Remember those old EF Hutton commercials? ‘When EF Hutton speaks, people listen.’ Well…that’s true for the Republican Party anytime William F. Buckley chimes in on national affairs. Back in February 2006, the earth shook a little when Buckley wrote:
One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.
Today he has a different warning:
The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal…
But beyond affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq…
There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.
Buckley created the National Review in 1955 and used it as a platform to build the ideological underpinnings of the modern Republican Party. When he got started the Republicans had the White House (Eisenhower) but they had yet to define themselves in the post-New Deal era. Buckley backed Barry Goldwater in 1964 and was undeterred by the beating the Republicans took as they started to develop their modern ideology. In a real sense, Buckley has been here before. He has seen what it looks like for the Republican Party to virtually cease to exist.
His warning should be heeded not only because Buckley is a perceptive fellow, but because he has a feel for the the slow-moving tectonic shifts in party fortunes. Yet, it is hard to see how the Republican Party’s ‘survival’ is threatened. After the 1964 congressional elections, the Democrats had a 68-32 majority in the Senate, but the Republicans took back the White House four years later and steadily chipped away at the congressional margins. Nevertheless, we might consider a post-2008 Senate with more than 60 Democratic senators…and even wider margins in the House. Under those circumstances the GOP will certainly have to reinvent itself.
There seems to be a growing chorus of Republican intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks) that are warning of an imminent catastrophe and wondering why the Republicans are not showing any signs of self-preservation. I don’t know the answer to that question. It’s unfortunate for the country.
I think the death of the Republican party is greatly exaggerated.
That said, any replacement for (or mutations of) it as currently constructed will almost certainly be a fascist party in all but name.
I think that depends.
Let’s say they take a real severe beating in 2008 and the Dems knock off Coleman, Collins, Smith, Warner, Domenici, Alexander, Allard’s seat…plus they pull large upsets by beating people like Craig, Hagel’s seat, Enzi, Inhofe, Cornyn, McConnell…
And let’s say the GOP gets creamed in the presidential election and loses another 20 seats in the house.
A total landslide, as is being predicted in some quarters…
The rump of the Republican Party will definitely be a kind of proto-fascist, xenophobic, Christianist, hyper-nationalized bloc that is quarantined in the deep south, prairie states, and some border areas. But…
How will they make a comeback to approach parity?
That is the real question. I don’t see them going back to the old strategy…and if they do…I don’t see it working.
How will they find their way
The danger of a Fascist Party is in a time of crisis. Why do you think Chris Hedges is so concerned about Christian Dominionist infiltration into the military and political establishment. Absent a complete reversal of our country’s fortunes under a Democratic administration (no certainty considering the hangover we will be reeling from the failed trade, war and anti-regulatory policies of the past 10-20 years), we may see a crisis, whether an economic meltdown, a terrorist attack or even a flu pandemic trigger a Christian fascist takeover through a bloody or bloodless coup with quite probably a figurehead Republican Christian politician as its leader.
The Republican party is already very close to a fascist party in may states, particularly in the Bible Belt and in Utah. Fear would be the trigger, fear and panic. If we think it can’t happen just because Bush has apparently derailed the Republican party’s electoral chances for the moment, we would be fools. Now, true this is a worst case scenario, but since we have already seen the worst case come to pass so often over the past 10 years, do you really think that its merely my tin foil hat speaking?
I hope that things develop as you predict, and as they appear to be heading at this moment, but even in those circumstances we can’t be too careful. This assault on America’s democracy has been long in the making, and will continue regardless of how well Democrats do in any one election. Remember, the Nazis actually lost votes before Hitler assumed power. We don’t have the Weimar Republic’s mixed parliamentary system of government, but we do have many of the came pre-conditions that led to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. All we lack is a triggering event to start the ball rolling.
Did you see Chris Hedges yesterday on cspan? I watched some of his presentation at the “Los Angeles Times Book Festival.” Amazing stuff he’s talking about.
Then I woke up this morning to see a story at Crooks and Liars that quoted the following from the Daily Herald in Utah:
our base natures – racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism – etc. True they hired on some “uncle tom” types to keep some illusions up, but they were very thin illusions. Our base nature folks are still there, they are remnants of civil war, civil rights haters, affirmative action haters, even FDR social program haters. Those are the base of that 25% that still clings to Bush.
The real question is will the business part of this fuse again with the relio-haters and forge that kind of anti-worker, anti middle-class fusion again. Some business are running from Bushco – fund raising has been tough for the pubs this year, but they still have enough for smear campaigns.
