Will a Trump Nomination Kill the GOP?

In many ways George Will has become a warmed over version of Pat Buchanan, but once in a while he gets it right when he looks at the GOP's rush toward long tern political suicide as it increasingly allows the far right lunatic fringe, Christofascists, and white supremacists to take control of the party.  This trend is best personified by the rise of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP poll, with the very scary Ted Cruz in second place.  Sadly, Will himself has for too long failed to oppose the cancer metastasizing in the GOP.   But, as the saying goes, better late than never,  In a Washington Post column Will predicts the death of the GOP as a conservative party in the event Trump wins the GOP presidential nomination.  Here are column excerpts:

If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. . . . . Now, panting with a puppy’s insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.

When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Putin “kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries,” Trump replied that “at least he’s a leader.” Besides, Trump breezily asserted, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop. It has, however, been “proven,” perhaps even to Trump’s exacting standards, that Putin has dismembered Ukraine. (Counts one and two at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned conspiracy to wage, and waging, aggressive war.)  

[B]y his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.  

Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP’s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years.  

In 2016, a Trump nomination would not just mean another Democratic presidency. It would also mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in U.S. politics.  

It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this: 

One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

Days of Republican Desperation

If one looks at so-called establishment Republicans floundering in their pursuit of the GOP presidential nomination there is an air of desperation.  They are peddling the same old GOP policies that have not worked since the 1980's even as the world has changed radically and the country's demographics have changed significantly.  Moreover, much of the party base has descended into utter insanity and now embrace ignorance, white supremacy and religious extremism that is anathema to the once stereotypical country club Republicans.  A piece in Politico by Michael Lind, author of Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, looks at how the GOP went off the rails and argues that it is time for the party to throw away the 50 year old playbook and embark on a new course.  Here are highlights:

There is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology.

What happened to the conservative movement?”  It’s an excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas that worked for Ronald Reagan . . . . Yet the old-time conservative religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation

[N]o one is quite sure what the Republican Party’s vision is or should be any more—least of all those hapless “establishment” presidential candidates who are flailing away out on the trail. Today, the greatest obstacle to majority status for the Republican Party may not be demography. It may be a superannuated conservative ideology that is increasingly disconnected not only from the values of the larger society but from the values and interests of Republicans themselves.

Today’s legacy right originated 60 years ago as “movement conservatism.” It was born with the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1955. In 1964, movement conservatives captured the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. They lost the general election that year, but in 1980 and 1984 the White House was won by a leader of their movement, Ronald Reagan.

Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of “rollback” in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution—have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

This is nothing less than a failure of conservatism itself. After Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater had jettisoned much of their earlier hard-edged conservatism, there should have be an intellectual reformation on the American right in the 1990s. And there were a number of candidates for a redesigned conservative ideology.

But instead of fading from the scene and opening the way to new thinking, old-fashioned Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan movement conservatism came back, in an even more radical form in the 2000s, catching me (by then an ex-neoconservative) and others by surprise.

When George W. Bush was elected, like many others I expected him to combine the “kinder and gentler” domestic policy of his father with the realist foreign policy symbolized by his father, Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Instead W. doubled down on all the elements of the old “conservative movement” policy and left utter wreckage in his wake. Reagan had wrecked the budget with his tax cuts for the rich, but later in his two terms he presided over numerous tax increases. George W. Bush pushed through budget-wrecking tax cuts for the rich again, invoking the same supply-side theory that had been discredited in the 1980s.

Following 9/11, George W. Bush not only invaded Afghanistan but also invaded and occupied Iraq, which had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda attacks and posed no serious threat to the U.S. or its allies. The country is still paying for that mistake more than a decade later, and its reverberations have robbed neoconservatives of most of their credibility.

The original conservative movement of Buckley and his allies was called “fusionism” because it sought to fuse three strands: free-market economics, militant and militarized anticommunism, and social traditionalism. Once conservatives wove this into a comprehensive political vision. But as time went on that vision started to come apart, and in the hands of different right-wing groups each strand grew more and more radicalized and unrealistic.

