Tea Party

I rarely regress into politics here. Or at least I try to stay within the confines of economics when I express myself. But this is just extraordinary. For those of you who have missed the story: Karl Rove, the very architect of the Bush coalition with the religious right and sundry other extremists, was thrown under the Tea Party bus last night for making the obvious, and very sensible, claim that the winner in Delaware’s Republican primary is an extreme kook. Even by Tea Party standards O’Donnell is way out there. As in waaaay out there. She is a nut by any normal standard. But these are not normal times.

So there is poor old Karl bemoaning the ever rightward march of his GOP brethren, and getting trampled underfoot for his pains. He, and his ilk, have lost control of the movement they started in motion.

It would be funny if it were not just one more example of how unhinged the GOP loyalists are becoming.

Another example was the win in the New York Republican primary for governor. The winner was the extremist Paladino who thrashed the Republican establishment candidate.

For all the talk about the impending defeat the Democrats are facing this fall – and I am one of those still predicting defeat – we should not take our eye off the extraordinary shifts going on in the right wing. The GOP is under siege by the forces it unleashed. The constant slurs and racial inference used to attack Obama have stirred up some very nasty sentiment. There are people who take this seriously. They are the core of the Tea Party effort to take the Republicans into uncharted territory.

That Rove was one of the founders of the rightward movement makes his humiliation at the hands of his proteges even more startling. The monster is now officially out of control.

On second thoughts, I find this more worrying than amusing. The hatred, anger, and destructive vitriol of the Tea Party seems symptomatic of the turmoil America is in. The electorate is volatile. The call for action has become unhinged from common sense. It is now more a venting, or lashing out, than an attempt to choose policies. The atmosphere is dark with undercurrents of racial, religious, and economic divisions that will be hard to contain if they are not mollified soon. The country runs a real risk of so dividing itself that discourse ends, and any chance of getting practical policies implemented stalls.

This poison began with Reagan and is now reaching its fever pitch. Just how much further can the GOP lurch to the right without endorsing policies that are antithetical to the core of the nation? Or are we simply redefining that core to accommodate the transition from coherent democracy into endless strife?

O’Donnell and Paladino are not alone. There are others scattered across the country. It is too late for the GOP establishment to claim surprise. At some point the old guard has to recognize the extent of the take over. It was one thing to embrace Paul in Kentucky, it is another to embrace the entire Tea Party as if it were part of the establishment.

The bitterness that the right has for its loss of power – to a black man no less – is frightening. The Republican inability to accept its opposition status in 2009 lies at the root of this chaos. Its relentless “No”, a primal scream of rejection, is rebounding in a vicious and ugly way.

Not once have I heard a practical policy suggestion from the opposition. Their entire manifesto consists of tax cutting and “no” to everything else. That simple minded and trivial solution is what created the mess we are in. The economy imploded on the Republican watch. That they continue to preach the same errors is astounding and irresponsible. Surely there are right wing policies that are constructive. If there are, no one could tell by listening to the GOP leadership.

Therein lies the problem.

The GOP leadership is no longer leading. It is being rushed along by its extreme activists. The Republican Party has been co-opted. Its moderates squelched. It is a shadow of the party led by Eisenhower. It is not even remotely the party of Lincoln.

And that’s a shame. For any democracy to work it needs at least two strong and responsible parties jockeying for power. Both need to recognize that they will be out of power at some point. When they are, they cannot simply stamp their feet and yell obscenities. That is childlike immature nonsense. It encourages similar behavior amongst the activists. Uncontrolled, that yelling turns into outright rebellion. Which is where we are today.

I can understand the anger roiling the Tea Party. Our elites, across the board, are so self referential that they have no idea of the anxiety and loss of control being felt at the grass roots level. That has been one of my themes here recently: the middle class has been betrayed and is now an angry confused and leaderless mess. That is a dangerous position for any country to find itself in. It is even more dangerous when neither of its main political parties seems coherent, or committed enough to take a strong stand.

It was just such a dithering muddle from the center that brought down Weimar Germany. The German elite in the 1930’s was weak, rudderless, ineffectual, and bereft of ideas. Both sides of the political spectrum failed to appreciate the enormous surge of hatred and anger that ultimately brought the entire country down. The Tea Party analog back then was viewed as a temporary phenomenon, and a short term method for the middle class to vent its anger. How wrong that idle and limp analysis turned out to be.

We are not there yet.

Yet.

But when Karl Rove is made to look like a moderate I begin to wonder just how far away from a similar cataclysm we are.