McCain’s Big Oxymoron

I hope you are as confused as I am. The whole Republican campaign this fall is built upon an oxymoron. They want to change Washington. Yes that’s right, the conservatives want to introduce change.

Hang on a minute!

They want to change Washington? Do they not realize that Washington has been in the thrall of Republican ideology for thirty years? The so-called Reagan revolution turned the Washington agenda sharply to the right. We have been subjected to mostly Republican presidents since 1980. Congress has been under Republican control for large chunks of that time. Economic policy has been relentlessly pro-market and anti-regulation. Cutting taxes to starve the beast of government has been the only fiscal policy that endured through those years. Social policy has been anti-welfare and anti-entitlement. Defense spending has soared. Foreign policy has been interventionist and unilateral. Barriers between church and state have been reduced. The Supreme Court has been stacked with right wingers who believe the world is unchanged since the late eighteenth century. And we have attempted to impeach a president for a personal moral lapse rather than a crime against the country.

So what’s to change?

Didn’t they win? The very word “conservative” seems to indicate a desire to “conserve”. So why would McCain be running as an agent of change? The last few decades have been Republican decades, I would imagine that they’d be proud of that and want to preserve … or conserve … as much as they can.

This economy, this foreign policy, America’s standing in the world, Washington’s way of working, our social fabric, and our self-image are all very much shaped [if not entirely shaped] by Republican ideology. These have been the Reagan years. They are what the Republicans sought. The outcomes are Republican outcomes.

Yet. McCain thinks his best shot at winning the election is to reject the Reagan agenda and embrace something else.

The anger amongst the right wingers is palpable this year. They are running against their own record. They are furious that the expected outcomes, whatever they thought they were, from their right wing agenda have somehow not transpired. So the logical conclusion in their minds is that someone must have thwarted the true outcomes. In other words the purity of right wing ideology was perverted along the way and Reagan’s promised land was never attained. The someone appears to be the “elitists” and the “media”. Anyone with an education. Anyone who is not god fearing. Anyone who thinks gun ownership should be restricted. Anyone who supports freedom of choice in abortion. And especially anyone with a funny sounding name.

Were it not for the anger the oxymoron would be hilarious. Only Republicans have the gall to run against their own agenda with a straight face … in their world it surely cannot be a gay face. But this is not hilarious. These folks are angry. They are imputing all the results of their own failure to us, the “others”, those of us not trapped in their limited world, those of us not afraid of diversity and progress, and those of us, most of all, who think differently.

These folks are unstable. They may win. Their failure of the past thirty years would then pale as they hurtle the country even more rapidly down their extreme path as they search for the fruits that their unbounded and unthinking faith says should be theirs.

Yes they want to change. They want to smash the balance in America. Their can be no dialog unless it arrives at the answer they want. There will be no compromise … that’s what’s thwarted them so far. They have become neo-Leninists: they want to save America by destroying it and creating it in their own vision. In their own image.

The conservatives are reduced to change agents: in order to conserve the past and replicate it in the future they have to destroy the now and all the elitists who resist along the way. That’s a radical agenda. That’s a dangerous agenda. I hope America denies them the chance to execute their dream.