How the GOP and Far Right Hope to Fool America

A part of the GOP propaganda campaign that the party can govern is to promote the myth that many of its so-called leaders are "moderates."  But they fail to say what standard is used to deem one a moderate.  Compared to the Republican Party of my youth and my years as a GOP city committee member, there are no moderates left.  Almost all of the current crop of would be 2016 candidates and congressional leaders of the GOP are extremists compared to their counterparts from the days of Rockefeller Republicans.  Sadly, the media for the most part ignores this reality and mere parrots the GOP talking points without question.  A piece in Salon looks at how the GOP and its far right elements hope to play the American public for suckers yet again.  Here are highlights:

After the election the Villagers all declared that the Republicans now have to “prove they can govern,” apparently meaning they would have to moderate their views, hold hands with moderate Democrats and basically be the moderate centrists all politicians surely yearn to be. There is reason to be skeptical of this scenario for a couple of reasons.

The first is that Republicans just won a large number of seats in both Houses after they pushed far right policies and engaged in unprecedented obstructionism. Perhaps they have searched their hearts and decided that no matter how much their voters approved of their behavior and rewarded them with a congressional majority, it was the wrong thing to do. But it’s doubtful.

The second reason this is unlikely is that the base of the Republican Party votes and the base of the Republican Party is extremely conservative. The Republican activists, of which their are legions, are even more conservative. 

When even staunch conservatives like Bob Bennet of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana are unceremoniously booted out of office by challengers from their right, the message is pretty clear: stray from right-wing orthodoxy at your peril.  However, that has not stopped the D.C. pundits from insisting their fantasy is coming true. 

First, let’s dispense with the ludicrous idea that Paul Ryan represents the “intellectual wing” of the Republican Party. He represents the flim-flam wing of the Republican Party, which is admittedly a very large faction, but it can hardly be defined as “intellectual.” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are actual intellectuals. (And at this point they are practically the only ones.) But it doesn’t take an intellectual to see that policies benefiting the non-college-educated, blue-collar, “Sam’s Club” voter would be useful to a party that must win the vast majority of white votes in order to even have a dim chance at obtaining the presidency. This is the stuff of Fox News analysis, not intellectual inquiry.

The article also points out that Heritage Action has recently been ostracized in Washington for taking on the political establishment. They were even barred from attending the meetings of the Republican Study group, which is the D.C. Republican equivalent of being shunned by the Mean Girls table in the cafeteria — a kind of social death. The article characterizes this as an ideological battle between the center and the right, but it’s really a little family spat among conservatives. There is no center.

[T]here isn’t a “rebranding” going on at the Heritage Foundation. Under the mature and reasonable leadership of Jim DeMint, the Christian right ex-senator who said Obamacare would be the president’s “Waterloo,” the foundation is undergoing a bit of a face-lift. They are touting the sexy new Beltway brand called the “Reform Conservative Movement” (which strikes me as something of an oxymoron. Why would conservatism want reform?).

[I]t’s fair to guess that it means they will simply reiterate that the Invisible Hand of God will intervene once the government is drowned in the bathtub. And lest anyone think this means they won’t be going after the dreaded “entitlements,” think again. The alleged intellectual leader of the “reform conservative” movement, Paul Ryan, wants to voucherize Medicare and privatize Social Security. He just thinks they need to stop saying such mean things about poor people as they take away their food stamps.

Conservatives believe that average working families need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop asking for anyone to do anything to help them improve their lot. But apparently, they realize that in a world in which the top 1 percent is gobbling up more and more of the nation’s wealth while everyone else is dramatically falling behind, that isn’t selling as well as it used to, particularly when the demographics of presidential elections may just keep them out of the White House for a good long time unless they can attract a few more voters. So they are “rebranding.”