In late 2005, just a few months after the horror of Katrina and the GOP’s absurd contortions to try and place the blame elsewhere, some of America’s most astute political analysts finally began to sort out what this new, poisonous, jihadesque brand of Republicanism was really about.
On December 5, 2005, author and columnist Rick Perlstein nailed itwith a famous post on the then-fledgling, liberal-leaning blog HuffingtonPost.com:
In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.
Perlstein’s prescient observation was prompted by a comment from liberal blogger Digby at Hullabalo, who said: "'Conservative' is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals." But Perlstein brought down to an essence what was powering the GOP drive toward what they had designed as a Permanent Republican Majority: total allegiance and discipline in service to a philosophy that always had a ready excuse for its abject failure.
Two months later, in a post dated February 12, 2006, Glenn Greenwald filled in many of the nuances and implications of this distinctly Republican attitude with a closer observation that shows how Perlstein’s observation was practiced on the ground by the GOP and Bush loyalists:
Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.
And sure enough, as Perlstein and Digby had predicted in 2005, repeated failures in Iraq, New Orleans, the nomination to the Supreme Court of Harriet Miers, debt, fraud, deficits, and scandal caused Republicans to distance themselves from George W. Bush as an individual. In spite of their penchant for loyalty, the GOP turned on Bush—calling him, as predicted, "more of a liberal than a conservative" even a few short months after they had nearly deified him along the lines of Ronald Reagan. Hastening the process of their whiplash-inducing rebuke of GWB, the Republicans lost the congress in November, 2006. And nothing treats a Republican bout with priapism like losing political power.
The 2008 election should have been a referendum on the conservative philosophy after the economy collapsed with monumental force in September 2008. But no. Again, the Republican Party is leveraging their bets with the hope that they can palm off their failures to individuals, and not the philosophy that led us to this crisis—the same philosophy that led us to the crisis in the last recession of this magnitude, and the one before that, and the one before that. They were called "Panics" then, back in the 1890s, but it was the same philosophy.
The die-hard 24%ers will continue to cling to the belief that Perlstein pointed out, that there’s nothing wrong with the philosophy. The GOP will continue to vote as a bloc to serve that master, and their talk radio, media empires, and think tanks will continue to support the idea that we just didn’t follow their philosophy well enough—until we get the message out once and for all that it’s not the individuals, but the philosophy that is in error.