[I]t is this incoherent package of ideas that is being recycled by Republican presidential candidates today, more than three decades after Reagan effectively abandoned it after winning the White House. . . . . Thus you have the spectacle of insiders like Jeb Bush, Kasich and Christie trying to sell policies that were unworkable even in the Reagan years and since have become far more radical and therefore less palatable.

The reformocons are the Gorbachevs of the right. They want to reform the system without questioning its fundamental premises. What the Republican Party could use instead are a few Boris Yeltsins, willing to abandon the old orthodoxy altogether and start afresh.

It’s about time. Today, we are nearly twice as far from 1962, when Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, than Friedman was from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. When he founded National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. was closer in time to William McKinley than to Barack Obama. The particular synthesis of free market economics, hawkish foreign policy and social reaction that defined movement conservatism was the product of particular circumstances half a century ago.

Is Conservative/Religious Extremism Genetic?

The Christofascists refuse to believe that sexual orientation is genetic and not a choice.  Now, new research suggests that perhaps religious extremism and adherence to conservative dogma may somehow be genetic/hereditary.  One of the aspects of the far right and the Christofascists in particular is - at least in my view - an almost sick need for  what some describe as order, structure, closure, certainty, and dogmatism.  And anything that threatens this need - e.g., gays suggesting that the Bible is wrong about homosexuality - is enough to cause these folks to go into hysteria.  A column in the New York Times looks at this new area of research.  Here are excerpts:

It’s been a key question of American politics since at least 1968: Why do so many poor, working-class and lower-middle-class whites — many of them dependent for survival on government programs — vote for Republicans?

The debate over the motives of conservative low-income white voters remains unresolved, but two recent research papers suggest that the hurdles facing Democrats in carrying this segment of the electorate may prove difficult to overcome.

In “Obedience to Traditional Authority: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness,” published by the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2013, three psychologists write that “authoritarianism, religiousness and conservatism,” which they call the “traditional moral values triad,” are “substantially influenced by genetic factors.” According to the authors — Steven Ludeke of Colgate, Thomas J. Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, and Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh — all three traits are reflections of “a single, underlying tendency,” previously described in one word by Bouchard in a 2006 paper as “traditionalism.” Traditionalists in this sense are defined as “having strict moral standards and child-rearing practices, valuing conventional propriety and reputation, opposing rebelliousness and selfish disregard of others, and valuing religious institutions and practices.”

Working along a parallel path, Amanda Friesen, a political scientist at Indiana University, and Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, a graduate student in political science at Rice University, concluded from their study comparing identical and fraternal twins that “the correlation between religious importance and conservatism” is “driven primarily, but usually not exclusively, by genetic factors.” The substantial “genetic component in these relationships suggests that there may be a common underlying predisposition that leads individuals to adopt conservative bedrock social principles and political ideologies while simultaneously feeling the need for religious experiences.”

From this perspective, the Democratic Party — supportive of abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the primacy of self-expressive individualism over obligation to family — is irreconcilably alien to a segment of the electorate. And the same is true from the opposite viewpoint: a Republican Party committed to right-to-life policies, to a belief that marriage must be between a man and a woman, and to family obligation over self-actualization, is profoundly unacceptable to many on the left.

If these predispositions are, as Friesen and Ksiazkiewicz argue, to some degree genetically rooted, they may not lend themselves to rational debate and compromise.

There are many scholars who challenge the quality of the evidence amassed to date linking genes, politics and values. The field is highly controversial, to say the least. But let’s take a look.

The three psychologists found evidence that they believe demonstrates that authoritarianism, religiosity and conservatism are “different manifestations of a single latent and significantly heritable factor,” the tendency to follow conventional authority “in attitudes toward the structure of family and society, toward religious conventions, and toward conventional attitudes on political issues.” They argue that each of these traits is shared to a substantially greater degree among identical twins than among nonidentical twins

Everett notes, the need for “order, structure, closure, certainty, dogmatism, and discipline are often shown to be more central to the thinking of conservative proponents, whereas higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity and greater openness to new experiences appear to be associated with liberal cognitive styles.”

