The GOP Civil War 2: Rush Is Still Winning

Terrifying. Can nobody criticize the man and survive?

The GOP Civil War

David Frum, Via Andrew Sullivan:

A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

I've been hearing allegations of a coming GOP civil war, but I had a feeling that it wouldn't go that way. I didn't think there were any high-profile Republicans left who would take on the way that the behemoth of the GOP was currently headed.

During the primary season, there were four voices who I thought would give an opportunity.

The first was Ron Paul. He was a revival of good ol'fashion Fiscal Conservatism. Granted, he goes way overboard with all of his policies--his noninterventionism is a welcome change from Bush's empire building, but strays far too far into the Hoover Era, as does his fiscal policy. But he gave a cohesive platform, one which excited young conservatives for the first time--and then was promptly quashed by a vengeful GOP.

The second was John McCain, who promised to return balance and accountability to the conservative party. But Bill Kristol brought Sarah Palin to his attention, and quickly his campaign fell under her power, and the Limbaugh-effect set in.

The third was Mike Huckabee. He returned to the good ol' fashion Evangelical Republicanism that proved to be the difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore (who, by the way, is a deeply religious man, or so I've heard). And throughout the campaign, he spoke with a civility and grace that, while hiding a hopelessly backwards outlook on gay rights, climate change, and everything else. Then he decided that Obama was equal to Lenin or Stalin at CPAC, demonstrating that apparently Rush Limbaugh has him by the testicles too.

And the fourth was Bobby Jindal, who was being touted as a smart, bipartisan, Republican answer to Barack Obama. And if you saw his response to the non-SOTU address, it turned out that it was reasonable, conservative, and shallow as a kiddy pool.

But up until now, the "civil war" that was touted didn't seem to come. McCain staffers took out their irritation on Sarah Palin, but other than that, she returned to her position as Governor, and continues to be a presence in the party. At CPAC, it was clear that there wasn't a politician with a backbone who was willing to go against Rush Limbaugh--a few in Congress who voiced doubts were kicked in the ass mightily, one assumes by the Minority Whip or others like him.

Well, at least David Frum is putting his voice into the ring. But the problem is that he's not a politician. This isn't going to be a true GOP civil war until the GOP gets a serious candidate to take others to the mat. The high-profile Republicans in politics who've dissented have largely dissented because of their lack of aspiration to continue--Schwarzenegger, who likely will not win a seat in the Senate, and Crist, who seems happy where he is right now--or have done so at the cost of their political future--Specter, whose current polling indicates that he, like Senator Lincoln Chaffee, is on his way out the door due to excessive moderation (the right feels betrayed and the left has their own candidate).

Let's see if this gathers any steam from the actual power-brokers in the GOP. Otherwise, this is just noise in the echo chamber.

Obaminet: The Upcoming Eric Holder Fight

Brian Beutler, on the statements from the Republican Party that they will try to block Eric Holder's nomination:

It looks like the Republicans threw every name on Obama's roster of cabinet designates into a hat and drew Eric Holder. And so, he'll be the guy they try to block.

I do think that blocking Eric Holder is crass and etc. But I don't think it's random. See, one of the very early questions that will face the Obama Administration is how to treat the crimes committed by the former Bush Administration. President Bush did not deliver any pardons, which means that an incoming Attorney General would be well within his rights to appoint a Special Prosecutor or in general open an investigation into, say, torture (along the Levin-McCain Report lines).

How can the Republicans in Congress possibly fight this? If they try to make a tough fight over Eric Holder, try and paint him as a partisan -- maybe leveraging his involvement in the Clinton Administration pardons -- they can then slander any attempt to bring President Bush or cabinet to justice as a partisan assault. They're hoping that they'll force Obama into the position of losing his mantle of bipartisanship, or forgetting any attempt to discipline the Bush administration.

Burris And Franken COLLIDE

Democrats are threatening not to seat Burris. Constitutional questions persist.

