The story behind the departure of John Boehner from the Speakership of the House and from Congress has left one big question largely unanswered to date: why? And why now? There's been lots of speculation and unless (or even if) Boehner gives an explanation, there will be lots of arguing over what is really going on and what it means for the future. It's not really a mystery to those who have recognized the descent of the Grand Old Party into madness, but for those who haven't...
The narrative to date seems to suggest that Boehner has simply come to the end of his rope. He's tired of trying to deal with a caucus that has become more and more radical. He's been unable to deliver on the promises they expected with control of both the House and Senate in Republican hands (McConnell is getting his share of abuse), and he's been unable to demonstrate to the world at large that Republicans can actually run Congress. He's stated he's stepping down for the good of the institution and his party, that the turmoil around his leadership has simply become too great to allow it to continue.
There's some history behind all this; Boehner's abdication is due in part to forces that have been building for decades; analysis follows. There may also be some snark. I am going to get a bit deep into the weeds here so be advised. But - if you can work through this, you'll have a better idea of how to look at questions about the Democratic Party as well, and where Bernie Sanders might fit in.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
Let's start by being gracious (so we can get it over with if nothing else). Boehner had an impossible job from day one. The process of making Congress and the House work is difficult under what were normal conditions - but the new normal makes it near impossible. Even as minority leader Boehner had trouble getting his caucus to stay in line. As speaker it only got worse. There are many factors that led to this decision, but let's start with the usual.
When a politician steps down unexpectedly, health is often cited as a reason. The stress levels Boehner has been experiencing from his own troops have been horrendous. Frankly, the question has to be asked why any sane person would want to be in charge of the GOP mob in the House. Boehner has had to deal with repeated challenges to his leadership, and of late has been called a traitor to the conservative cause and worse.
They Hate Him. They Really Hate Him
Before Boehner's abdication, Sean Hannity on his radio show the day before was asking why Republicans in Congress refuse to fight, specifically complaining about Boehner, along with McConnell and also Roberts at the Supreme Court. When news of Boehner's coming resignation was announced at the Values Voter summit, there was cheering and a standing ovation. But even Boehner's departure is not enough to assuage the angry extremists of the Right.
There's a suspicion that Boehner is going to commit one last act of treason to conservative hopes in the month leading up to his departure. Ted Cruz made a statement (echoed by Hannity) that...
"If it is correct that the speaker, before he resigns, has cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi to fund the Obama administration for the rest of its tenure, to fund Obamacare, to fund executive amnesty, to fund Planned Parenthood, to fund implementation of this Iran deal - and then, presumably, to land in a cushy K Street job after joining with the Democrats to implement all of President Obama's priorities, that is not the behaviour one would expect of a Republican speaker of the House," he said.
Ted Cruz has been working to sabotage Boehner's leadership for months; it used to be considered pretty outrageous for a Senator to intrude on the House's prerogatives, but this is the new normal. He'd found a body of hardcore Tea Party House members eager for his encouragement. (This should raise questions about Mitch McConnell's Senate leadership and inability to rein in Cruz.) Cruz may have put out the scenario of a Pelosi - Boehner deal as a pre-emptive move to derail it, but it also feeds into the anti-establishment sentiments of the base.
Perhaps the question should be not why Boehner's leaving, but why didn't he leave sooner. He's admitted he had been considering it for a while. The 2014 failure of then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to survive a Tea Party primary challenge has been cited by Boehner - he wanted to provide some leadership continuity after what was an almost unprecedented upset. Boehner's problems go deeper though; the skids were greased a long time ago...
The Dead Hand of Zombie Ronald Reagan
When Ronald Reagan declared war on the very idea of government, he set the stage for the current fiasco in progress. The cult of Reagan, along with the anti-tax fervor of Grover Norquist has locked modern Republicans into an ideological strait jacket. It is no longer possible for a Republican to support the idea that a functioning government can be a good thing, and it is double-plus ungood for the government to spend money or tax anyone. To suggest otherwise is to be branded a traitor to the conservative faith, and to be made a target by the Mighty Wurlitzer of the Right Wing Media Echo Machine.