GOP/Conservatives on the Wrong Side

With world leaders and dignitaries gathering in South Africa to remember Nelson Mandela, it is timely to remember the wrongheadedness and bigotry of many conservatives and Republicans towards Mandela.  That knack at being on the wrong side of history, however, extends to many other things that rang from opposition to the civil rights movement to recent efforts to disenfranchise voters and efforts to stigmatize and harm LGBT individuals.  Bigotry and opposition to equality have become the hallmarks of today's conservatism and, of course the GOP.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this history which is certainly not something to be proud of if one is a decent and moral person.  Here are excerpts:

The Beast’s estimable Peter Beinart already laid bare the rancid hypocrisy of today’s Republicans honoring Nelson Mandela. Joan Walsh delivered a similarly biting critique of the “right-washing” of Mandela going on right now. American conservatives loathed the man when it mattered. This leads us to a broader question that Beinart and Walsh didn’t have the space to get into, so I’ll pick it up from here: When has the American right ever—ever—been on the right side of history?

The answer is almost never. Indeed, history is an unfolding, and more or less constant, vindication of the people who were thinking ahead, who weren’t happy with things the way they were and saw they had to change, and who have been on the side of personal liberation and de-concentration of political power. Those people are virtually by definition liberals and reformers and radicals.

Consider the great political earthquakes throughout history and imagine the contemporaneous—not retrospective, as we are seeing in these phony paeans to Mandela, but in-the-moment—conservative posture. The conservative position was wrong nearly every time—not just wrong, but often morally shocking from our later perspective.

Do you support the American Revolution? I should hope so. You would not have, however, had you been a conservative in 1785.

How about the abolition of slavery? I reckon you’re on board with that. Well, Lord knows you wouldn’t have been if you’d been among the 1860 conservatives who started a war over it (and whose apologists today insist the Civil War was not about slavery).

In terms of domestic politics, few polemical tasks are easier than demonstrating how wrong conservatism has been about pretty much everything in all of American history. Eradication of child labor? Why, an imposition on business owners to run their factories as they saw fit, you socialist! Giving women the right to vote? Women?! They simply don’t possess the logical faculties to be entrusted with such a responsibility, and anyway where will it end—I suppose you’ll be suggesting that black people get the franchise next? Segregation. Miscegenation laws. Immigration. Civil rights. The environmental movement. Conservatism’s record: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

It’s amazing how one hears the same hideous arguments, always swaddled in alleged morality and always—always—totally immoral. A hundred years ago, biblical thunderers screamed that their pact between their conscience and their God couldn’t possibly allow them to consider the marriage of a white person to a “colored” one to be valid. Today, our thunderers say exactly the same thing about gay people. We should no more tolerate a “religious exemption” for those who oppose same-sex marriage than on race. It is bigotry, period and end of story. History one day will determine as much, and our anti-gay thunderers will look every bit as hateful as the racial ones of yesteryear do now.

So let’s turn to foreign policy. Here, I admit things get a little more complicated, but only a little. There have been two great questions on foreign policy in the last century, the questions of fascism and communism. On the former, the American right’s record is one of deep shame. Most of American conservatism actively attacked Roosevelt for getting us into war. If America First had had its way, in Amsterdam, Oslo, and Paris they’d be speaking German today, or at least would have for a long time.

Mandela is another case in point. There is no question that some, maybe many, in the African National Congress were communists. But does anyone think for a second that the ANC would have said no to American help had it been forthcoming?

The conservative record is one of tragedy and moral nullity. Even so I would say we do need a conservative tendency in ours or any society as a check against reformist over-zeal. So conservatives should certainly be involved in our arguments. It’s just that they should also lose most of them, as history shows they’ve done a good job of doing.

