The tea party activists rallying in Washington today at Michele Bachmann’s invitation may not know it, but they’re one of Nancy Pelosi’s and Barack Obama’s greatest assets.
Their search-and-destroy mission against Republican congressional candidates who don’t march to every note in their dogmatic tunes provides the cover fire that liberals need to advance their agenda and turn the American republic into a European nanny state.
Wreck enough promising Republican congressional candidacies next year, make life easier for enough marginal Democrats, and long-term donkey rule could be mortared into place for years to come.
As chronically bumbling as today’s Democrats tend to be, given enough time at the tiller and larger majorities in Congress, even they would have the space they need to lock their agenda down into law and regulations.
Soon enough, a vastly broader reach for government would be the new normal and part of the cultural furniture for younger generations that had never known anything different—the next New Deal.
Britain’s Labor Party faced a situation in the 1980s that Republicans do today. Everyone-is-a-sellout-except-us ideologues who regularly congratulated themselves on their righteousness but lacked the political sense that God gave a billy goat grabbed hold of the Labor Party in the early 1980s and gave it a hard left turn into comical irrelevance.
Consequently, Conservatives that had newly returned to power had an uninterrupted run at Whitehall for another decade and a half. Margaret Thatcher broke the militant unions, unleashed markets, and remade the dowdy old UK into cool Britannia.
When Tony Blair came along, there was no thought of reviving the Labor Party’s old Militant Tendency extremism. After the Iron Lady had finished remodeling British politics, Thatcherism had become the new normal.
The Brits were lucky. The Labor Party’s self-intoxication with utopian extremism gave Thatcher a clear political field, exactly what she needed to reverse her country’s descent into threadbare socialism.
We won’t be so lucky if we repeat the experience with our nation’s conservative party losing its way at the hands of fratricidal militants who would rather be true to their brand of right-wing radicalism than responsibly defend against the advance of statist liberalism.
It seems illogical to let an obsessive fear of center and center-right Republicans trump concern about the excesses of a Democrat majority that is heavily influenced by liberal extremists, or to reject bipartisan compromise in favor of Democrat-only solutions. You cannot subtract your way to a majority.
13 responses so far
1 JohnMcC // Nov 5, 2009 at 2:25 pm
No, no! You don’t understand. Democrats are hard to defeat these days. Rinos are easy and it makes you feel good when you humiliate them. So go go go, boys. Purify that party!!!
2 SFTor1 // Nov 5, 2009 at 3:09 pm
All they need is a Mussolini, and we’re on our way. Soon the trains will run on time.
Nah.
3 mthen // Nov 5, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I agree with the title of the piece but the fact that such a title appears on this website is amusing to say the least.
4 joemarier // Nov 5, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Tone. It. Down.
5 andydp // Nov 6, 2009 at 8:41 am
Let the Club for Growth have its way and we will have a “pure GOP” consisting of about 6 Senators and 15 Representatives.
Question for the group: does anyone have figures of how many GOP seats have been lost due to the Club for Growth’s involvement in elections ?
6 joemarier // Nov 6, 2009 at 9:21 am
Maybe two or three. It depends on how you count them.
If we had a “pure GOP” that you described, we’d probably also have a much more conservative Democratic Party. Tempting.
7 sinz54 // Nov 6, 2009 at 9:25 am
The FL Tea partiers have already told reporters that should their favorite (Marco Rubio) lose to Charlie Crist in the GOP primary, they will refuse to support Crist in the general–and in fact, they would prefer that Crist loses to the Dem.
David Brooks summed the Tea Partiers up perfectly when he said: They would rather keep control of a party that loses, than lose control of a party that wins.
8 sdspringy // Nov 6, 2009 at 9:40 am
Yes you folks love a moderate, but when did a moderate win? Did McCain win, did Snow help the Dems or Rep by voting to move the healthcare bill out of committee? Please tell me of the great wins by moderates, RINOs and other limpwristed Rep.
