Updated Friday at noon. See below.
Another unintended consequence of the Bush Leaguers' corrupt, wholly partisan, mendacious, and destructive methods of "running" the country may be the swearing into office down the line of Senator Kevin Tillman.
Senator Tillman will not be a Republican.
I don't know what if any plans for a political career the brother of Pat Tillman may have. Based on admirably he conducted himself during his testimony before Congress this week, though, and given his own war record, the Democrats should be knocking on his door to beg him to run for something soon.
But if Tillman himself doesn't want to go into politics, there is already forming a small army of future Senators Tillman and Congressmen and Congresswomen Tillman, Governors Tillman, State Legislators Tillman, Mayors Tillman, and School Board Members Tillman, among whom there's probably a President of the United States Tillman or two, all of these young politicians Tillman being like Kevin Tillman, intelligent, eloquent, angry veterans of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who will never see their future careers as having anything to do with the Party of the President who sent them off to die for a lie and a swindle, except in opposition to it.
Meanwhile, it's a good bet the Bush Leaguers have robbed the Republican Party of any future Senators David Iglesias.
Honestly, if you were a smart, ambitious, successful, honorable young conservative woman or man with even one socially tolerant bone in your body, would you look at the Republican Party as it currently is, the Party of Bush and Cheney and Rove, the Party of Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Randy Cunningham, and Jack Abramoff, the Party of the Rabid Religious Right and think, Hey, I'm signing right up! These are the guys for me!
I suppose you might if you had a real messianic complex and believed you were the One elected by God or Fate to clean up the Party and save it from itself or if you were a born martyr who wanted to see just how quick it would take for the thugs and thieves running the show to tie your career to a tree and fill it full of arrows, because the people in charge of the Party right now would see you as a threat and they would waste no time in either getting rid of you or corrupting you.
There's no way they would let your honesty and integrity ruin the nifty little racket they've got going.
You are exactly the type Karl Rove has had run out of the Justice Department.
And out of every office in every department in the executive branch whenever he could manage it or have it managed.
The future of the Republican Party is the likes of a Monica Goodling, not you.
It's worth asking how the Party got itself into this woeful condition. Nevermind its having once been the Party of Lincoln. How did the fate of the Party of Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Everett Dirksen, Howard Baker, and John Chaffee wind up in the hands of Karl Rove?
There's a book to be written exploring the roots of the Party's decline into dishonesty, corruption, and willful ideological self-destructive ignorance in the Republicans' heartless passivity in the face of the Depression and then its Isolationist leanings in the years leading up to World War II. The decline could be traced through the McCarthy years and on into the years of the Civil Rights Movement when many honorable and decent Republicans had to break with too many of their Party's leaders and too much of their base in order to do the right thing.
It would be a good book. Maybe it already is. Anybody know of it? I'd like to read it.
But my short answer right now to how did the party that nominated Dwight Eisenhower for President twice become the Party that nominated George W. Bush twice is that in between it nominated Richard Nixon twice.
The Party of Lincoln became the Party of Nixon.
Now think about this.
Look at all the Baby Boomers and aging Gen Xers running the Party in Washington and ask yourself when they came of political age, when they started down the path that brought them to where they are today?
The Republican Party today is the Nixonian Southern Strategy Party, the Nixonian Bomb Hanoi Party, the Nixonian We Could Get the Money But it Would Be Wrong Party. It is the Post-Watergate Party.
If you were an intelligent, ambitious, honorable young conservative in 1974 would you have looked at the Party Nixon had remade in his image and said, I'm signing up! These are the guys for me!
I'm sure the Party experienced a lull in its recruitment of honorable and decent young men and women and in that lull gangs of Nixonian apologists and die-hards rushed in to grab a seat. By the time Ronald Reagan made it respectable to be a Republican again, the paths to a political career would have been blocked by the young Dick Cheneys, Tom DeLays, George W. Bushes, Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves, who naturally would have given a hand up only to aspiring hypocrites, incompetents, thugs, and thieves like themselves.
In the generation since, those hypocrites, incompetents, thugs, and thieves have recruited others who in their turn recruited still more who did their bit and so on until now it seems almost a miracle that there is any Republican holding a national office who doesn't have a rap sheet.
Like calls to like.
Writing about another of what is becoming an all too routine example of Republican hypocrisy and personal corruption, this one perpetrated by Texas Congressman Pete Sessions, Digby says:
I make the generalization that Republican politicians are crooks. They break laws and do unethical things even when it doesn't benefit them directly --- just because that's the way their system works.
They simply don't believe that the rules apply to rich and powerful people. Read [Sessions'] words once more about that bankruptcy legislation which it more difficult for families without health insurance to recover from massive, obscene medical bills when they had a health crisis. Then look again at the sanctimonious gasbag complaining about business being defrauded, which apparently is only a problem if it isn't one of his rich friends doing it, since he admits under oath that this contributor and his wife were hiding their assets from creditors.
This is just one guy. But those who fail to rein them in, who refuse to distance themselves from this --- particularly the so-called religious right, who also worship big bucks --- are aiding and abetting. The fact is that there are so damned many of the that I don't know why we should avoid making the sweeping generalization that the GOP is basically a racket. It makes sense when you think about it: their swaggering rhetoric that says you're a dupe if you pay taxes and calls government the enemy would naturally draw the kind of political leader who literally believes that the rules don't apply to him.