Republicans are threatening to filibuster the vote to seat Franken (when Coleman's ridiculous opposition to his seating finally fails).

These two events are not disparate. Republicans are going to let Franken sit once Democrats allow Burris to sit--on the same rationale (they were picked by the legal process, so let it happen). If Democrats cave, so as to allow Franken to sit, it will feel like a Democratic victory (they get two Democratic senators rather than risking losing both Franken and Burris), but will really be a Republican victory (seating Burris might look like it damages Democratic legitimacy).

This Republican strategy doesn't seem to me like it'll work. It'll basically ask Republicans to go against two instances of Democracy (in one, opposing a special election in favor of an appointment; in the other, trying to invalidate an election as certified by the process). Furthermore, the odds are that at least two Republicans are going to think this strategy is cheap and political (Specter? Snow?), and Democrats will be able to override the filibuster--so they have no reason to cave on Burris. Let's just hope that they know that.

Colin Powell And The GOP's Future

A response to KevDog at Beautiful Futility:

I wasn’t one of those who cracked on the man for the U.N. speech. I think he was more deceived than duplicitous. The Frontline special Bush’s War makes a good case for exactly how pissed Powell was by what happened.

More recently, I think that he has been one of the leading voices of reason (sorry, Andrew) on the ills of the GOP. As a Democrat, I hope they don’t take his advice. There does need to be an opposition party, but the Republican party as it is currently formed needs to go the way of the Whigs.

A) As to Powell: I am simply disappointed that at no point he voiced his anger. I can’t remember where exactly it was sourced (The Daily Show poked fun at it), but when he received the first draft of the UN Speech, he apparently threw it up in the air and shouted, “This is bullsh**.”

Furthermore, if you look at the Powell Doctrine of the use of force, it actually seems to me that even if you believe what the Bush Administration was putting forward during the lead-up to war, the war doesn’t qualify under his own guidelines. I have a huge respect for the Powell Doctrine, and it hurts that he didn’t stand up for it when it was tested.

He should have known that. He should have investigated the plans for a post-war Iraq, and as the Secretary of State he should have realized that there was no plan. As the head of the diplomatic corps, he should have understood that there would be a more complex situation in a post-war Iraq than “being greeted as liberators;” he should have mentioned the words “shi’ite and sunni.”

Maybe he didn’t know everything. But I remember Albert Speer, in his memoirs about his time as a Nazi, saying that although he didn’t know anything about the concentration camps, he was always ten minutes away from knowing, if he really wanted to know.

Contrast Colin Powell to General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki still didn’t go as far as I’d have liked in terms of vocalizing his belief in the misguided lead-up for war. But Shinseki did not back off on his statement that we would need more troops. Powell went out there and defended the planning for the war, for the post-war; he defended Bush as going to war “only as last resort.”

I think he was neither deceived nor duplicitous. I think he abdicated responsibility. And the responsibility was his. He should know the responsibility to soldiers that the Presidential Administration has.

B) You’re right that the Republican Party as it is currently composed should go the way of the Whigs. But Democrats will be worse off if the Republican Party doesn’t take Powell’s advice. As Obama understands, if you have a smart, organized opposition that its actually in conversation with you, your ideas will get /better/. The ideas that lose out are the ideas that should lose out. If we’re actually debating on the issues in a smart and informed way from two different perspectives, Democrats may not get what they want, but their progressive positions will be better served.

The same goes for the Republican Party. Conservativism will be better served when they understand how to communicate with liberal groups and find common ground. There was an article recently somewhere about the pro-life argument for Planned Parenthood–if only they would understand that PP seeks to reduce abortions, the way that the conservatives say they want, then they should support it. There will always be fringe liberals and fringe conservatives whose ideas won’t have a place, but the mainstream of conservative and liberal thinking should come together to constructively criticize each other and create better policies.