Funny how conservatives, the vast majority of voters for Rep, most rollover to support Rep. and not the other way around. Conservative most vote for moderates who are likely to vote with the Dems on the big issues, like healthcare, showing how bipartisan they are. That makes alot of sense, good thing you only write small columns on a weak web site.
9 franco 2 // Nov 6, 2009 at 12:48 pm
The reality, you poor infantile Republicans, is that you are losing support of conservatives and still feel entitled to their votes. Apparently you seem to think we can be convinced by the same method that has gotten us into this position and is failing each time. You must think conservatives are reasonable since you keep trying to convince us that we are doing damage to our own cause.
You ignore the fact that we believe moderate Republicans do more long-term damage than left-wing Democrats. Yes ,you heard me (and may still not understand…) Moderate Republicans like McCain, Spector, the turncoat nominee in NY23, et al, do more damage to our cause than Democrats. So we will get rid of them all and be a minority until the GOP wises up and we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Still, you think we are acting against our interests. But YOU are acting against your interests by alienating us. Perhaps you are just statists who have lost touch with the US Constitution and are simply trying to take a different route to power because the Dems have frozen you out for being insufficiently leftist.
People SEE what lefty Democrats like Obama are doing and they don’t like it, not one bit and therefore are prepared to act. You GOP moderates were unaware of the left-wing agenda of Obama and tut-tut ed when we claimed he was a radical. We are done with clueless and venal Republican pols who bash the GOP by trashing the conservative factions therein, allowing themselves to be used by the MSM. Allowing themselve to give cover to Democrats by voting for outrageous bills so the media can pretend there is bi-partisan support.
You are also engaging in projection when you claim conservative want “purity”. It is the moderates who bash conservatives on TV agreeing with the lefty hosts on premise after premise. In fact that is the ONLY reason Frum et al, get airtime from them. You guys are just trying to stay in the limelight and have no political convictions. You actually attack those of us who DO have convictions.
10 franco 2 // Nov 6, 2009 at 12:57 pm
“You cannot subtract your way to a majority.”
Er, yes you can.
You get out the turncoats and those who give comfort to the opposition. You stand in opposition to failed party hacks that try to push the McCains the Spectors the Hegels the Snowes.
Really, who thought McCain was a good selection? Hmmm? Wasn’t he just pathetic?
The GOP has the possibility to gain right leaning independent votes by the score, yet focuses on left leaning independents who will always vote for Democrats anyway because their independent status is essentially a fraud. They are independents by personal conceit not independent ideologically.
11 Kanzeon // Nov 6, 2009 at 4:09 pm
sdspringy:
“Yes you folks love a moderate, but when did a moderate win? Did McCain win, did Snow help the Dems or Rep by voting to move the healthcare bill out of committee? Please tell me of the great wins by moderates, RINOs and other limpwristed Rep.”
Forgive my denseness on this point, but it would seem to me that if moderates didn’t win, there wouldn’t be disaffection in the base of the Republican party, since there would be no moderates in power.
12 SteveB-Colorado // Nov 21, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I have some bad news for SDSpringy and Franco2. Here in Colorado, the Republican party has been run for some years by the Club for Growth and far religious right types. They control the party platform and have done their best to purge out the so-called moderates. Their inept & heavy handed leadership has been a wet dream come true for the Dems.
Under their leadership, since 2004, Republicans have lost the governorship, a Senate seat, two House seats, and both houses of the state legislature. Thanks to the inept Republican leadership, the Dems have even been able to position themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility.
If we can’t get the real conservatives back into power (fiscal conservatives/social moderates), our party will be in the political wilderness for years. I for one am real tired of these tea party CINOs who control the party (CINOs = conservatives in name only).
13 Moral Strategy: The Case For Pragmatic Conservatism « Resolute Determination // Jan 21, 2010 at 3:01 pm
[...] politics and focus their energies on pragmatically constructing broader coalitions. As my friend Jim DiPeso writes: Britain’s Labor Party faced a situation in the 1980s that Republicans do today. [...]
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