As House Speaker, Boehner was expected to keep government running, find a way to pay for it, and do some legislating on matters of national interest. What used to be a process of horse-trading, log rolling, and arm twisting to get things done broke down in the new era of conservative extremists who have no concern with keeping the lights on. Every thing becomes a stand on 'principle' leading to shut downs, sham votes (dozens just to 'repeal' Obamacare), and what ever scandal can be drummed up. (Benghazi!!! Emails!!! Acorn!!! Planned Parenthood!!!).
Electing Republicans to run government these days is akin to staffing a fire department with arsonists, or running a day care center with cannibals. They just don't believe in government for anything except fighting wars, locking up criminals, and protecting their wealth and privilege. (Mandatory bashing of the poor, etc. is required whenever possible.) And to make an impossible situation worse, Republicans don't want to pay for any of the government they do demand - and they've constructed a fantasy economic ideology that 'proves' they don't have to, i.e.: tax cuts pay for themselves and create jobs, cutting government spending stimulates the economy, and so on.
Not all House Republicans are crazy - but there are enough who are to make the job of leading them damn near impossible. That is, without some leverage. And leverage is sadly lacking.
"Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?" (Randy Newman reference)
Along with Reagan and Norquist, thank Newt Gingrich for the his role in destroying the ability of the Speaker to make government work. Because of Gingrich and his zero sum game approach to the Speakership, GOP Speakers have far less room to maneuver, and are short of both sticks and carrots.
Gingrich systematically engineered the destruction of debate, away from its proper role as a means of expressing views, exchanging information, and changing minds. His 1996 GOPAC memo, Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, was a how-to dictionary of Orwellian newspeak put into practice throughout the right wing universe. Words became weapons and mental strait jackets instead of tools of communication and understanding. Compromise became that much harder. (And the modern extremist conservative movement rejects compromise of any kind as a core principle.) Not that this is really anything new in politics, of course, but Gingrich went out of his way to formalize it.
Along with thought control, Gingrich also gave the House a lobotomy. He slashed the Congressional staffs who used to provide fact-based policy advice, knew what had been tried and worked, and had long term experience sufficient to spot fallacies and really bad ideas. In short, they were incompatible with the faith-based ideology-driven tactics of Gingrich, and they had to go. Congress has always been a bit of a madhouse, but Gingrich decimated the asylum's staff, letting the inmates run wild without check. A modern speaker can no longer call on the institution's resources to provide push back against really bad ideas.
Gingrich is a grifter, and his long term damage to the nature of the Speakership was not a problem for him; he was and is interested in short term personal power and profit. He remains an 'elder statesman' of the party, despite - or perhaps because of - his persistent ability to find ways to scam the system for profit and political advantage. (Hat tip to phenry for linking to the details on this and John Boehner's involvement in it.)
Boehner was around for one of the really bad ideas the House imposed on itself: the elimination of earmarks. Earmarks were subject to abuse at times, making for regular headlines, but they served a useful purpose.
Earmarking was a process by which an expenditure of funds was specified to apply to a particular project. The Congressional Research Service specifically defined earmarks as “provisions associated with legislation (appropriations or general legislation) that specify certain congressional spending priorities or in revenue bills that apply to a very limited number of individuals or entities. Earmarks may appear in either the legislative text or report language (committee reports accompanying reported bills and joint explanatory statement accompanying a conference report).”
The pejorative term for earmarks is
pork barrel spending, and a party obsessed with cutting government spending labeled them as pure waste - not that that was anything new as long as it was somebody else's pork. The difference was they actually did something about it. (Be careful what you wish for.)
The problem is, earmarks are how Congressmen can represent their districts by targeting spending to specific needs; without earmarks the money might get budgeted, but as the link notes, where it is spent devolves to the agencies disbursing it. Faceless bureaucrats in other words, instead of elected representatives who can be held responsible - or take credit. Ducking responsibility for their actions is SOP in the GOP these days. And by killing earmarks, the people back home in the district no longer had concrete examples of specific things the government had done for them personally. It strengthened the narrative that government doesn't work, that all your tax money goes to somebody else, not you. (And that somebody else is always someone who doesn't deserve it.)
