Is this the end for the GOP? An interesting post on at Slate, GOP, RIP?, By Timothy Noah says, “For Republicans the events of Sept. 29 could well be remembered as the start of a decades long exile from power—much as Democrats remember Nov. 4, 1980.”
Noah seems to argue that because the success of the GOP is based on a con, and because this con is becoming undone, the GOP may become undone as well: Excerpts from the article:
- The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
- This was a con for two reasons. First, the middle and upper classes were both dependent on the federal government for a variety of benefits …
- Second, the distribution of this government largesse greatly favored the rich. In the April 1992 Atlantic, Neil Howe and Philip Longman, citing unpublished data from the Congressional Budget Office, reported that U.S. households with incomes above $100,000 received, on average, slightly more in federal cash and in-kind benefits ($5,690) than households with incomes below $10,000 ($5,560).
- The Reagan coalition survived because nobody wanted to believe this and because both upper and middle classes were bought off with President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. (That the tax cuts favored the wealthy didn’t seem to matter.) But the proposed $700 billion bank bailout made it hard for Republicans to cling to their cherished illusion that government exists only to indulge spendthrift widows and orphans.
- It should be remembered that a fundamentalist belief in untrammeled capitalism is not the first but, rather, the second pillar of Reagan-style Republicanism to fall. The first was the belief that the United States should extend military power wherever enemies lurk, regardless of what our allies do. Reagan didn’t actually practice this doctrine, except to overthrow a teensy regime in Grenada and to deploy (and, after a deadly terrorist bombing, withdraw) U.S. Marines in Lebanon;
- President Bush, alas, took Reagan at his saber-rattling word, waging a war against Saddam Hussein so unilateral that, except for a few Kurds, there was no indigenous fighting force to prop up the way we propped up the ARVN in South Vietnam.
- I also thought the GOP was cracking up in 2000, when, desperate to find fault with every last aspect of the Clinton administration, it started bad-mouthing prosperity. I got that wrong, too. So maybe the GOP isn’t really dead.
