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Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Republicanism from Movement to Margins

The full-throated market fundamentalist theocratic fundamentalist sulfur-belching locomotive of Movement Republicanism is skittering after thirty years or so of reckless acceleration to the edge of the cliff-face and Republicans are starting to get a good glimpse and vertiginous sense of the utter abyss now so near. I think a recent post from David Frum captures the moment quite well.

Frum is too comparatively sensible to approve the anti-civilizationism of his fulminating Randroidal and Christian-Talibanist colleagues as they race ecstatically over that cliff, in defiance of a wholesomely diversifying, secularizing, planetizing, convivializing multiculture to which their mean-spirited white-racist patriarchal death-dealing trickle-down authoritianism is ever more conspicuously marginal. But it is his reluctance to join in the work of progress despite all of this that evokes most exquisitely for me the emerging reality of the Republican right.

It is interesting that in an article that castigates his party’s cruel and nihilist anti-governmentalism he still offers the notion of the Welfare State just a tepid “two cheers” even while conceding the arguments that justify its full support (especially the sort of support that would demand social democracy live up to its aspirations in practice through accountability and reform). No less interesting, in an article that declares “the libertarian ideal championed these days by so many conservatives has become at least as drained as the social democratic idea,” Frum provides ample arguments against this libertopianism but none against social democracy while still pronouncing them more or less equally drained.

Movement Republicanism has no future: It has been an anchor slowing reforms of the New Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society to the pointless diminution of countless lives for as long as the Red Scare and the Southern Strategy and the Patriarchal war against vulnerable women and closeted gays (who are out and brown and proud and organized in their many millions now) could manage that devastating and demoralizing work. Movement Republicanism has done the worst of its racist, sexist, war-mongering, plutocratic, divisive, disenfranchising damage, and the jig is up, that dance of death is grinding to its sad sick sleepwalking closure.

Republicanism must either jettison its Movement or, clinging to its Movement, America will jettison Republicanism into a permanent marginality that cannot credibly govern as a National Party.

And yet, here is the melancholy reality to which Frum attests so patently in his own rather exhausted ambivalence: It is true that jettisoning its Movement would assure for the “Compassionate Conservative” wing of the GOP (if it even deserves to be considered a wing, and not, say, just a feather) a more viable and appealing future than the wild know-nothing bigot-frenzied Walpurgisnacht of a GOP marginalized into a permanent neo-confederate rump. But when all is said and done Frum is embracing the vision of a no less marginal Republicanism himself, since his post-Movement GOP would function at best as a kind of domesticated Tory “loyal opposition” accepting the basic premises of social democracy and secular multiculture and left to tinkering collaboratively around the edges: advocating publicly (which is better than secretly, I say) for the interests of ineradicable incumbent elites and to register the distress of those who inevitably suffer from the storm churn of change even if it is more progressive change than not.

I agree with Frum and the small handful of his colleagues that such an organized force is legitimate and would even be useful in our society, and I happily endorse his embrace of this rather thankless rear-guard work. But it is hard to imagine many people will join him in it, and harder still to see what the appeal is for him, given the greater glory and good that attends the active collaboration and constestation from which a more equitable and diverse and sustainable planetary democracy will emerge. It looks to me more likely that the cynical GOP coalition will simply splinter into its elite-incumbent and bigot-populist factions without the forward momentum of its Movement energy to distract attention from the actual irreconcilability of those factions and the longstanding predation of the former on the latter: I daresay still more ugly and desperate GOP dysfunction together with more dangerous elite-incumbent efforts at opportunistic Democratic subversion will be the order of the day.

2 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I don't think the two factions will split off from each other. I think they'll remain locked in a tug of war where the populists try to force concessions from the elites. Ultimately they always end up losing and getting odious token gestures.

I was quite impressed by how decisively and forcefuly the GOP elites crushed the populists in the Florida primary. They'd stayed quite during the whole flavour of the month phase of the campaign but as soon as a populist looked like he could possibly win they united to take him down.

You might get more faux sub movements like the Tea Party that act like pacifiers for the more extreme parts of the base that don't really go anywhere but I don't see the populists either being the keys or leaving the tent.

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, it was a sight to behold.