'The hard right-wing turn'

Jonathan Chait:

One thing about the hard right-wing turn the Republican Party has taken since 2009 is that many of its supporters genuinely seem not to grasp what’s going on. Take former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, a moderate who sometimes criticizes especially heartless positions taken by some members of his party.... He’s a useful stand-in for the mindset of Republicans who share a loyalty to their party but lack a deep attachment to its right-wing platform.

Another thing about the hard right-wing turn the Republican Party has taken is that its spectators to the left are forever postdating its birthday.

Since 2009? What about 1999, shortly after the GOP had attempted the extraconstitutional repeal of a legitimate presidential election? Or a year later, when shock-trooping right wingers, had they not gotten their electoral-college way by means of a corrupt Supreme Court, would have ripped this country apart?

Or one can revisit the 1980s, the decade in which right wingers first envisioned the inglorious possibilities of a bankrupted and deeply indebted federal government. "Trickle down" was always less about further fattening the 1 percent than emaciating the one institution actually capable of achieving socioeconomic progressivity.

Or, breeze back to the 1970s, the decade in which the Republican Party's frothingly ideological New Right discovered the electoral pixie dust of unabashed demagoguery: braying about busing, the Bible, and white backlash.       

Or, dial back to the Goldwater era of the early 1960s, when the GOP's post-McCarthyites rediscovered the extraordinary value of unfettered rhetoric -- which laid the foundations for those magnificent, fundraising mailing lists to be used by their successors, the New Rightists.

All of whom, of course, were the ideological descendants of rabid anti-New Dealers, who were the real, and original, drivers of the Republican Party's "hard right-wing turn." Today we hear different voices, but the same noise.

Not to wade too deep into the philosophical weeds, but it was the 1930s -- and certainly not our post-Bush decade -- that essentially formulated America's prolonged dialectic: the struggle between some semblance of collective, socioeconomic equity and a dystopia of capitalistic feudalism. I suspect 2012 will come to reflect a synthetic breakthrough of some sort; the tension, at long last, seems too taut not to snap, resulting in a far greater measure of national re-unity and re-purpose.

Too Hegelian? Probably. On the other hand, present circumstances appear untenable.

Comments

[John Haas]

Just heard on NPR that South Carolina has chosen the Republican candidate for every presidential election since 1980.

Speaks volumes.