Conservatives at a Crossroads: Christianists and Tea Party vs. William F. Buckley

I notice a piece on Politico the other day by did not get back to it until today - in part because of having cocktails with one of the boyfriend's oldest clients who actually knew William F. Buckley, Jr.  Her parents and Buckley's parents had even hoped to arrange her marriage to Buckley.  Being strong willed and one to be in charge of her own destiny (she still is at 93), she said "no" to the marriage hopes. She is an amazing woman and has many truly interesting stories about her "adventures," including meeting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor back during WWI.  

But back to my point.  There was a time when conservatives and Republican valued logic, reason, legitimate debate and did not flee from objective reality.  It was the type of conservatism that wasn't an embarrassment to confess to.  But that was then and now we see a form of conservatism that refuses to listen to facts and reason and shuns honest debate.  A piece in Politico looks at the descent of the conservative movement into a form of know nothing ignorance.  Here are highlights:

The GOP’s trouncing has triggered a wave of “soul searching” typical in its post-election timing, but more significant in its impact for our politics and for the conservative movement — if there is one. We think not. The conservative crisis of 2012 is not just a crisis of messaging; it is a crisis of conscience.

The cast of characters now presenting themselves as conservative leaders bear nothing in common with the intellectual cadre that brought the movement to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. For months we watched in horror as a parade of Harold Hill hucksters mouthed empty tea party phraseology, followed the advice of Dick Morris and Karl Rove, and parroted Frank Luntz’s magic words — all the while selling a boy’s band that simply does not exist. Their polls, their news, their understanding of America, are a façade. The people of River City — the conservative base — were willingly sold a bill of goods. They got their reality check on Nov. 6.

To be clear, media access and its persuasive power have always been central to the conservative cause. But how far we have come from the days when William F. Buckley, Jr. hosted a PBS program called “Firing Line,” where conservatives of all stripes, liberal intellectuals and policymakers debated issues in depth. Today the conservative base prefers the endless recitation of things it already believes.

The movement, once a coalition of cold warriors, traditionalists and free marketeers, no longer exists. Buckley did not preach an ideology; he helped maintain a fusion of different factions. The key players, and candidates, came from very different camps but were united in a fundamental understanding of the limited role of government and the power of the individual. These groups often disagreed. But their differences were worked out through reasoned debate and exchange

What we see today, in contrast, is a dialogue of empty sets of talking points with no intellectual content or critical thinking to back them up — epitomized by Mitt Romney’s foundationless candidacy that pandered to a shrinking and ideologically extreme base. But conservatism, as it was understood by those who built the movement in the postwar years, was never an ideology.

Ideology and ideologues were imported into the party in recent years, especially by extreme theocratic types whose embrace of an intrusive Big Government is in fact antithetical to Republicanism and conservatism.

A different conservative intellectual legacy extends back to Edmund Burke and beyond, a legacy emphasizing the long view over the short one, which thrived not on political marching orders but on debate and diversity. It is a tradition that dates to the dawn of Western civilization and the invention of democracy grounded in the practice of rhetoric. The modern conservative media machine, in its vapid self-congratulation, is a total negation of this tradition. While a few survivors still try nobly to maintain the real conservative tradition, their voices are drowned out by those who want to blame the media, demographics, Obama flimflams, and anything else — except themselves.

We are saddened to observe what has become of its legacy — and its cast of pretenders to the throne. If you are a Republican, it is a sad day for your party and the movement that built it. If you are a believer in American democracy, it is a sad day for the country.

It is noteworthy that one of the authors of the piece was in the Reagan administration.

How the GOP Lost Its Way

As a former GOP activist - I was on a local city committee for 8 years - I remember a time when one did not need to be either a religious fanatic, a thinly veiled white supremacist, or driven by greed and obsessed with lower taxes to be a Republican.  Sadly, those days are long gone and I and many others - including a number of LGBT bloggers I know - fled the GOP where after the Christofascist take over, we are deemed not even fully human and certainly not entitled to any civil rights.  As I've noted before, my entire extended family more or less has fled the insane asylum that has become today's GOP.   I blame most of the change in the GOP on the emergence Christian Right as the real puppet masters of the party.  In Virginia, the Republican Party of Virginia has become a de facto branch of The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-modernity affiliate of Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.  What I find especially chilling about the Christianist take over is that it has coincided with a level of selfishness and greed and intolerance that never used to be the principal hallmarks of the GOP.  A lengthy column in the Washington Post looks at this slide away form caring about the common good and the embracing of far right extremism.  Here are some excerpts: 

To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.

Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.

Today’s conservatism is about low taxes, fewer regulations, less government — and little else. Anyone who dares to define it differently faces political extinction. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was considered a solid conservative, until conservatives decided that anyone who seeks bipartisan consensus on anything is a sellout. Even Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of the longest-serving Republican senators, is facing a primary challenge. His flaw? He occasionally collaborated with the late Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy on providing health insurance coverage for children and encouraging young Americans to join national service programs.

Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea.

The great American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. certainly understood this. In his book “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country,” he quotes approvingly John Stuart Mill’s insistence that “everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.” With liberty comes responsibility to the community.

Before the Civil War, conservatives such as Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay believed in an active federal government that served the common good. This included a commitment to internal improvements (what we now, less elegantly, call infrastructure), public schooling, and the encouragement of manufacturing and science. Clay, an unapologetic supporter of national economic planning, called his program “the American System,” explicitly distinguishing his idea from the British laissez-faire system. (The Club for Growth would not have been pleased.)

Civil War pensions — the first great social insurance program and a central Republican cause — were supporting about 28 percent of men 65 and over by 1910. In 1894, the program’s most expensive year, the pensions accounted for 37 percent of federal spending. Sounds like a massive entitlement program, doesn’t it?

And the first American version of socialized medicine was signed into law in 1798 by that great conservative president, John Adams. The Marine Hospital Servicefunded hospitals across the country to treat sailors who were sick or got injured on the job. There is no record of a mass campaign to repeal AdamsCare.

Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system and established the federal student loan program in the 1950s.   More recently, Ronald Reagan never tried to dismantle the New Deal and acknowledged, sometimes with wry humor, the need for tax increases. He was acutely alive to the communal side of conservatism.

In other words, until recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.

Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.

Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his term encouraged conservatives, including the fledgling tea party movement, to distance themselves from his legacy. They declared that Bush’s shortcomings stemmed from his embrace of “big government” and “big spending” — even if much of the spending was in Iraq and Afghanistan. They recoiled from his “compassionate conservatism,” deciding, as right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin put it, that “ ‘compassionate conservatism’ and fiscal conservatism were never compatible.”

 Obama, in the meantime, pitched communal themes from the moment he took office .  .  .   .   The more he emphasized a better balance between the individual and the community, the less interested conservatives became in anything that smacked of such equilibrium.

It’s why they cannot accept (as Romney and the Heritage Foundation once did) energetic efforts by the government to expand access to health insurance. It’s why, even after a catastrophic financial crisis, they continue to resist new rules aimed not at overturning capitalism but at making it more stable.

[W]hen we balance our individualism with a sense of communal obligation that we are most ourselves as Americans. The 20th century was built on this balance, and we will once again prove the prophets of U.S. decline wrong if we can refresh and build upon that tradition. But doing so will require conservatives to abandon untempered individualism, which betrays what conservatism has been and should be.

When Will the GOP Face a Reckoning On Marriage Equality?

Andrew Sullivan has written on why marriage equality should be a conservative goal - and I have done the same in a VEER Magazine column - because of the stability and benefits that flow not only to the couples involved, but also to their families and the larger community. Despite this, the GOP continues to pander like a tawdry whore to the Christianists. When has to wonder when the ultimate reckoning will come given the rapidly growing acceptance of same sex marriage by the younger generations. A piece in the New Yorker looks at this issue and again makes the case as to why marriage equality should be a conservative value. Here are some excerpts:

Why isn’t gay marriage conservative? One would think that, at a certain point, there would be a real confrontation within the Republican Party about this—one that goes beyond its libertarian wing’s impatience with the subject. Do you want children to grow up in a home with married parents? Do you want adults who live together to make a binding commitment, one that helps weave them into their community? Are your party’s candidates and alleged intellectuals turning out books complaining about the absence of both of the above, books with titles like “It Takes a Family”? Would you like to help plan, attend, and dance at the wedding of your daughter, nephew, brother—or your own marriage? All of these people exist; so do their children. A wedding ring is the symbol of a transformative legal act, but it is not the sort of magic ring that conjures people out of nowhere or, pulled off, makes them invisible.

