Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

The current occupant of Rolling Stone's Hunter S. Thompson Gonzo Journalism chair, Matt Taibbi, furthers the analysis of the GOP's self destruction:

In Spinal Tap terms, the rhetoric by the time Obama got elected already had gone well past eleven. It was at thirteen, fifteen, twenty …. Our tight little core of Real Americans by then had, over a series of decades, decided pretty much the entire rest of the world was shit. Europe we know about. The Middle East? Let’s "carpet bomb it until they can’t build a transitor radio," as Ann Coulter put it. Africa was full of black terrorists with AIDS, and Asia, too, was a good place to point a finger or two ("I want to go to war with China," is how Rick Santorum put it).

Here at home, all liberals, gays, Hispanic immigrants, atheists, Hollywood actors and/or musicians with political opinions, members of the media, members of congress, TSA officials, animal-lovers, union workers, state employees with pensions, Occupiers and other assorted unorthodox types had already long ago been rolled into the enemies list.

Given the continued troubles and the continued failure to return to good old American values, who else could possibly be to blame? Where else could they possibly point the finger?

There was only one possible answer, and we're seeing it playing out in this race: At themselves! And I don’t mean they pointed the finger "at themselves" in the psychologically healthy, self-examining, self-doubting sort of way. Instead, I mean they pointed "at themselves" in the sense of, "There are traitors in our ranks. They must be ferreted out and destroyed!"

This is the last stage in any paranoid illness. You start by suspecting that somebody out there is out to get you; in the end, you’re sure that even the people who love you the most under your own roof, your own doctors, your parents, your wife and your children, they’re in on the plot. To quote Matt Damon in the almost-underrated spy film The Good Shepherd, they became convinced that there’s "a stranger in the house."

This is where the Republican Party is now. They’ve run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They’ve already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!

More here.

I think that the conventional wisdom on what's been going on in the Republican primaries is that it's something of a battle between the so-called "establishment" and the much more conservative base, and this is true. However, that barely scratches the surface. Taibbi traces the history of the Conservative Movement's early days during the Reagan era all the way to today's intense paranoia and anger, and compares it to an addictive drug whose users always need more to get that high they experienced upon first use. Indeed, the story of modern conservatism is one of massive promises offered by politicians, only to be followed by let-down after let-down once these politicians get into office. And, even though the GOP continually lets its base down, or perhaps because of it, the angry, paranoid rhetoric is always there, always ramping itself up, always pulling the faithful back into the fold.

But how do you top yourself once you're at the top? You don't. You either take over, like the Nazis did back in Wiemar Germany, or you collapse into utter absurdity, like the GOP is doing now. I mean, really, their moment lasted for a couple of years after 9/11, but they just weren't fired up enough at that point, which is hard to believe, given how psychotic the rhetoric was, but apparently true.

Personally, I don't really see anything saving the Republican Party, as a political entity. I mean, sure, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh will continue to ramp up the rhetoric for years to come, and there will always be that twenty percent or so of the electorate that fumes with righteous white indignation, but I don't think they're really capable of winning national elections, anymore. I'm also starting to believe that they're going to have increasing difficulties taking or keeping either house of Congress. It could just be wishful thinking, but I really do believe that social issues will become obsolete, the Democrats will ultimately be the new conservative party, on economics at any rate, the Republicans will just become a nuisance, and, hopefully, a new liberal party will arise from all the wreckage.

I hope.

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