He’s not happy about the current actions of his fellow Party members:
I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess.
I’ve had conversations that felt like what he describes in the beginning of his essay, where I tried to tell a Republican just why the GW Bush administration was a bad thing, and was patronized as being deranged.
In another essay, that he links to in that one, he talks about when he became aware that something was going wrong with his Party:
I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996. And there I began to notice something disturbing. While the congressional victory of 1994 had ceased to produce much in the way of important conservative legislation, it sure was producing a lot of wealth for individual conservatives. They were moving from the staff offices of Congress to lobbying firms and professional associations. Washington (to quote something I’d write later) began to feel like a giant Tupperware party, where people you had thought of as friends suddenly seemed always to be trying to sell you something. Acquaintances of mine began accepting all-expense-paid trips to the South Pacific from Jack Abramoff.
The Party of the Rich, not even pretending these days. The Democrats are still pretending, but not very convincingly. Is the Republican Party all used up? Isn’t it time for something new that is not Democratic Party, Inc., (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street)?
Discuss
23 Comments . Leave a comment below.This Week etiquette and labeled as fools and clowns anyone who follows GOP ideology:
Yeah they’re dumb or they’re evil. Great analysis.
Krugman at greater legnth on why no deal by the supercommittee is far better than the bad deal that was the only other option (per David Frum).
The R’s proposal would have raised $400B additional revenue by lowering rates and cutting loopholes. That is where the center is, boys and girls.
It looks like the Dems are happy playing the representatives for a system with high rates which get cut down for rich donors by lobbying and juicing Congressmen. Can anyone convince me otherwise?
for the richest Americans, which your description of the R’s proposal does not include, is at the “center” of Grover Norquist’s fevered imagination for sure. The rest of us think that the middle class is something worth trying to preserve.
The center calls for higher actual tax rates on the rich, be it through reducing loopholes/exemptions on high earners* or increasing the marginal tax rates at the upper end.
The Dems are more than happy to cut down (some of) these loopholes. See: depreciation on airplanes that Obama suggested modifying, only to be skewered by the GOP (not Dems).
* Here’s an example: why the hell is there a mortgage interest deduction on a SECOND home? We can quibble about a first home interest deduction, but a second home? Why the hell are the rest of us subsidizing the interest on vacation homes?
Wonkbook:
The Republicans move to the right. The Democrats, trying to move towards the center, move to the right behind them. Then the Republicans do it again. Repeat ad infinitum.
At this point, movement conservative ideology is telling us that the ice caps aren’t melting, that people who have a stroke are going be able to go comparison-shopping amongst health care providers, that people just struggling to get in low-wage work need to pay more in taxes, that Sharia law is such a looming menace to America that the only way to forestall the rising tide of radical Islam is to enact to enact a Christianized version of Sharia law, and that we’re too broke to fix our nation’s infrastructure but the sky’s the limit when it comes plotting new foreign wars.
At some point, someone has to go on TV and call this game out. Otherwise, neither side has any real incentive to negotiate this stuff in any kind of good faith. Might as well be Krugman.
Politicians are creatures of the electorate. They don’t drive it as if it were a car. The parties shift right because the electorate shifted right. This has been happening since 1968.
So, yes, yesterday’s Republican was more liberal than today’s moderate Democrat. But that is merely because yesterday’s Democrat wrecked your brand, and the electorate moved right.
That wrecking took a good two decades to cement itself. Today’s GOP only took it’s real turn for the worse in the last 5-6 years. At least they are well on the way to wrecking their brand as well.
Where that leaves us I don’t know. For now, the American center is well to the right of where it was even during the Clinton administration.
with the exception of Grover Norquist and a large handful of others, aren’t evil. A lot of Republicans aren’t dumb.
Republican ideology, however, is stupid, often intentionally so. No one on your side, however, is going to admit that until OWS protesters take a bath and get job.
If they voted for a freakin jobs program!
Newt received all kinds of praise for his global warming ad with Nancy Pelosi.
But you know if Newt was doing the ad, it was because there was a pot of global warming money for him and his friends at the end of it.
