Movement Defectors

Matt Yglesias said that the tide will turn on the Bush debacle when a hard liner turns on him, not some sort of mushy “bipartisan” type like Chuck Hagel. Atrios doesn’t think it’s possible because the party has morphed into a Crusader Codpiece cult in the last three years.

I agree that it won’t happen, but for different reasons. The “movement” is virtually defined by its take no prisoners stance. It’s not about philosophy or ideology, although that’s how it started out. It’s about power. And until the power players like Tom Delay and Grover Norquist are purged from GOP there will be no challenging the party line by anyone who wants to keep their seats.

A case in point is Dick Armey, hardly a goodie-two shoes himself, who has made the mistake of crossing the Nazicans.

And in a symbolic obliteration of Armey’s influence, DeLay took over a Web site Armey had used to promote his prized flat-tax proposal when he was in Congress. The URL — www.freedom.gov — remains the same. But now the site contains propaganda about the “Victory in Iraq.”

Armey opposed the invasion. In August 2002, he met separately with Bush and Vice President Cheney in an attempt to talk them out of it. “I said, ‘This has the potential to be an albatross at election time.’ I was so desperate that I quoted Shakespeare instead of Jimmy Buffett,” he said. “I don’t know the exact quote. Something like, ‘Our fears betray us,’ or ‘Our fears make cowards of us all.'”

While he believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist organizations, Armey did not agree with the administration’s assessment of a dire and imminent threat. He said he told Bush and Cheney that it was “against the character of our nation” to strike a country that had not attacked first. Liberating the Iraqi people was the more resonant argument, Armey said, because it was in keeping with American principles. But that, of course, was not the stated reason for the war; had it been, it’s unlikely Americans would have supported the invasion.

Similarly, Armey said Congress probably would not have approved the Medicare bill had all relevant information been known before the vote last fall. Medicare’s chief actuary, Richard Foster, revealed after the vote that the Bush administration had threatened to fire him if he informed Congress of his true, higher cost estimate: not $400 billion but as much as $600 billion over 10 years.

If, by speaking out, Armey hopes to embolden his former colleagues to stand up to DeLay’s bullying, it’s not clear he will succeed. In interviews last week, several of the conservatives who voted against the Medicare bill were reluctant to say anything that might draw DeLay’s wrath. And Armey’s critiques do not sit well with others among his former Republican colleagues, some of whom view him as a hypocrite. “What did Armey do when he was in office to restrain the growth of government?” asked Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill. “He led the floor debate to create the Department of Homeland Security. I would say he contributed to the growth of government.”

Unlike DeLay, Armey, who now demands simon-pure conservatism, voted for final passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush-backed education reform much reviled by many on the right as meddling by the federal government in state and local matters.

To his critics, Armey says that’s precisely why he left his job as majority leader. He was having to make even more serious compromises on policy under a Republican president than he did under Clinton, and he no longer wanted to have to take party positions contrary to his philosophy.

The conservative revolution is bigger than George W. Bush. But, the presidency isn’t and he’s the incumbent so they are stuck with him. They’ll do whatever it takes to keep the executive branch in Republican hands including administering a few knuckles de sandwiches to members who stray from the reservation. Since they have held power they have solidified the most important powerbase in Washington, K Street:

For two years, the assistant who answered Rove’s phone was a woman who had previously worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist’s and a top DeLay fundraiser. One Republican lobbyist, who asked not to be named because DeLay and Rove have the power to ruin his livelihood, said the way Rove’s office worked was this: “Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn’t approve, your call didn’t go through.”

If you don’t play ball with Rove, DeLay and Norquist, you don’t play.

Grover Norquist is probably the most influential Republican the country has never heard of and he is a true believer in power politics:

“…in the November 1992 American Spectator, he [Norquist] wrote an article titled “The Coming Clinton Dynasty,” in which he admitted that “any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step back Leninist march, is a flawed one.”

Instead, Norquist explained, the way a party ensures its perpetual dominance is by controlling the levers of power. In 1974, Watergate led to the election of 75 new Democrats in the House. In Norquist’s view, “this liberal band of congressmen” was “willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power.” Without the benefits of incumbency (bigger staffs, larger budgets, taxpayer-funded mail, pork, and the ability to “extort campaign contributions from industries”), Norquist argued, the Democrats could not have remained in office for the subsequent 18 years. Power perpetuates itself. The correctness of conservative ideas paled before the ruthless “minority ideological cabal” in Congress.

[…]

…these predictions illuminate Norquist’s profound respect for the power of the state. (They also show how closely Norquist’s politics track with the “paranoid style” described by the historian Richard Hofstadter.) Governments, if they are willing, can maintain themselves in power forever. This reverence for the state’s nearly limitless power explains both Norquist’s desire to dismantle the state as well as his insistence on using it for propagandistic ends, such as his Soviet-esque obsession with building monuments to the Great Leader (Ronald Reagan—including a campaign to replace Alexander Hamilton with Reagan on the $10 bill).

None of the above sounds that different from this (possibly apocryphal) quote:

“We must establish a Brezhnev Doctrine for conservative gains. The Brezhnev Doctrine states that once a country becomes communist it can never change. Conservatives must establish their own doctrine and declare their victories permanent…A revolution is not successful unless it succeeds in preserving itself…(W)e want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle.”

If there is anyone left in the GOP (besides the five “moderates” in the Senate) who has even a shred of integrity or independent thought left, I’m unaware of them. When we are hurling insults about the pussy Democrats we might give that some thought. It’s not like the other side is overrepresented with courageous, independent warriors for freedom. They are as whipped as whipped can be.