Perhaps that confrontation has begun, quietly enough, although the agreement of the G.O.P. Presidential candidates (other than Ron Paul) on the subject makes that harder to see.

And yet the legalization of gay marriage in New York State was eased by Republican Party donors who supported it and told Senators and assemblymen that they wouldn’t be abandoned financially. And, as the Times noted recently, they haven’t been—quite the opposite. . . . . The Washington bill was supported by Nike, Microsoft, and Starbucks—liberal-minded corporations on issues like this, maybe, but still corporations. But what may be more effective is the voter in the back of the auditorium who checks himself when he hears bitter talk about the supposed assault on marriage, because the words are no longer abstract, and because they seem unloving.

When policemen in Virginia barged into the bedroom of Richard and Mildred Loving, in 1958, there was a wedding certificate hanging on their wall. Because Richard was white and Mildred was black and Native American, the piece of paper marked them, in the eyes of the local government, as disreputable. . . . . They were forced to leave the state. The perversion of that position was recognized by the Supreme Court five years later, in a unanimous decision that overturned miscegenation laws.

Gay marriage may get to the court, but it’s looking as though it will stop in many statehouses along the way, and by then more marriage certificates will hang on more walls, recognized as something to honor.

Between the GOP position on contraception, the glorification of discrimination against those deemed "other," the anti-abortion extremism and the efforts to dehumanize LGBT citizens I have to wonder when the majority will wake up and throw the GOP on the trash heap of history.

Today's Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality

Fareed Zakaria has a piece in Time magazine that looks at today's conservative and analyzes how it has lost touch with reality. A situation that is in stark contrast to the old school type of conservatism that I grew up with and which used to pride itself on objective fact and reality. Personally, I attribute part of the decline in rationality to the rise of far right Christians within the GOP. Their entire "Biblical world view" is untethered from objective reality and scientific fact. Throw in the more ignorant elements of the Tea Party and the problem becomes exacerbated. The other factor, of course, is the fact that those in leadership positions in the GOP - who certainly knew or should have known better - chose short term expedience over what was best long term for the GOP and the nation. Now, ignorance and wild theories that sound almost drug induced are embraced and fact and reason are flushed down the toilet. Here are highlights from Zakaria's article:
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Conservatism, he [George Will] explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.
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Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
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The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.
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[R]ight now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
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Of course, American history suggests that as well. But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this.
. . . . We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience.
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Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals.
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Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?
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We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

