Party Collapse · 16 October 2008

I worry, and hope, that Stephen Colbert will go out of business. Another brand that’ll be hit hard by the coming recession, because the GOP is imploding. Right now. The key strategists are sabotaging each other and the real conservative ideologues—David Brooks, National Review writers, Peggy Noonan—are filled with new remorse and self-hatred. They’re letting go of their party ID, sickened by the too-close association with the knuckle-dragging nationalists out there on the frontier. The racist family-values authoritarians Sarah Palin represents. The “real John McCain” has left the building they claim, abandoning his class (doubly understood) and pandering to the haters.

But is that really it? I think they’re using Sarah—and the regressive culture she symbolizes—as an excuse. The GOP is really imploding not because of some last-ditch gaffe on a cultural dimension but because of economic policy. The ideology that just expired is economic—that of the invisible hand of the market—and it will be a while before the conservative definition of the situation can absorb that. Meanwhile, GOP strategists are reaching down to the uglier parts of the platform and the ideologues are having a really hard time now that they have to see party clearly. Good for them.

So the party is imploding. The few smart people are bailing, claiming to blame Sarah when really they just need cover for their new Keynesian conversion. It’s ok.

I give them eight years to articulate a way more, well, “progressive” conservatism. One that decries the loss of rational thought and classical high culture. The party rose from the ashes of Nixon in 1980 and I don’t doubt they’ll do it again in 8 years. In the meantime, they’re actually going to have to learn something about the economy. The really hilarious thing about freemarket ideology (which isn’t really Smithian so much as know-nothing, do-nothing voodoo economics) is that politicians who promote it are experts in not knowing how economies work. Seriously, how much does the finance-captured policymaking crowd actually understand about the interiors of the “self-regulating” black box? It’s probably too much to learn in eight years, but in the meantime, I look forward to Brooks, Noonan and friends rearticulating a Republican cultural elitism unhampered by the mouthbreathers in Montana. They need to re-learn to fight with pens rather than with swords.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism

Comment

1. A Republican cultural elitism knit out of its current utterly incoherent and yet miraculously functional blend of SUV post-yuppies, midwest farmers who should know better, and millenarian deathmongers would be a suprise so unexpected and seemingly impossible that it would almost be welcome.

   Posted by: patrick · Oct 16, 05:59 PM · #

2. !!!!! That sentence is delicious.

   You know though, I wonder of the new conservatism will be even more openly elitist, a reaction to Rovian populism gone to the bitter roots. Racism isn’t conservative anymore, it’s reactive; and in another decade there may be little place for it on a platform (if still room for it in the ‘fraidy hearts midwest farmers).

   How they’ll work with the neocons is the bigger question, you’re right. Will the US even be a military hegemon in 8 years? Is there a conservatism that can justify multilateralism? They do it in Europe…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 16, 06:09 PM · #

3. The thing that heartens me is that my smart Republican friend (yes, I have one!) is appalled at the current state of his party, which to him is a party of small government, free markets, and fiscal conservativism. Multilateralism? Sure, if it makes sense to the economy. Racism and homophobia and “family values”? No way! How perverse and parochial and divisive and unnecessary and counterproductive.

   Odd, no? He and I agree on so many things.

   Posted by: karen · Oct 17, 04:58 AM · #

4. Fiscal self-protectionism is probably not going anywhere… :)

   This was in my in-box this morning. I haven’t seen it, but it might be pretty good.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 17, 10:51 AM · #

5. Oh SHIT! (Caveat: I didn’t watch this one either.)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 17, 10:55 AM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.