David Brooks really caught the zeitgeist of the Republican Party on
Face the Nation yesterday. He was asked what the current status of the Republican party was. This was his reply:
"World of pain," Brooks said. "A generation of pain. 1964, it was so much better than now. In '64, they had a coherent belief system. They lost, they didn't persuade the American people about it, but they understood where they wanted to take the country.
"Now it's just a circular firing squad, with everybody attacking each other, and no coherent belief system, no leaders. You've got half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come and rescue them. The other half is waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs. Really a decayed conservative infrastructure. It's just a world of pain."
Harris said that the party has to decide whether they are looking for "another Ronald Reagan to carry them out of the wilderness? By the way, that took Reagan years, a full generation to do that. Or are they looking for a Republican version of Bill Clinton?"
Harris said that the party is now divided into two wings: the "hell, no" wing and a "yes, but" wing. "The 'hell, no' is going to fight [Obama] every step of the way" on ideological grounds.
"The other will say, '[Y]es, we agree with a lot of his objectives; we want to do it in a somewhat different way.' It really, I think, goes right to a tactical and philosophical fault line in the Republican Party."
Brooks was not convinced that Sarah Palin could be taken seriously as the GOP's next Ronald Reagan.
"Well, the 'hell, no' group is rallying around her," he said. "And this past week, I don't think, has been particularly flattering to her, the McCain people - and the whole thing has been a complete disaster. They've attacked her for her lack of human capital and for being a diva.
"I'm not sure it's all fair, but one would not say she has spent her life preparing for an intellectual revolution to lead the party out of the wilderness. Let's put it that way."
Brooks declared himself a part of the "yes, but" wing. "You know, this is where the American people are," he said. "And, fundamentally, the conservative movement failed (and I've been in it my entire life) because it hasn't addressed the problems of today, the rise of China and Russia, the rise of inequality, energy, health care. It's great to worry about Reagan. I loved Reagan, but those days are over."
Conservatives now how no new ideas and no leaders they trust (Christ! They are discussing resurrecting Gingrich? Palin will go nowhere.) For a national political party that prides itself for being held together by big ideas, this is a disaster. Many Republicans realize that America's current economic problems are a direct result of the failure of their conservative ideology. They're in Brooks' "Yes, but" camp.
Meanwhile the remaining Congressional Republicans seem to be mostly members of the "Hell No!" camp. Senator Jon Kyl is already threatening to filibuster Obama's (unnamed) choices for future Supreme Court nominees, while the House Minority Leader John Boehner appears to believe that the Republicans lost this last election because they weren't conservative enough.
Steve Benen points out:
Brooks' even more compelling observation is that Republicans lack a "coherent belief system." This became evident when John McCain failed to present a policy agenda beyond an anti-earmark crusade, but it's bound to be even more glaring moving forward. After '64, Republicans knew exactly where they wanted to take the country. After '92, Gingrich had the sketch for a Contract with America.
At this point, though, the party exists to oppose Democratic ideas. That's fine for an opposition force, but for a governing philosophy, it's an obvious sign of bankruptcy.
The Republicans have been bankrupt for years.
Let me try this idea out. Two things kept the Republicans competitive in national politics. First, the Democrats were similarly bankrupt in grand ideas. They ran on good government but were not trying to change American society. They offered improvement (or perhaps just change) around the edges of what appeared to already be a good society along with government that was effectively doing what most Americans wanted it to do. But why should Democrats offer grand new ideas for change when the American society faced no major existential problems? This was at one time Bill Clinton's lamentation. He felt he could have been a great President, but was never faced with great problems that would allow him to prove it. The Democratic Party in general was designed to face such a generally non-threatening environment. The Republicans are an alliance of people who each think they have compelling problems that need to be fixed by government, and their alliance was based largely on opposition the the Democrats who did not share their belief if the need to deal with the Republican grab bag of problems.
Second, when Bush 43 was elected he was rapidly going nowhere until 9/11. When 9/11 happened
Dick Cheney largely took control of the administration's response and directed it into regaining the power he believed had been taken from the Presidency after Nixon resigned. Dick Cheney had absolutely no interest in how his ideas played politically. He left that to Karl Rove to deal with politically.
In short, the Republicans sold themselves as the party of grand, massive radical solutions to solve middling difficulties, and as they did it their Congressional Senators and Representatives became more and more corrupt, happily stealing what they could of the massive amounts of money that flowed through the government. This is not just a Republican problem. Democrats in government become corrupt also. But for a party that has both contempt for and disinterest in what government does, it is easier to justify so it has been a lot more widespread among Republicans.
These grand solutions found a willing ear in George W. Bush. Bush has a belief that when making changes, big changes are better than small changes [*]. He and Cheney agreed that an appropriate reaction to 9/11 should be a lot more than just attacking al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They wanted to completely recreate the Middle East, and for that they adopted the NeoCon ideas offered by the PNAC. They felt that attacking Iraq and recreating it as a conservative free market small government democracy they could accomplish that recreation.
The War in Iraq foundered in part on the Republican distaste for good governance and the conservative belief that intellectuals were to be ignored. Sure Iraq was the wrong war fought for reasons not well thought out, but it was also incompetently run from the White House down through the Pentagon. The White House gave the Pentagon total control of the war, cutting the State Department out of the loop because of conservative dislike for diplomacy. Don Rumsfeld ignored the experience of his Generals when they told him the invasion would require 400,000 troops. Lt. Col. Kwiatowski has written about the planning by Doug Feith in the Pentagon. When staff officers wanted to work out contingency plans for anticipated problems, Feith told them that such plans indicated a lack of faith in the success of the plan, so they did not make such contingency plans. So when the looters ran wild after Baghdad fell, no one knew what to do about it or what it might mean. The looting led directly to Sunni insurgency. Rumsfeld then refused for a long time to acknowledge that they faced an insurgency. In short, conservative ideology and dislike for good methods of planning and governing were very important in causing the invasion of Iraq to become the mismanaged occupation of Iraq.
The end result has been a discrediting of the ideas offered by the conservatives. First, the radical solutions to middling problems caused so many unanticipated nasty side effects that even a great many conservatives have at last broken with the rigid top-down message control of the Republican party. Second, the anti-intellectualism of the right-wing populism, together with the Libertarian disdain for government itself, has created a political party which used to present itself as the realistic managers but now simply can't run government competently.
The end result is the party that used to pride itself that it was held together by grand and radical ideas has tried them, and found they cannot make the ideas work. This has left the party with no new ideas, no national leaders and a deep gap between those who have accepted the failure of the conservative ideology (Brooks' "Yes, But..." Republicans) and the surviving "Hell No!" politicians. The "Hell No" politicians consist of House Republicans who were reelected only because they represent districts gerrymandered to contain a majority of conservative true-believers and Senate Republicans either from the South or who have not faced reelection this year.
The conservative radical, poorly thought out "ideas" which made such good political propaganda when it came time to be elected have clearly failed when serious problems face America. Worse, the radical ideas have been in large part the cause of America's current severe problems. The conservatives simply can't govern a modern industrial nation.
The National Republican Party in the near future is going to look a lot like the California Republican party since Governor Pete Wilson ran on the anti-immigrant idea which proved to be so unpopular in California. The California Republican Party has since been a permanent minority party generally dominated by "Hell No!" Republicans who can occasionally elect a "Yes, but..." Republican like Arnold Schwartznegger to statewide office. The National Republican party has followed the California Republican party down the same disastrous path.
[*]Bush's effort in 2005 to solve the Social Security problem by destroying it and recreating it as a massive government-run IRA was another of the massive changes Bush wanted to implement.