Earmarks not only allowed representatives to address the specific needs of their constituencies, they helped lubricate the legislative process. Control over inserting earmarks into legislation gave leadership a measure of control over their members, a tool of discipline and reward. Trading favors, aka log rolling, gave legislators reason to reach out for mutual benefit - compromise in other words with their colleagues. It also gave them a strong motive to keep the government running and pass budgets on time. If members of the House today are willing, even eager to shut down government, it's because they lack the 'skin in the game' they used to have. (I'm really starting to hate that expression.) The dynamic is all about "I stopped wasteful government spending because that's my job" rather than "I made people's lives better through the government because that's my job."
To a modern conservative extremist, calling government spending wasteful is redundant - unless it's to fight a war or fight crime. Then it's essential - but they still don't want to pay for it with taxes, but by stealing the money from elsewhere in the budget, preferably by crippling the government's ability to regulate, slashing Federal payrolls, 'reforming' social programs, and so on.
The Fox News Effect - A Congress of and for Dunces Within a Bubble
The Right Wing deliberately built a huge media machine to bypass the "liberal media" and catapult their propaganda. A whole cadre of wing nut pundits, 'experts', spokes people and thought leaders has been turned loose on the world. And, for a time it was a good thing for the Republican Party and movement conservatives. But, there was one slight miscalculation. They didn't control it as thoroughly as they thought they did.
While the right wing media effort may have started as an aid to their efforts, it has taken on a life of its own. There's lots of money in catering to the audience they've built up; books, videos, tv, radio, and associated economic activities (aka scams). (Listen to conservative talk radio for example, and it's full of all kinds of snake oil type products.) The point is, they have an audience to satisfy, and what it wants is the destruction of the liberal agenda. After all, that's what they've been promised all these years. I heard Rush Limbaugh the other day repeating his schtick that he's primarily an educator, trying to get the message out that everything that is wrong with the world is the fault of liberalism, that it's evil and a recipe for enslavement. The politics of resentment - making people angry and afraid, turns out to be a cash cow.
So, when Republicans have control of Congress and the Supreme Court, that audience can't understand why gay marriage is the law of the land, why Obamacare hasn't been repealed, why we are going to give Iran billions of dollars and let them build nukes, and so on. To keep that audience happy, the right wing media has to go after the enemies who are letting this happen - and who else but the GOP people in Washington who have broken their promises? Never mind that they don't have the votes, that just being elected isn't a magic wand that can make the impossible happen, that what they want is incoherent, incompatible, impossible. They want what they want and it comes right from the gut - and they've been told for years that government is the problem, along with a whole alternate universe of things that just ain't so - but are articles of faith for the true believers. (Hat tip to Richard Riis for the 2012 summary. Things have not improved since then.)
Is it any wonder that the GOP candidates doing the best at the moment are those who are seen as outsiders? And is it any wonder that Boehner and all the rest of the GOP crew infesting Washington are suspect at best and hated at worst? Meanwhile the politicians in DC who are hard core Tea Party types have gotten there by A) catering to that FOX audience paranoid fantasy world view, B) have no interest in, or understand how, to make government work, and C) are getting bankrolled by the power of Big Money in politics. As it happens, C) is another critical piece of the puzzle in the fall of Boehner.
The Customer Is Always Right?
While Citizen's United really opened the floodgates for money into political campaigns, it had been building for a long time. The Republican Party deliberately chose to use money to A) compensate for the demographic base they've been chasing that is shrinking, B) to fund the messaging they use to "flood the zone" in order to control the narrative, and so on. The problem is, the tail is now wagging the dog. Just as the media machine they built is no longer under their control, the money they've allowed into the political process can now often call the shots and bypass the party almost completely. The rich have discovered they can cut the party middle men out of the loop. And so it's really them who are setting the agenda - even over the desires of people who identify as Republican.
Hence the fear of the Tea Party among the GOP establishment and the disappearance of Republican moderates and compromise. Primary voting is dominated by the comparative handful of voters who show up - ask Eric Cantor how that turned out. Outside money created the Tea Party and keeps it going. (See here, here, and here.)