I like Democrats, but recently I saw an ad with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sitting on a couch, and Nancy Pelosi was telling the viewer to “Contact their Congressmen and tell them to support legislation against climate change.” And my first instinct was: “What the hell are YOU doing? Aren’t you the head of the House? Isn’t that your job? who exactly is running this boat?” Democrats have a lot of sins that I think a strong, sane Republican party can help wash out of them.

Open Letter To Dr. Ron Paul

Later this month, the Republican Party in Congress will be meeting to elect new leadership in the House. Any leadership challenge for the party is an opportunity to define a new direction, as I'm sure you understand from your run for the Presidency. Much noise is being made that the most recent election is the end of conservatism, or that the Republican Party has nothing left to offer the American People except the same rejected platform that President Bush offered America for the last eight years.

I'm writing to urge you: please challenge Rep. Boehner for House Minority Leadership.

When you first appeared to me on the national stage, challenging the more likely Republican presidential nominees in the beginning of the primaries, I was instantly struck by what you stood for. Every step of the way, you fought for a return to conservative principles, calling for the Republican Party to openly repudiate President Bush, to return to its small-government principles. This is the message that the Republican Party should have communicated in 2008. Perhaps it would have won on this message, or at least come closer to winning. But in choosing John McCain, it chose to continue standing by the Neoconservative movement.

You saw John McCain try to pretend to be you. He tried to pretend to oppose his party, when nobody has made such a clean break with President Bush while still remaining a true conservative as you. You saw John McCain pretend to be against redistribution of wealth, even though he never truly opposed it in a flat-tax scheme such as the one you have proposed. As a result, it never really rang true in the electorate.

You were one of the few people who was questioning Alan Greenspan's policies back when he was still at the Fed. Many else were buying into the Cult of Greenspan, assuming that his knowledge of the situation far dwarfed their own, and allowing him to do his work. You also voiced your opposition to the Iraq War, which most Americans now agree with. If the Republican Party is going to move forward, they're going to need to prove that they have more than ideology: that they have foresight, the ability to see problems as they approach, not just react to them once they're here.

People are also discussing how the Republican Party has lost the young, the educated. How Barack Obama captured an excitement around his ticket that the Republican Party could never capture. But you, in your primary run, proved to be exciting and inspiring to a large block of conservative independents who could not continue to support Bush, but didn't want to turn to a liberal agenda. When John McCain became the candidate, most of those who supported you wound up supporting Barack Obama.

Your fundraising and organizational skills proved to be incredible. You set a record for a single day of fundraising; you outshone all of your opponents in fundraising during the primaries; while John McCain was going bankrupt, you were showing the same internet savvy that Barack Obama was using to his own great success.

In short, if the Republicans in the House choose to reelect John Boehner, then the conservative movement will be out of touch with the people. They will still be trying to appeal to the voters as if it were still 2002. They need a new direction, and they need to be in touch with reality. They need someone who is willing to say, "This is where we went wrong," because until the Republican Party can do that it can never truly win the trust of the American people again.

It will be an uphill battle for you. Even if you don't win the Minority Leadership, however, it will benefit the House Republicans to have an open debate about their future. The idea that they may simply retain Boehner without even wondering if there is an alternative is possibly the worst outcome at all,

Expelling Heretics

The term "dissident" comes from a latin word, "dissidencia," which was first used in the Middle Ages during meetings of various factions of The Church (pre-schisms), and the term meant "Those who seek the same goal by a different path." The importance of the emergence of that term was that it gave space to those in The Church to voice their dissent without being heretics. This is important, because a healthy movement cannot remain healthy unless it gives space for its members to have less than 100% loyalty. Martin Luther King Jr, as an example, did not think America was perfect. But he loved it, and he helped it change for the better.

The Republican Party is in the middle of asking itself: dissident or heretic?

For the right, from Red State (I refuse to link to them) via Matthew Yglesias:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

Clearly, RedState has an answer: Heretic. Anyone who opposes Governor Palin, anyone who doesn't toe the... well, not even the party line, but the party-base line, the ideological line, must be cast out. Expelled. They're a heretic.

