The Tea Party that never ends
by digby
If you read nothing else today, please read this important piece by Rick Perlstein in The Nation:
A Democratic president begins a new term in the White House. Two years later, America votes a cadre of aggressive conservatives into Congress, loaded for bear. At first the Republican establishment, thrilled to have the Democrats on the run, puts its wariness about the fire-breathers aside. Within a few years, though, the new guys throw out all the old rules of consensus and compromise, and the establishment shows signs of buyer’s remorse. One of the new conservatives, a bulky, take-no-prisoners senator who sees socialist quislings everywhere, takes control of the agenda and threatens to drive the GOP into the ground.
But this is not 2008 or 2013. It’s the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the senator is not Ted Cruz but Joseph McCarthy.
A new sort of conservative has taken over the Republican Party from the ground up—and they don’t give a goddamn about anything the US Chamber of Commerce says. They want a total divorce between capitalism and the government, and whoever disagrees can go straight to hell. Business people, above all else pragmatists, are alarmed at the prospect of losing control of “the party of business” and hatch schemes to take it back. The Democratic president, for his part, declares a White House open-door policy for business leaders and makes maintaining a climate favorable to business a keynote of his administration. Suddenly, the direction of the Republican Party itself seems to be at stake.
But this is not 2013. It is 1964. The business-friendly president is Lyndon Johnson, and the Republican insurgents are followers of Barry Goldwater.
Moderate Republicans are on the run. The most powerful establishment Republican in Washington is by most measures a conservative. He argues in his speeches that the nation’s economic problems “bear a label: Made in Washington, DC.” He proclaims “a crossroads in our history”: whether America will continue on the path of “bigger government” and “higher taxes” or take a new direction to “halt the momentous growth of government.” But that’s not enough for the leader of the grassroots conservatives, who proclaims the establishment leader a sellout. But even more rabid conservatives distrust the conservative leader and call him a sellout as well. They hatch an insurgency against the insurgency.
But the establishment leader is not John Boehner. It is Gerald Ford. The conservative leader is not a Tea Partier but Ronald Reagan. And the insurgents—led by Jesse Helms, fresh from an effort to start a conservative third party—insist that Reagan’s campaign strategy isn’t conservative enough. So they effect a boarding party and attempt to turn the Republican platform into a full-on extrusion of right-wing ideological rage—“a reminder,” a columnist then opined, “that Helms belongs to that rabid band of committed conservatives who stop just short of conceding that they are willing to kill the party if they can’t control it.” Sound familiar?
Perlstein is the premiere historian of the modern conservative movement and he knows whereof he speaks. (And I’m old enough to have lived through a few of these alleged insurgencies myself.) And I have to say that one of the more astonishing aspects of liberalism is its starry-eyed confidence that the Republicans are always on the verge of being rejected by the mainstream because … well, how could they not be? They’re just terrible.
And yet, at least since Goldwater, the right wing has been relentlessly moving ahead sometimes incrementally and other times with grand victories. But the one thing that never happens is that they never, ever give up. It turns out they really believe what they believe. (And yes, there have been liberal advances as well, especially culturally — but the great “liberal consensus” the Democrats think is just around the corner, never seems to arrive.)
I’ve been writing about this for a long time, questioning the assumption that there is some moment of national kumbaaya just around the corner in which the conservatives will come to their senses and we’ll all live happily ever after. I guess it’s a natural inclination of both sides. But the liberals seem to be the one’s who always take their victory laps before the race is won and end up feeling disillusioned and looking particularly foolish in the process. (I’m thinking especially about the recent delirious celebration after the government shutdown ended in which their alleged annihilation of the right lasted no more than a week.)
This fight goes all the way back to the beginning and has been present in our culture and politics ever since. It’s never going away. Circumstances change its contours, one side may be ascendant while the other licks its wounds, but it’s always present. This battle defines us.
Please read the whole Perlstein piece. It’s not depressing, it’s realistic. And if liberals would understand that this is the way American politics are structured we might actually find that it’s possible to fashion long term strategies that don’t depend on dynamic leaders and instant success to sustain them.
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