What this means is, traditional party discipline that might keep malcontents, crazies, and radicals in line no longer has the power of the purse strings with which to threaten them. Indeed, one need only look at the way GOP presidential candidates have been auditioning for sugar daddies to see what has happened. The problem for the GOP is that their candidates need to appeal to their radicalized base and the wealthy donors to make it past the primaries, but then they have to somehow 1) depress voter turn out by the left, 2) run in gerrymandered districts, and/or 3) appear moderate enough to appeal to a larger electorate and risk pissing off their base/sugar daddies. It calls for fundamental dishonesty and self-deception at every level.
Getting candidates to appear moderate is increasingly difficult during the primary process and the party can't really impose it by withholding money - there's too much out there. Skewing voting is something they've been working at with great determination in the states, and it has been paying off for them. But the dynamics of it are locked in a feedback cycle that has yet to break.
Republicans, to put it in marketing terms, are attempting to appeal to a customer base that wants contradictory things that are impossible to deliver. How do you sell people the idea you can make government work better, when they don't believe government CAN work and/or they specifically DON'T want it to be able to work? How do you get elected party members to work together once in office when they campaigned on... not working!?!?!! And what do you do about the much larger number of Americans who want something other than what you're selling?
Well, we've had some time now to see how it's done. Push distractions as much as possible - i.e. run on 'values', 'scandals', fear and anger. (ACORN, Planned Parenthood, Benghazi, eMail, birtherism, immigrants, terrorists, etc. etc.) Go for the Gut in other words.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.
Get elected by making promises you can't keep: giant walls around the country; creating jobs by deregulating everything in sight; make America a "Christian" nation, repeal Obamacare. Undo the Liberal Agenda, and smaller government will make everyone free and rich! Cut government spending, and America will be stronger than ever!
These are easy promises to sell - but damned difficult to keep. If you look at what Republicans have accomplished since Ronald Reagan announced war on government, it comes down to this: the rich have gotten a whole lot richer, we've had some lovely wars (with more in the GOP pipeline) - and everyone else has gotten screwed. Everything else is a side show to that achievement - and it tells you who is really winning the battle for the party. The Rich are working on taking the United States back to the 19th Century (hat tip to gjohnsit) - and the religious fundamentalists are hitchhiking along as they try to return to the Dark Ages.
Happy Days Are NOT Here Again
There are those in the press who are proclaiming that Boehner's departure will bring peace of a sort to the Republican Party. These are largely the same people who've been oblivious to the descent of the party into extremism of the worst sort, and can't explain why the party is at war with itself - let alone acknowledge it. Mann and Ornstein used to be regulars on talking head shows - until they came out with a book detailing how the Republican Party has become the problem. The mainstream media won't touch them - until lately. There are signs they are getting 'rehabilitated' because what they have to say is now starting to fall within the Overton Window to the point where even the MSM can see it.
The media still refuses to admit that there's any meaningful difference between Republicans and Democrats, dismissing Bernie Sanders as the Left's equivalent to Donald Trump - but it's even more tilted than just false equivalence. Note that they ignore Sanders as much as possible, while obsessing over everything Trump-related. But, the conventional wisdom can't keep up with what is now going on in full public view. When House Speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy openly admits the Benghazi hearings were all about attacking Hillary Clinton, it's hard to ignore "the trout in the milk".
https://youtu.be/...
But that doesn't stop them from trying. Despite media efforts to pretend sanity is going to return, the Tea Party is not going to be appeased by Boehner's abdication; they regard it as a first step in getting what they want. It's the kind of situation ripe for a man on horseback.
The Republican Party is now nothing but an authoritarian cult fighting over who will be the Great Leader, and how to pursue their agenda. But to say so in the mainstream media is not possible, save for outliers like Paul Krugman in the New York Times, the saturnine snarky observations of Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire (who definitely deserves a more mainstream gig, or in the guise of comedy via Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, both of whom have gotten tired of shouting into the void and moved on.