The Correlation Between Conservativism and Ignorance and Economic Backwardness

Richard Florida - who has done studies on the so-called "creative class" and entrepreneurship and economic vitality has done another study that seems to demonstrate a direct correlation between the economic well being of states and the level of conservatism of the states' residents. Also directly tracking the level of conservatism in states is the level of education of residents. The more poorly educate a state's population, the more conservative the state. Yes, ignorance and bigotry does seem to have a high and direct price. Unfortunately, states that are politically lurching to the right are the antithesis to long term economic success and vibrancy. The chart above from The Atlantic also shows a direct correlation with between religiosity and lack of education to the Bible Belt. As for the "average" ranking for Virginia, the study obviously failed to fully factor in the maleficent influence of The Family Foundation and the Virginia Republican Party. Here are some highlights from Richard Florida's article in The Atlantic:
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[S]tates with more conservatives are considerably more religious than liberal-leaning states. The correlation between conservative political affiliation and religion (the share of state population for which religion is an important part of daily life) is considerable (.63).
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Conservative states are also less well-educated than liberal ones. The correlation between conservative affiliation and human capital (that is, the percent of adults who have graduated college) is substantially negative (-.53).
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States with more conservatives are less diverse. Conservative political affiliation is highly negatively correlated with the percent of the population that are immigrants (-.59) or gay and lesbian (-.66).
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Conservative states are more blue-collar. Conservative political affiliation is strongly positively correlated with the percentage of the workforce in blue-collar occupations (.73) and highly negatively correlated with the proportion of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based professional and creative work (-.61).
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Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind. The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold on America's states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal.
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[L]ong-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.
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I have noted before that the biggest threat to the USA's future is not liberalism, gay marriage or diversity. Instead, it is individuals and states that embrace ignorance and backwardness by choice. Yes, its those like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and the Tea Party crowd and similar know nothings that are the real threat to America. As the USA slides towards regression, the rest of the world marches forward.

Conservative Frauds and Snake Oil Scam Artists

As if lying anti-gay Christianist are not disturbing enough, an elder senior citizen shared with me some mail received from far right organizations posing as quasi-government entities seeking to con money from the elderly who - despite tiny print disclaimers - are likely to believe that the materials are legitimate and be duped into sending money to these parasitic organizations. One group - revealed in tiny print to be "a project of the National Center for Public Policy Research" which has a former board member Jack Abramoff - calls itself the American Criminal Justice Center and is disseminating highly inflammable materials alleging that Barack Obama is a criminal and seeking funds for Obama's prosecution. Fortunately, this elderly citizen had the sense to ask me to look at the bogus documents.

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The other batch of materials is made to look like it is from an affiliate of the Social Security Administration and seeks to scare senior citizens into believing that their benefits are on the verge of being cut off. Naturally, the materials indicate that it is crucial to protecting benefits that recipients mail funds to the organization immediately. The entity behind this fraudulent mailing? The Federation of Responsible Citizens, another far right organization.

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The materials from both organizations are, in my opinion, intentionally misleading and, but for tiny print disclaimers that most senior citizens will likely not notice, nothing short of fraudulent. All of this is yet another example of the moral bankruptcy that seems to be entirely taking over the conservative movement in the USA. One must be a liar, crazy and/or religious fanatic to be a part of today's conservatism.

A Right Winger Bemoans the Dumbing Down of the GOP

John Derbyshire is a contributing editor of National Review and the majority of the time I disagree with everything he writes. He's generally reactionary, bigoted and not what one would call LGBT friendly. On rare occasions, however, he shocks and comes out with something most observant. In a column in The American Conservative he has a great column that looks at the dumbing down of the GOP and conservatism by those like Rush Limbaugh the of which he describes as "carny barkers." The article is worth a read and it describes one of the reasons I left the GOP - not to mention its inability to recognize the separation of church and state. Increasingly, one either must become a Democrat or get a lobotomy to remain a Republican. Here are some highlights:
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Now the loudest Republican voice belongs to Rush Limbaugh.” Upon discovering that Limbaugh had anointed himself the successor to William F. Buckley Jr., WFB’s son Christopher retorted, “Rush, I knew William F. Buckley, Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr. was a father of mine. Rush, you’re no William F. Buckley, Jr.” The more po-faced conservative intellectuals have long winced at Limbaugh’s quips, parodies, slogans, and impatience with the starched-collar respectability of the official Right.

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Now the airwaves are full of conservative chat. Talkers magazine’s list of the top ten radio talk shows by number of weekly listeners also features Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin.

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Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs? They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

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Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises.

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Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development. It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. . . . In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.

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[I]n fact liberals are very successful at talk radio. They are just no good at the lowbrow sort. The “Rush Limbaugh Show” may be first in those current Talkers magazine rankings, but second and third are National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” with 13 million weekly listeners each. It is easy to mock the studied gentility, affectless voices, and reflexive liberalism of NPR, but these are very successful radio programs.

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I repeat: There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. . . . Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?