agree to nominate their own sitting President to serve an elected term, after he had taken office upon incumbent’s death.
Wikipedia (under. Whig Party):
Millard Fillmore, who became President after Taylor’s death in 1850, was the last president under the Whig label.
The party self-destructed because of the internal tension over the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination for a full-term of its own incumbent, President Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott. Most Whig Party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter-base mostly gravitated to the new Republican Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the Whig Party had become defunct.
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Yes, the current GOP situation is a nearly identical replay of the Whigs in the 1850s. The fundamental economic issues - an Aristocracy vs. Populist economics - is identical (the Whigs being the party of the Bank of the US - a private, for-profit Central Bank). Lincoln and Roosevelt - both on the cusp of major realignments - are outliers for that coalition. While the 19th century Democratic Party’s support of Slavery makes this somewhat confusing, you have to recognize that Alexander Hamilton really had the vision and roadmap for an Aristocracy founded on Finance - that was his future vision (and I’m quite certain why the Federalist Society is so named to honor his vision of the constitution). He was a Georgist before Henry George, and had the prescience to see that Land would no longer be the only form of Capital (means of economic production) from which to capture rent. Jefferson and Jackson were woefully backwards in understanding what would happen economically, but very clearly recognized the threat that the US Bank and corporate entities generally (which mostly didn’t exist during their presidencies) posed to the individual. Of course, the southern fuedal system they championed was hardly much better for non 1%ers.
The Whig party split primarily because they had been cobbled together out of two constituencies (like the modern GOP) who really didn’t fundamentally share common inerests. With the Whigs, you saw this in the anti-slavery stance of the northern wing of the party, and pro-slavery in the southern wing. They literally would campaign (media being somewhat more regional and limited then) out of two sides of their mouth - if you think Romney said different things to different audiences…well, he had nothing on the Whigs - promising to curtail slavery in the north, and promising to protect it in the south. They had an alignment of lower class voters who were social reactionary and nativist (the Know Nothings) who were preoccupied with culture wars and xenophobia and defiant willfull ignorance - pretty much a perfect template for the Tea Party (a hefty dose of Burned-Over 2nd Great Awakening fundamentalist protestant revivalism too). Eventually, you couldn’t have abolitionists and slavery people in the same party. Just as today you cannot have labor exploiters and anti-immigration people in the same party either (at least not long term). You have to remember that Northern industrialists knew full well that “free” labor was ultimately much cheaper than slave labor (just as 1099 contractors are cheaper than employees).
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I have not seen the GOP tackle a real issue in years. It’s all about character assassination,phony scandals,voter suppression,and district gerrymandering in an attempt to hold on to power. They can’t even admit problems exist. They are not a legitimate political party any more as a result.
As one blogger put it so well. They are like the old Soviet Politburo desperately trying to hold on to power any corrupt way they can while the country falls apart all around them.
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“… grew worse while President George W. Bush pushed through an entitlement package and two wars without paying for them, giving rise to the Tea Party movement.”
Uh, no. It was the election of a black dude, pure and simple, they just hid behind the facade of fiscal responsibility to cover their ass.
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The Tea Party isn’t really an astroturf movement at all. It looked that way for a short time when everything sprouted, but now it’s obvious what really went on. They are all fertilizer with no weed barrier, and the party is looking more and more like an abandoned feed lot.
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Meanwhile, back in TexASS…
In the face of all of this chaos, the really important question is why aren’t Republican “moderates” defecting to the Democratic Party?
And the answer is plain as day…there is no such critter as a Republican “moderate”. There never was. They are ALL extremists.
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