It should be remembered that Boehner, however he be treated by the press after all, is a conservative, dedicated to crippling government, cutting taxes on the rich, and slashing entitlement programs - as the key to getting and holding power. He's willing to tolerate racism, religious fundamentalism, and worse to get it. His problem was he just wasn't fast enough or ruthless enough to satisfy the base the party has invested in so heavily. The base is still there, and they want what they want. As David Corn notes:
Boehner ascended to power due to the rise of tea party extremism within his party. He attempted to harness this political energy for his own purposes. In November 2009, he and other GOP leaders hosted an anti-Obamacare rally at the Capitol, where enraged protesters chanted, "Nazis, Nazis," in reference to Democrats working to enact the Affordable Care Act. Boehner never tried to tamp down this sort of conservative anger. He did not tell the birthers to knock it off. He encouraged Obama hatred, allowing the Benghazistas to run free and filing a lawsuit against Obama to satisfy the Obama haters. Ultimately, he became a prisoner of these passions, and his speakership became mainly about one thing: preserving his own job. And that's not much to leave behind.
Meanwhile, On The Other Side of the Aisle...
Digby has been paying attention to the growing extremism within the GOP - and the media's cluelessness about what the party really is these days.
It doesn't get any worse than this. If they cannot see that the party whose front runner for the presidency is a xenophobic racist freakshow and which chased John Boehner out of the speaker's chair because they want to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood is the cause of DC gridlock then there is no help for them. None.
If the media has been clueless, the Democratic mainstream hasn't exactly been quick to pick up on it either. It wasn't all that long ago that
President Obama was on the verge of negotiating a Grand Bargain with Boehner that would put the Democratic Party's legacy achievements on the chopping block. Only Tea Party intransigence kept Boehner - and Obama - from closing the deal. Digby notes that Republican Peter King, hardly a 'sane' Republican himself
has issues with what the party has become.
That's so weird because I [Digby] was assured by Luke Russert and all the pundits that this means Kevin McCarthy, an allegedly moderate conciliator was a shoo-in for the speakership and everything was finally going to be ok.
Let's assume that McCarthy becomes speaker with Democratic votes making up for the loss of the hardcore crazies who will not want to vote for a California immigration squish.The assumption that those crazies will just buckle under and do what they're told seems ... unlikely. But waddo I know. Luke Russert is "the sage of Capitol Hill."
But this, from King, is hilarious:
“I think whoever runs for speaker should make it clear that he’s not going to give in to these people. We’re not going to appease them," he concluded. "The time for appeasement is over.”
The war has come home.
There's a big problem in that it's not just the media that failing to come to terms with what the GOP is now; the establishment Democratic Party isn't doing all that much better. The national leadership still seems to be locked into the idea that it's possible to win with Democrats who can somehow appeal to Republican voters by not being too leftish, that trying to appeal to bipartisanship is still possible, that the center is where to go - even though the Republican Party is now nearly as far from the 'center' as their base in the South of the Confederacy was in the Civil War. They're still gobsmacked and blindsided by the Reagan revolution. (The same revolution which is now eating its children and threatens to consume America and the entire planet.)
Currently, the strategy seems to be lay low and let the Republicans fight it out among themselves while the country sees how crazy they are. There's a certain complacency that seems to assume voters are going to reject them for the 'sensible' Democratic alternative. That could be a huge mistake Rick Perlstein warns.
In 1940, the world's greatest movie clown, Charlie Chaplin, starred in The Great Dictator, a silent film about a funny little man with a toothbrush mustache named Adenoid Hynkel. In one memorably madcap scene, Hynkel, hanging from the curtains, orders a lackey, Greta Garbo-style, "Leave me. I want to be alone." He slides down the curtain like a fireman, spies a giant globe in the middle of the room, and, imagining himself emperor of the world, does a mincing Fred Astaire-style dance with the giant globe, bopping it around like a giant beach ball. The globe pops. Hynkel collapses in tears. It's hilarious. Everyone loved the movie, including then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, after learning years earlier that the studio was trying to scrap the project, sent a representative to Chaplin to encourage him to persist.
The president's judgment was poor, however. As the writer Ron Rosenbaum has pointed out, Chaplin "did nothing but help Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at a time, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler's threat seriously." Chaplin agreed, saying that had he know about the horrors Hitler was responsible for at the time, "[I] could not made have fun of their homicidal insanity."
