It's becoming almost surreal watching the chest-thumping of Republican Presidential candidates. Like a game of oneupmanship to see who's the toughest guy in the field.
Which makes recent discussions of excessive partisanship near comical. I mean, how do you negotiate with a someone whose views continue drifting towards greater extremes? It all has the feel of a conservative suicide pact, coupled with "Rule or Ruin" brinkmanship. The present field of candidates would rather go down in flames than compromise a single iota of ideology.
The NYT review of books titled "They'd Rather be Right" explores this topic while reviewing several of the latest red meat screeds on Conservatism. The Money quote is:
Conservatives tend to blame their travails on Republican politicians' missteps and especially on their inability to communicate. But the public's unhappiness with Republicans goes much deeper than any such explanation. A mishandled war, coupled with intellectual exhaustion on the domestic front, has soured the public on them. It is not just the politicians but conservative voters themselves who are out of touch with the public, stuck in the glory days of the 1980s and not thinking nearly enough about how to make their principles relevant to the concerns of today. Unforeseen events could yet change the political environment radically. As it stands, Republicans are sleep-walking into catastrophe.
Self immolation, anyone?
Hard to understand what's going on here. Do Conservatives feel they have to destroy the movement before they can rebuild it? Is this another cycle similar to the '64 Goldwater martyrdom? The problem with that notion is Goldwater had some intellectually consistent foundations to build on (more Libertarian than Conservative). But all you hear from the present Republican field is a shrill negativism.
The article has several thoughts on this disconnect:
How could this be? The explanation is fairly simple. It has little to do with the out-of-touch politicians and conservative voters Ponnuru and Lowry cite and reflects instead the central hard truth about the components of the Republican Party today. That is, the party is still in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues. Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moderate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq.
Three failures, and there are more like them. And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles.
Conservatives don't seem to be interested in fielding a viable candidate in the coming election. Is it their goal to architect a political equivalent of a suicide bombing? Or is it just a deflecting of attention away from a bankruptcy of ideas?
An interesting election cycle is forming up.