Now, I have to say that these McCain campaign workers who are going around after the fact complaining about Sarah Palin and talking about how bad she was even though they worked tirelessly to try and get her in the White House... well, I have as much respect for them as I have for Scott McLellan or Colin Powell, who may have discretely voiced dissent at the time but pretended to be 100% partisans in public, thus denying us the ability of private debate. But that's a different issue, that stems to me all the way back to the Saturday Night Massacre, when a huge chunk of the Attorney General's Office were fired because they refused to replace the Independent Prosecutor in charge of Watergate.

But still, they are members of the Republican Party. Even if they're complete hacks, they get to choose their political affiliation. If Republicans will hire them, or they win primary elections for the Republican Party, they're in the Party, and they can lend their voice. They can dissent, even if they choose not to when it matters.

The Independent Voter

Megan McArdle:

Every time we have an election, the partisans confuse the fact that the independents disliked the opposition candidate, with the idea that the independents joined their party. The independents did not want to stomp the Democrats in 2004, and they do not want to stomp the Republicans now. They are not interested in advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, any more than they were preparing to hand the Republicans a "permanent majority" in 2004. And when the various parties act as if it is so--as if the independents had actually voted to join their power-hungry two-minutes-hate, rather than voting for the guy they thought would best shelter them from the vicissitudes of fate . . . well, for the last few elections, they've had their asses handed to them on a silver platter two years later.

Yes. McArdle's original point was that partisans take such an election to be a broad mandate for the destruction of the other party. I agree with her on that point: just because Republicans have been handed electoral defeat does not mean the independent voters want their destruction, are stomping them out.

In order for independent voters to be satisfied one way or the other, one basic thing must happen: they must be satisfied that one guy is better than the other guy.

Now, if one guy sounds like the guy who's in power, and people are unhappy at the people in power, that guy will probably lose. But, the other guy has to show that he is going to be better. So: loser must be shown to be bad, and winner must be shown to be better.

I mean, that's basically the heart of the election. John McCain did not manage to distinguish himself enough with Bush, and Barack Obama managed to convince people that he (despite inexperience and, for some people, despite race) would be better.

That's what happened. And ironically enough, the catch-word in this election was change. Not just from the Republican Party (which is what I loathed about Dean's "Anyone But Bush" approach) but to something. And Change encapsulated changing the Democrats too--after all, the Democratic Congress was the one that set the record of unpopularity, beyond the Republican ones under Bush. Independent voters are very open to change. In four years from now, they may change back, if they feel like it.

What makes a party partisan is an ideology; ideology implies a long-term sense of history. Party partisans think they see into the future and see the past clearly; they think that an election is a referendum on ideology. How much of the actual debates, the actual campaign ads, etc. are actually devoted to the esoteric field of political philosophy? Not much. That is left to the politicians and the highly informed journalists; to the partisans and to the people who speak their language.

The independent voter, on the other hand, is looking at today's problems and looking at the candidate's in terms of today's solutions. That's why they're accused of having a short memory span; for instance, when John McCain made his talking points "earmarks" I think people looked at that and said, "Yeah, that's nice, but that's not today's problem." Terrorism as a concern came in at 8% because, well, only 8% of Americans are actually concerned about it at the moment. Duh. Today's problem is not terrorism: it's the economy. It's the Iraq War. It's health care.

In the year 2000, what were the problems on people's minds? I can't really point to anything specific over all. After all, we were still riding the gravy train. The result? A near 50-50 election. Why? Because it didn't really matter one way or the other. Now, if someone had sorted through the difference in Bush's ideology and Gore's ideology they would have probably come to a clear decision one way or the other. But most independent voters don't. That's what makes them independent.

Identity Politics

Today, in my Culture of Dissent class (taught by the inimitable Jan Urban, a Czech dissident from the Velvet Revolution and an excellent journalist in Bosnia, and Kosovo), we discussed the rather difficult question of why Communism proved to be popular.