Obviously, Donald Trump is not Adolph Hitler—his insanity is not of the homicidwial sort. But this essay is not about Donald Trump. It is about us, and our longing to dismiss politicians who scare us as unthreatening clowns—or to pretend the threat does not exist at all.
emphasis added
It's not that long ago that George W. Bush was handed the White House because the Democratic Party and Al Gore declined to go to the mattresses over it "for the good of the country". It's not that long ago that President Obama was telling the country it was more important to look forward than back. The head of the DNC Debbie Wasserman-Schulz is refusing to allow Democratic debates any time soon, leaving the news cycle to be dominated by the GOP - including GOP framing of the Democratic candidates. The debates she has scheduled have incredibly poor timing, almost as though she'd rather they not be watched. (Some snark here, in response to DWS and the author's disgust over the fact that:
...scheduling only 6 debates and scheduling them late and at times when people would not be watching: the first debate four days after the deadline for New Yorkers to register as Democrats, the second on a Saturday night when there are many millions fewer viewers, the third on the Saturday before Christmas when people are frantically shopping, the fourth during the NFL divisional playoff game, etc.
The Democratic Party has a chance to do something to compensate for the huge media machine the right wing has assembled. Debates would get them some FREE national press and a chance to get the Democratic message out to the country - except they're fighting over what that message is. Sanders is working from the traditional roots of the Democratic Party, out of the traditions FDR created with economic justice, JFK with his focus on the future, and LBJ with his great strides on racial and social justice. The legacy of WJC is quite weak tea by comparison; BHO reforms on health care and attempts to address Climate Change are a step back in the right direction. Meanwhile the GOP is still the party of RMN; RWR just put a kinder face on the racism and paranoia and the party has completely forgotten DDE. (They'd also like to pretend GWB never happened.)
Tacit acceptance of GOP extremism by the Democratic Party has legitimized it even as it has increased. There's a strong temptation to pretend that things haven't gone that far, that business as usual will return, that the pendulum will swing back... And business as usual it what political establishments in both parties are there to maintain. But what if it's not a pendulum but a burning fuse?
The lack of Democratic voices speaking out, the mainstream media obliviousness to the madness of the Republican Party could well mean that the voters expected to reject the GOP won't bother to show up - and may not even know there is a problem, because who pays attention to politics? Where is a countervailing Democratic view? Why do issues of real importance get so little attention? Despite the turmoil within the party, Republicans are still shaping the narrative, framing the issues, and generating the headlines. This is not the way to win.
So, when the Democratic Party refuses to hold debates or schedules them when no one will be watching, how do they expect to get anyone to turn out to vote for them over the GOP? While Democrats sit back and assume the accomplishments of the Obama presidency will be enough to keep the White House and maybe take back the Senate, the constant message voters hear is that the country is going to Hell (Hat tip to KingOneEye) - and a lot of them are not happy with business as usual because they're not seeing things get better in their own lives.
And they're not wrong.
The Democratic establishment and the mainstream media are both trying to pretend that business and politics as usual are still possible, and they are not. And that includes those elements of the party apparatus still locked into neoliberalism, the idea that the private sector should be looked to as the primary means of organizing the nation and addressing its problems while government merely plays a supporting role at best. It's just Reagan's war on government with a kinder, gentler face. When Bill Clinton proclaimed "the era of Big Government is over", that had to be one of the most idiotic statements he ever made, not excepting his epistemological arguments over what the meaning of "is" is.
However prettily he danced around it ("But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves."), he was legitimizing the framing of government as the problem, not the solution. It was a calculated bit of triangulation to reach out and maneuver around the GOP, but it was taken by them (and the media!) as A) validation of the Reagan Revolution, and B) a declaration of surrender. And it pretty much has been.
The Democratic estrangement from the idea that we need government, lip service to the principle that self-governance of the people, by the people, and for the people while suggesting the answer to the problems facing the nation is belief in 'market forces' - this has corrupted the soul of the party. It is best understood by contrasting today's party establishment with the words of FDR in 1936:
"
...For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master."
emphasis added
What goes around, comes around. The difference this time is that the Democratic Party has been so subsumed by neoliberalism, it seems more terrified of Bernie Sanders than anyone from the Republican Party. (Ditto for the mainstream media.) And yet it is Sanders who is generating real excitement among voters who are tired of the same old same old. When Sanders says we need a revolution, that's exactly right - except it's not the paranoid dark fantasy of the Reagan Revolution now devouring the Republican party - it's a revolution in the sense of a mass enlightenment sweeping the country, the possibility, nay the necessity, that people must come together and take back their government from the oligarchs who have quietly but ruthlessly co-opted it over the years.
