Can we treat the Republicans as a normal political party, a party that went off the rails during the last eight (actually sixteen) years but which can still be rescued from its more self destructive, hard right tendencies through engaging its more moderate elements. Is it possible to remake it, as Paul Krugman and other liberal commentators still seem to believe, into something on the level of the Tories or the various Christian Democratic parties in Europe; rightwing but nor reactionary? Not according to the Stiftung Leo Strauss, who explains just what the Republicans have turned into in the past three decades:
It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party. As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000. the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.
Wonder why after Obama the ferocity is turned up to 11? The answer is intrinsic to the Movement as functional social, cultural and political creature. It governed for 6 years and hung on for 2 more. Its Counter-Enlightenment, racial, authoritarian /hierarchical impulse was the official American government. With Obama’s victory its rejection is not only personal but for the first time, in 2006 and 2008, it as dominant political force (not as a minor coalition partner within the Republican Party) was rejected.
The Movement Is Not Playing For Liberal Democracy
For the Movement, as we said, politics is existential. And when survival is on the line, pluralistic compromise is for chumps. Democrats still are playing for political advantage within the confines of traditional two party politics. How to give a concrete example? When the other side’s world view is existential, then the stakes are higher than something so trite as the Constitution, etc. We saw this in part through Addington, Cheney et al. with their view on the Unitary Executive. As I wrote a while ago, during a lunch with John Ashcroft after his tenure as AG, he quite blithely said the President is entitled to ignore Congress and its laws — the only thing that matters is the plebiscite on a president because it is national. He then added if the president is re-elected that by definition means the country ratified everything he has done, even secret stuff the nation doesn’t know about.
Existential combat in ideological struggle for survival with a natural affinity for hierarchical organizations and militarized speech and thought patterns. Do you see now why to the Movement any criticism of Bush as Warlord was akin to treason? It’s not only mere warfare for any given news cycle, but deeply rooted in the non-liberal democratic, pre-Enlightenment agenda.
What the Stiftung is describing is immediately recognisable to anybody familiar with US foreign policy during the Cold War and how anti-communism was used to overrule any considerations of democracy and freedom. The normalisation of torture, election fraud, rightwing militias, political assassinations (what else would you call the murder of doctor Tiller), the mass hysteria whipped up over what Obama is going to do to the country and how this justifies anything that can stop it all of it has been used with great succes in South America and elsewhere to destroy governments and countries Washington does not like. It was only a matter of time before these techniques were re-imported into the US.