Then read E.J. Dionne's evisceration of the Republican Party over at TNR ("Whose Side Are You On, Comrade")--and I am not usually a big fan of that particular "in flight magazine." More than any analysis I have seen in a long time, Dionne ties everything together in a brilliant and fatal diagnosis.
Dionne begins with a few key pieces of information out of recent Pew and WaPo studies/polls. You might want to print these two paragraphs out and past them on your car dashboard as you drive around on GOTV duty:
A Pew Research Center survey this week found that among political independents, Palin's unfavorable rating has almost doubled since mid-September, from 27 percent to 50 percent. Whatever enthusiasm Palin inspired among conservative ideologues is more than offset by middle-of-the road defections.
Even on the right, she hasn't done the job. In The Washington Post tracking poll released on Thursday, Barack Obama drew 22 percent of the vote from self-described conservatives. That's a seven-point gain on John Kerry's 2004 conservative share.
The bottom line: Sarah Palin was tagged by McCain to appeal to conservative leaning swing votes, but as a result of her nomination Obama has gained ground in that demographic. Astounding.
And yet, Dionne explains, the hardcore backers of Palin see McCain's electoral predicament in a disturbing light, believing that the reason he is behind is because he is not 'tough enough':
Yet the pro-Palin right is still impatient with McCain for not being tough enough--as if he has not run one of the most negative campaigns in recent history. This camp believes that if McCain only shouted the names "Bill Ayers" and "Jeremiah Wright" at the top of his lungs, the whole election would turn around.
And this brings us to the crux of Dionne's argument: the central ideological conflict ripping the GOP asunder. Were it that the Palin propaganda hardliners dominated the Republican Party, the election would be even uglier, but there would at least be a kind of unity-in-nastiness within the conservative movement. But that is not the case. Instead, the Palin wing is under fierce attack by the economic and diplomatic conservatives who believe Palin's 'vulgarity' has poisoned the future prospects of the party:
Then there are those conservatives who see Palin as a "fatal cancer to the Republican Party" (David Brooks), as someone who "doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin" (Kathleen Parker), as "a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics" (Peggy Noonan).
These conservatives deserve credit for acknowledging how ill-suited Palin is for high office. But what we see here is a deep split between parts of the conservative elite and much of the rank and file.
I begrudgingly agree with Dionne on this point: the Peggy Noonan's of the right-wing do deserve some credit. When the base of the party went over the cliff of aggression after the Palin nomination, the old-school Republican elites seemed to have woken up, albeit with a very bad hangover and a deep case of denial--Noonan in particular, and this is why:
For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
If I were Dionne's editor, I would have added seven (7) words to the end his otherwise perfect observation:
"...the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement--and the civic culture of this country.
That is the problem. What is now tearing the Conservative movement to pieces is the same dynamic that the Republican elites allowed--even encouraged--to tear this country's civic culture to pieces, on the gamble that doing so would usher in a new era of 'conservatism.' Instead, it brought a decade of Bush-style revolutionary destruction: Evangelical Dominionism soldered onto the bombs of petro-capitalist military colonialism.
What lies beneath this in-house right-wing collapse, writes Dionne, is a problem that many on the left have been shouting about for years, but which has been ignored by the media: the complete inability of conservative ideas to grasp, let alone solve the problems we face and will face over the next half-century. And so, instead of actually solving problems and elaborating a pragmatic set of programs to craft and strengthen the nation for the 21st Century, the right-wing chose to drown our democracy in media noise:
Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush's apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the "real America" is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin's speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.
Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.
The shocking result of this effort? The right-wing is now weighed down by a generation of supporters who truly believe that a problem actually vanishes and reality actually changes on the ground simply by changing the wording used to describe it--that the Iraq war, for example, is actually going well just because FOX News says so--that the financial crisis really will 'unfreeze' if the Federal government 'pours' taxpayer funds into it--that the opposition really is lead by a 'terrorist' and a 'socialist' just because the GOP candidates say so.
Faced with an increasingly sophisticated push back and a rising desire in the country to solve real problems, these conservatives begin to look like what they are: movement believers swallowed up by the magic thinking of their own propaganda.
If you read only one thing, today, read Dionne's Op-Ed. Then, print it out and give it to a friend.