Mid-Term Hangover and the GOP Brand

Polls of citizens in states from Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Michigan, to Maine, to Florida are suggesting serious buyers' remorse wherever GOP candidates won in November, now that they have begun to behave like, you know, GOP governors.

Setting aside the I told you so's, if I may be permitted a rosier contemplation in the midst of all this dismally predictable criminal stupidity, I do wonder if part of what is happening here is that the serious damage done to the GOP "brand" by the catastrophic failures of the Bush administration is being confirmed now in much deeper ways the Republicans will not soon be able to recover from.

I happen to think the GOP is in shambles, and still risks self-marginalization into a regional rump, whatever its apparent energy and superficial victories. I think that the objective awfulness of its Presidential field, the level of ignorance testified to by its freshmen and among its more senior panderers of even the most basic governmental functions (this weird game of chicken with the debt ceiling, these crazy culture war spectacles in defiance of doing anything on jobs and so on), the inability to keep the caucus in any kind of order, all this suggests that the GOP wasn't really in any kind of shape to do anything with the majority it won in November. It won, by the way, recall, mostly by keeping its real plans to itself all the while shooting off its mouth to a demoralized general population (including too many unconscionably lazy vindictive Democrats) unwilling to think about what our problems objectively demand but eager to "throw the bums out" in an idiotically uncritical way.

But even after an unmitigated disaster like the killer clown administration, it remains true that political parties shore up a lot of narrative and organizational credibility. It's hard to believe deep down in your heart of hearts that in a country with only two real parties one whole party might completely disintegrate and give itself over to loons and incompetents. Michele Bachmann objectively seems like somebody who should at most be scooping ice cream in a food court, but she's got an "R" by her name and she's got a PAC, and I mean, Lincoln and Eisenhower were Republicans, PACS attract serious institutional money. A candidate like governor John Kasich (whose citizens want a do-over now that he is behaving perfectly predictably) probably benefited from his prior stint in Congress for many next-to-know-nothing voters who still trust that Congress is a minimally functional institution and therefore for whom it confers a measure of legitimacy on a candidate even when their actual record in Congress would be delegitimizing to anybody paying any attention at all.

I suspect that in these union-busting campaigns and dysfunctional congressional scrums Republicans are getting dangerously close to getting branded as the gang that can't shoot straight, the party you can't trust with your money, the guys who lie about what they plan to do because nobody would vote for what they plan to do. Branding like this can go deep and last long.

For generations now Democrats have balanced budgets and made government work better all the while being branded as Tax and Spenders and Big Government socialists (if only), meanwhile Republicans balloon both government and deficits, in ways that never make a whole hell of a lot of sense all the while basking in the surreally inapt brand of fiscal responsibility: Entrenched brands can inertially resist empirical falsification for the longest time, indeed they can frame perceptions in ways that sometimes seem to enable mass hallucination.

The GOP may be risking a radical re-branding right about now, the price of a generation of Movement Republicanism premised on market fundamentalism and white-racist patriarchal christianist authoritarianism which fly in the face of factual reality and popular values in ways they can no longer clearly grasp or adjust to.

There, something positive for you. Not something I'm confident about, just a thought.