Democrats like it when Republicans act like Democrats. Let’s not pretend there’s anything more sophisticated about that part.
Our government slogs along on the leftover ideas from the 20th century. All that is left of the New Deal is that big government supports big mercantile companies, be they defense, computer, healthcare, drugs etc. A few Republicans appear to favor cutting the government side, until they get elected and the business side of the equation gets to them. Then they keep the collusion going — and get faint praise for it from the Democrats!
Equality through New Deal-type operations demands efffective and totalitarian price and wage controls and nobody is for that any more. That is why there is no Left left. But left to its own the government-industry nexus will just feed back forever, taking more and providing less in the way of products and services people want. Businessmen may choose to produce, but they like it even better to get paid by the government to NOT produce.
There are several false premises in your comment, but to pick one.
Expressing support for global warming is “acting like a Democrat?” You don’t see a problem there? If someone becomes a RINO on the sole issue of climate change — which party has a problem?
Scott Brown attempts to straddle some middle ground (maybe not middle enough) and gets castigated by the Right and gets no credit from the Left. Maybe the only reason he does it is to get re-elected. Not sure.
Most MA Congressman stay far to the left rather than make any attempt to represent some middle ground. That’s probably a good political move because there isn’t much organized middle ground here to create a challenge.
So there’s no appeasing the 20% on either side, and that includes Krugman.
Who cares about Krum? Both parties have outliers that the other side trots out and says “See! This proves your side is wrong.”
I think that there is no end to the partisan divide and we might as well get used to it. If the country wants change they will just have to elect a super-majority, and right now the odds are better that the R’s will have that rather than the D’s. The President is the one wild card, with my bet right now he’ll be re-elected. So….. gridlock.
but the GOP is farther to the right than it has been historically and enforces uniformity with an iron fist.
Members of the Far Left can be counted on one hand and are ignored.
Outliers refer to people of a party who bash their own party, not necessarily ideological outliers (which is incredibly hard to pinpoint).
The rest of your statement is just a baseless opinion.
The part about “who bash their own party” may just be your own usage, though. I’ve never read it to mean that.
think of “outliers,” but now I understand what you’re saying. Who are the outliers in the party?
(I’ll concede a lack of evidence presented, but not that there isn’t evidence to draw from).
I think these two heterodox conservatives are well worth reading. Bartlett’s blog is here. I agree with Seascraper above that the Republicans have been taken over by people who are either stupid or evil. (It is a great analysis.) It’s keenly interesting reading people from the conservative tradition actually trying to figure things out in a reality-based fashion.
They are just getting ostracized from the movement for doing anything remotely reasonable. And many of them are still quite conservative circa 1985 but that isn’t conservative enough for todays’ crowd. Used to be Reagan was tough for negotiating with the Russians from a position of strength, now thats an excuse to challenge a 35 year Senator and dump him from office (Lugar), used to be conservatives like Goldwater and Simpson hated pork no matter where it was (even in defense!) and loved balanced budgets (even if it meant raising taxes!), and thought America was awesome enough it should attract as many immigrants as possible. The same conservative movement that relied on the GAO and CBO to attack the wastefulness of liberal government are now attacking the very idea of government watchdogs in general. Used to be conservatives like unions as a way to keep workers organized and working within institutions. Outside of self-term limited Tom Coburn, few conservatives are actually willing to walk the walk on deficit reduction and take on defense, all sorts of loopholes to keep the wealthy from paying taxes, and the very idea that the wealthy should pay their fair share. Frum has been making a lot of sense lately, hard to imagine he once coined the dumbest phrase in American foreign policy.
Yes, that’s why Huntsman is the frontrunner right now in the GOP race for the White House. The dwindling extreme right-wing faction is split between Perry, Bachman, Romney, Gingrich, Cain, and the frothy one.
i meant to say lots of “conservative intellectuals”, that latter word being the operative reason why it polls 1-5% among the base
I haven’t looked at the Weekly Standard or the New Republic in a while. Conceivably Mr Frum isn’t as alone as I last thought.
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