To answer Sander's call, we'll have to go far beyond the holding the White House or taking back the Congress. It's a call to take back government at every level, from the grassroots up. The Democratic Party seems to have lost sight of the importance of that. As Undercover Blue observes over at Digby's place,
...There is a lot of wishful thinking among the Beltway press and less-insane GOP members that Trump will fade, but maybe he won't. Trump is still dominating the GOP field. For a T-party that wants to fire everybody, Mr. "You're fired!" seems like just the man for the job.
That's why when people ask me who I support for president, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, I tell them I don't care. So long as the T-party controls state legislatures and the Congress, who Democrats elect as president won't matter. If it's Bernie, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. If it's Hillary, a GOP-led Congress will stonewall. Just as they have done with Obama. I care deeply that someone from the saner side of the aisle gets the next three Supreme Court picks. (Good luck getting them past a T-party Senate.) Other than that, I can't get excited about who will do the picking, so long as the candidate sends lawyers, guns and money to North Carolina. That is where my fight is.
A Bernie Sanders supporter asked yesterday, but what about coattails? Coattails, I cannot quantify. State legislative seats and U.S. House and Senate seats I can count.
The GOP is fighting tooth and nail at every level; it's how they win even when they lose. They go after everything down to dogcatcher.
FDR had one huge advantage: the Great Depression was a little too big to ignore, and the culprits were pretty obvious. It was apparent that a break was needed, a "New Deal" - and he was able to use that awareness to mobilize support for it. It's somewhat ironic that the economic disasters of more recent vintage have not had the same mobilizing effect because the reforms FDR began and the strengthening of the social safety net kept things from getting quite as desperate. While it was clear in the 1930's that only the government could save the private sector from itself, it was less so in 2008 - and the opposition is a lot more determined.
Tea Partiers are not going to settle for business and politics as usual - they're not happy. But - neither is a lot of the rest of America. Only Bernie Sanders is making a strong case to counter the Right's worldview - and the media is doing everything it can to make him an unperson, He Who Must Not Be Named. (The New York Times embargo of Sanders coverage is getting embarrassing.) Sanders is the real threat to an establishment which has accepted the Tea Party world view as just one more political viewpoint, but is not willing to admit how anti-democratic it is, or the threat it represents.
Sanders is generating some serious forward momentum at the present time. Even the New York Times has been forced to recognize it.
In a fund-raising shocker, supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have given an impressive $26 million-plus in small-dollar donations in the last three months, putting his funding at the pace of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s formidable machine.
The Times is careful NOT to allow mention of any reason why Sanders in particlar might be attracting support. No mention of his ideas in any great detail. Instead...
The small-donor activity may reflect growing public concern that democracy is under assault from politicians’ increasing reliance on millionaire supporters. An opinion poll this month by Bloomberg Politics shows that a stunning 78 percent of the public favors overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which has unleashed unlimited amounts of cash on political races, much of it coming from undisclosed sources. The public’s disdain cuts across party lines, with 80 percent of Republicans, 83 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents opposed to the court’s allowing corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts on political causes.
That's not to say money isn't becoming a big concern for some of the voters, but it is a long way from explaining all of Sander's appeal.
The elections of 2016 could be the critical to the fate of America in the way that the elections of 1860 proved to be. While the secessionists sought to break away from the United States and rejected the Federal government, the Tea Party and the ultra rich of 2016 seek to destroy from within. We are effectively at war for the soul of America, and the first step in winning a war is recognizing it, and what the stakes are. The next few months should make clear that the departure of John Boehner was not an aberration, that the forces underlying his abdication will not be appeased. McCarthy's statements and the efforts by the Tea Party to put one of their own in the #2 leadership slot indicate they're gearing up for the next phase.
What does the Democratic Party have in response - and will it be enough? November 2016 isn't as far away as it seems...