There seems to be a growing chorus of Republican intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks) that are warning of an imminent catastrophe and wondering why the Republicans are not showing any signs of self-preservation. I don’t know the answer to that question. It’s unfortunate for the country.
Modern Republicans are an inherently authoritarian bunch. The religious wing of the party goes as far as to define obedience to authority as a virtue, as weird as that sounds to normal people. If the Leader walks off a cliff, they are obligated to follow. To refuse to do so attacks the very foundation of the essentially monarchist model they’ve been following all these years.
Maybe so…probably so…
But Democracy doesn’t work very well when one of two viable parties doesn’t show a healthy fear of the electorate.
One other question, Will we have enough life-jackets for those GOPers who wish to jump ship?
Biding time and pointing fingers.
As long as it’s still a democracy, it should work just fine. If the Republicans can’t find their way out of the ideological corner they’ve painted themselves into, they’ll go the way of the Whigs.
Bond was on the news spouting how the dems were politicizing the iraq war with the supplemental funding bill. I wrote and said “as if the Bush adminstration is not politicizing every nook and cranny of the government!” One has to wonder at what point people will just automatically realize that whatever the repubs accuse the dems of doing the repubs are already cornering the market on that particular vice!
Of course, political fortunes are a pendulum that swings back and forth over time. It is currently swinging away from Republicans. But the public has a relatively short attention span for matters such as these that those with political interests find endlessly fascinating. What may seem to be the diminishment of the Republican party may actually give rise to a renovation, a new message, and the turning back of the pendulum in a period of a few years time. It has happened before, and it will happen again.
I think the Republican party will survive. Mutate, but survive.
People are coming to their senses in this country, slowly yeah, but it’s happening. Sooner or later I think the Republicans who aren’t batshit crazy are going to realize that if they don’t jettison the Christianist cults of personality they are going to get dragged down, and will cut them loose.
You have to understand, though, that the Christianists are like the Terminator. They can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be bribed, they can’t be stopped, and they will continue to believe that this is God’s country (for their definition of “God”) and they won’t stop until they “reclaim” it for him. I can easily see them creating their own political party, figuring that if they can’t take over the country from the inside, they’ll mount an attack from the outside.
I have to wonder if, assuming they did something like this, this could be the third party that gains momentum where others have not, since it would be fueled by a religious ideology rather than a desire to reform politics by putting pressure on the other parties already in existence. I can see such a party gaining traction in the South and Midwest; the West, I’m not so sure about, and Utah in particular. Support of the Republican Party (especially in its current incarnation) among Mormons is a constant source of amazement to me; if more Mormons realized exactly what Christianists had in mind for them if they did take full control of the government I think their support would drop off dramatically.
I’m with Omir. I just don’t think the Christian fundies have the numbers in their pockets to pull of a worst case scenario the way the Nazis did in the 30’s and it’s more likely that the majority of Republicans will decide it’s just not worth allying themselves with fanatics in order to get their own agendas.
Not to say it could not happen but I think something else would have to happen – like oil peaking catastrophically instead of gradually.
The fundamental problem seems to be that the GOP base isn’t willing to admit failure in Iraq. Any Republican who strays from the party line is inviting a primary challenge:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/29/AR2007042900948.html
So right now the Republicans are stuck between Iraq and a hard place.
You’re exactly right, ericy. What Bill Buckley and the GOP elites don’t seem to grasp is that they aren’t the soul of the Republican Party anymore. That soul is now the far Christian Right, people like Dobson and Hagge, doing everything they can to advance theocracy and Armageddon in pursuit of their Tim LaHaye Rapture fantasy. Hell, Buckley isn’t even the mind of the Republican Party anymore: Rush Limbaugh and Chris Beck and Ann Coulter are. Buckley was midwife to a monster: a Republican Party driven inexorably by its anti-intellectual, religiously bigoted, hate-filled ‘base’, a base summoned up by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan out of the old George Wallace movement. And that’s why the GOP is doomed: because it’s rapidly becoming indelibly identified with that ‘base’ in the minds of the other two-thirds of the electorate. It’s a Southern Fundamentalist party, and such a party has no meaningful future in American electoral politics, though it might, just possibly, have a future as the engine behind a secessionist movement, ten or fifteen years down the line.
all they need is one little terrorist attack on american soil and the republican party will be in control of every branch of government for another 4-10 years.