Republican Disarray?

I already mentioned today the current mess the Republicans find themselves in. What I didn’t highlight in that post was that the mess marks not the end, but, to borrow a phrase from Churchill, only the beginning of the end of the rightist radical movement.

Part of the reason for the radical right’s astonishing success over the last four decades is that the so-called centrists in both major parties hid from its true agenda.

The right-of-center centrists thought that the radicals were a fervent yet malleable small group whose obvious energy could be channelled along lines the establishment-right could set out. In other words the revolutionaries could be managed as a kind of storm trooper elite force to get out in front of the old guard and raise sufficient hell for the centrists to glide in after and then go about their centrist business.

After all, we have been told repeatedly as we slipped ever rightward that America is, at heart, a centrist nation. Which may be true, but is irrelevant when the revolutionary tide is sweeping us all along with it. Who knows where the center is in such a storm?

The left-of-center centrists were even more befuddled. They mistook the huge cloud of radical dust as a sign that the entire country was shifting to the right, so, in an act of self-preservation, they decided they too had to shift right. Thus we landed with Clinton whose economic policies resemble those of a Republican from the 1960’s – or earlier – more than they do a Democrat.

Meanwhile the media, shy of being tarred as biased, pushed a relentless line that the rise in radicalism was symmetric and that both extreme wings, right as well as left, were moving away from the beleaguered center. It became the media’s role, given this trope, to locate an act of extremism on the left every time they came across one on the right. Except there weren’t any. So they made them up, or they vastly exaggerated those they could find in order to persuade the public of the media’s ‘balanced’ reporting.

Except balanced reporting would have blown the whistle on the rise of rightist extremism. It would have exposed the anti-democratic agenda hidden behind the smooth and alluring words. It would have revealed the radical nature of the program and its dramatic re-balancing of American  society to favor the few at the expense of the many.

Now we learn how extreme the extremists have become and how they have gained such a grip on the Republican party that a civil war has broken out within its ranks. And the centrists are aghast. They are asking how this all happened. How, they ponder out aloud, did the radicals garner so much power? Weren’t they supposed to act as a front for the establishment, and not as an independent power?

The clearest sign of how the centrists completely misread the situation is the rise and fall of Jeb Bush. He was the darling of the centrists. He was the establishment favorite. But the radicals hated him for exactly that reason. Jeb! cannot be trusted. He’s in the pocket of big business. And big business is getting really sacred it can no longer control the extremists. So Jeb! is the enemy of his own shock troops. The storm troopers have turned against their own. Having tasted power they want more.

Which ought not surprise anyone. But apparently it does. Especially the centrists who make a career out of appearing so level headed and sensible.

I think it’s the arrogance of centrists that has upended their sensibilities so strongly. They imagined themselves immune to the falsity of radical thought. They had, they told us all, found that path along which they would guide the nation, if only we would all comply, toward a happy future. That happy future happened to fulfill their own goals, but since they were centrist goals they were assumed to be good goals. Good, that is, because they were untainted by the sniff of extremist ideas. They were good, old fashioned, compromise laden and thus hard wrought, goals. Sensible goals. The kind of goals that would keep the great ship of state afloat and on course to an endless American future matching the myths of old.

This was always rubbish.

The monoculture of the centrists, its deference to the past, and its denial of the dynamism of the radicals, gave it no chance. The revolutionaries, armed with libertarian economics and business school tricks, swept to power. The center kept shifting as it tried to resist the storm, but all it could do was to absorb aspects of the extremism. The plutocrats crept in behind the smoke screen and twisted the economy to their advantage. They imagined they could buy the game and stall it perpetually in their favor.

Not so.

The radicals continued to sweep forward. They actually believe in the revolution whereas the plutocrats simply wanted to use it as cover for their own regime change. Now that the revolution is out of control the plutocrats stand to lose: they no longer set the agenda. The far right does. Or should I say the even-further right? So we arrive at the current amazing scene: Republican civil war. The revolutionaries attacking their own sponsors.

So many Republican blue-bloods have fallen already – Boehner, McCarthy, Cantor, and Bush in just the past year. That’s a whole generation of current or future leadership overcome by the backlash from the monster of its own making. The House has become not just unruly, but entirely inept and neutered as an agent of government. The Republican party is now incapable of governance. Indeed the radicals are so vexed over supposed government oppression that they don’t want to govern even if they have power. They cannot agree on an agenda. They are anti-establishment to such a degree that even after they have seized the center of of power they refuse to use it. They simply want to tear it down.

There is nothing conservative in this moment. Nothing. It is the very antithesis of conservatism.

Meanwhile the Democrats look on bemused. Their own shift to the right, all that Clintonian triangulation, is now exposed as a fraudulent abandonment of principle rendered unnecessary by events. They too look ineffective as they try to take shelter amid the storm. They too have their own shock troops emerging from the shadows. They too now face an internal battle as the old guard struggles to maintain relevance in our radicalized world. All the blood shed over Obamacare is now seen as an attempt to install a conservative rather than a progressive program. All those who fell in its defense now feel a distaste: they were betrayed by centrist sentiments. Or, rather, they betrayed themselves by not fighting for a more progressive agenda.

So the disarray may be more than Republican. It might be more general.

If so: good. A realignment away from the failed Reagan/Clinton/Bush center is a healthy thing.

Is this, then, the beginning of the end for rightist radicalism? Will a leftwing version emerge to rebalance our politics?

I hope so. But I have no clue.