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Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Staking Their Future on Failure

Yes, the Republicans are staking their near-term prospects on Obama failing, the stimulus failing to turn the economic tide, some lurid terrorist outrage penetrating the border, and so on. Yes, the lived experience of such "Obama failures" would in fact be failures of countless millions of the Americans they claim to represent and of the America they claim to love. Yes, pinning one's hopes on unprecedented disaster is unspeakably disgusting. What perplexes me is that it is only now that people seem to be outraged by this attitude in Republicans. The Reagan Revolution was premised on his famous utterance that "Government is the problem," an attitude that is perfectly continuous with the present Republican gamble on failure, as well as perfectly predictive of the actually catastrophic failures of the Bush Administration. Republicans don't believe in the very idea of good government, and it isn't enough to say that the current posturing (many will surely opportunistically cave on the stimulus and so on before the end, else risk consignment to a Confederate Rump) is simply tactical, since what is more to the point is that these are the tactics a government party defined by anti-governmentality are reduced to.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, pinning one's hopes on unprecedented disaster is unspeakably disgusting.

Indeed but is unprecedented disaster almost inevitable?

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/125192/it's_not_going_to_be_ok