The answer, from my point of view, is one having to do with the nature of identity in the 20th Century. There are many people who don't believe themselves to be very philosophical in their everyday life (philosophy being a very 'elite' passtime), but in point of fact, everyone has philosophical ideas and worldviews. And one of the big philosophical questions is, "Who am I? What is my identity?"

People base a surprising amount of their political convictions and idealisms based on who they think they are. For instance, one of the reasons that Americans have consistently voted for tax cuts for the wealthy is an array of polls which show that Americans consistently think that they are wealthier than they actually are (which corresponds to the way that they think they're thinner than they actually are).

We talked about the appeal of communism in the Industrial Revolution era. In order to understand it, you need to take a village-eye view of the change. The poor serfs, living in small rural communities, lived in an era with very little mobility. They were engaged in occupations passed down to them from generations, among a small community of people they knew. As the industrial revolution came to pass, serfdom was abolished: they were not necessary anymore. A vacuum formed, which sucked these serfs into the city. Suddenly they were in a huge community, much larger than themselves. Whatever they had previously been known for, through their family, was no longer a mark of identity. They passed by nameless and faceless masses everyday; they worked alongside nameless and faceless masses that did exactly what they did. There was no honor in their new work: they were (proverbially) just another cog in the machine; just another brick in the wall. They had been robbed of their identity, their purpose, and their security.

It was rather like going to a large college after being in a small high school.

At any rate, they needed a new identity. Communism provided that. It gave them a name for themselves: proletariat. It gave them a cause for their misery: bourgoisie. It told them that not only were the proletariat powerful, they were the single most powerful force of history: and that it was historically determined that they must succeed.

So, to turn to contemporary politics: during the Cold War, these identity politics broke apart into large dualisms: Communists and Capitalists on the world stage, and Democrats and Republicans on the American stage (note that third parties were still a noticeable force until World War Two). Ideology became, for one of the few times in American history, a primary source of identification: Democrats, Reds, Anti-Communists, Republicans, Socialists, Peaceniks, Hippies. All of these tags were ideological in nature. They gave people a sense of identity.

Today, these two grand coalitions seem more fractured. At least, the Republican camp seems to have split decisively into moderates, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives. A messy primary season filled with candidates who did not fully appeal to any of these groups (with the exception of Mike Huckabee for social conservatives and the Ron Paul movement for Libertarians) left people on the right with a lack of a sense of direction. Many of these people identified themselves as Republican strongly, without being on board with many of the actions or beliefs of other Republicans.

A big tip-off to me that this identity politics is coming apart? Obama has a large following of so-called Obamicans (Republicans for Obama). Notice, of course, that they are still calling themselves Republicans despite voting for Obama. I'm not necessarily saying that they aren't actually Republicans, but I'm noticing that their insistence is on defining themselves by a party affiliation which, in this election, may not be entirely accurate.

One of my favorite sayings to hear is "I've been a life-long Republican, but I'm considering voting Democrat." Notice the phrase "life-long." This is put forward as a positive, even though being a life-long Republican might imply that you've supported characters like George W. Bush, Nixon, or Reagan (in the same way that a life-long Democrat must have supported Carter, Dukakis, McGovern).

But this is the way people have previously identified themselves.

But with a hyper-specification of polls, there is a new level of identification going on. We hear it today on the news all the time. Demographics. Very small clusters of identity. How are middle-aged women going to vote? What about older men? Young black men in rural towns? These statistics can all be coallated. And apparently, they matter. And although women's groups have been condemning Palin since she was first put on the ticket, the latest poll shows that McCain has indeed spiked among women.

The question, I suppose, is whether we can move past identity politics. Barack Obama (in my opinion) has a way of addressing that. He appeals to people to vote not as Democrats, or Republicans, or as black and whites, but as Americans. This isn't just a trite slogan of identification: he's asking us to identify ourselves as America, and vote in such a way that doesn't just benefit my group or your group or any group, but benefits all of America.

And the question is: will it work.