Digby is coming at the same idea from a slightly different angle, taking into consideration the unfortunately all too American attitude towards wealth, which is that Having Money Makes It OK, an attitude you can't say is undervalued in the Republican Party.
There is another angle to consider too, the authoritarian one, embodied by Rudy Giuliani, that there are people who are born to be in charge and then there's the rest of us who are born to obey, and the people born to be in charge get to set and enforce all the rules and decide which of those rules they themselves will bother to follow.
Whatever angle you come at it, you arrive at the same point: The Republican Party is the party of people who believe they are exempt. The Party is run by people who have taken full advantage of their self-granted exemptions and they will continue to bring into it other people exactly like themselves.
If you are an honorable young conservative who believes the rules ought to apply to everybody, there simply is no place for you in the Republican Party.
Which means a generation from now, if the Party is still around, it will only be worse.
I don't believe it will be around, unless there are plenty of messianic and would-be martyrs among this generation of young Republicans. I just don't think that enough voters will continue to think that white collar criminals need their own major political party.
Related: David Iglesias writing in the NYT about why he was fired. ThinkProgress on Iglesias' recent appearance on MSNBC.
"After Pat's Birthday," a letter to the nation from Kevin Tillman.
Hat tips to Susie and the gang.
Better late than never update: Back in January, Alex, who comments here under the nickname burritoboy, reviewed Thomas Edsall's Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power on his blog, motion picture, it's called.
Alex calls Building Red America a frustrating book, because of a couple important weaknesses in Edsall's approach, the first being, says Alex, that Edsall has written a book about the American Right that doesn't mention the word "capitalism."
The other big flaw is that Edsall starts looking at the roots of the rise to power of the Right at too late a point in time and begins his book:
by discussing “politics at the top” – i.e. current politics as it looks primarily from elite circles in Washington, DC. This is not a repetition of the too-common criticism of elitism. Rather, my criticism is of the value of Edsall’s particular elitism to understanding this phenomenon. The power of the New Right is not primarily explicable by the New Right’s machinations in the 1990s and 2000s. Those machinations were only made possible by the near-universal popularity of the New Right’s politics on a grassroots level starting in the late 1960s, thirty years before the New Right began it’s latest stage of concretizing its power under the second Bush administration.
Edsall analyzes the effects before analyzing the causes (if he can be said to analyze the causes at all). The primary puzzle is how the middle class in America became radicalized, not how that radicalization was later transformed into political power. It’s comparatively easy to gain political power if a lot of people are already willing (even eager) to vote you into office.
Read the whole of Alex's review at his place. Yesterday, he left a helpful list of books he recommends on the subject in the comments right here.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.... Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Wow. And I thought the Tillmans' military service was brave. What an amazing, courageous public statement. Absolutely Kevin Tillman should run for public office.
Posted by: joanr16 | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 12:47 PM
I read a book in college a few decades ago (by Lipsett and Raab) that had the thesis that the conservative party in this country (Federalist, Whig or Republican) always winds up with the knuckle-draggers dominating the party. The conservative party's problem is that it represents the economic elite. So, if people vote their pocket book, the conservative party loses--every time. They are therefore forced to run on cultural prejudices.
At the start of the cycle, the elites are in control of the party, giving lip service to the cultural wedge issue du jour. As time goes on, of course, the demand for more than lip service grows, and the party is given over more and more in service to the wedge issues rather than just to the economic interests of the elite.
As the party is linked more and more to cultural bigotries, it increasingly attracts that ilk and then slowly begins to alienate the more thoughtful and responsible among the economic elite. Some of these "moderates" actually leave the party; some just lose their zest for it. Either way, the party has begun its death spiral as it increasingly becomes an embarrassing joke.
Of course, the rich are always with us, and after the conservative party serves its well-earned time in the desert, the rich reassume their leadership roles and the cycle starts over.
Posted by: Raenelle | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 01:06 PM
I agree that the coming collapse of the Republican Party can be blamed on one man, but it's not Nixon. Do the numbers: after Ford finished the last half of Nixon's term we saw four years of Carter, eight of Reagan, four of Bush pere, eight of Clinton, and now two terms of W. That works out to 12 years of Democrats in the White House and 20 years of Republicans. You'd expect the numbers to be different if Nixon was The One.
No, I think responsibility can be placed at the sandaled foot of Mr. Christ. Jesus H. Christ, to be specific. The Republican Party found that it could win big if it played to the Religious Right to call the shots, and although you could argue that the Republican presidents have mostly just paid lip service to its agenda, I would put it to you that it goes deeper than that. The Religious Right supported Bush-- this Bush-- because he is one of their own. As a Christian nutcase George W. believes a whole lot of things-- chief among them the magical notion that belief makes things true.
As a result, the Bush Administration has made an utter hash of every single thing it has undertaken-- because it undertakes everything on faith, rather than on the evidence. Since this is likewise a guiding principle in the lives of the majority of Americans, he was quite popular for a while-- until it became apparent that the policies of the Bush Administration were failing spectacularly. Because he was popular, back when he was popular, everybody on the Republican side of the aisle signed on to his agenda, and now they are stuck with it.
Maybe the best example is John McCain. Personally, I have always found him to be despicable, but there are, or were, many that thought him principled. How anyone can think that today, after watching McCain kiss up to Bush and the Religious Right for the past seven years is beyond me-- it would turn the stomach of a principled man to say the things that McCain has said, but he felt that he had to say them so that the folks who liked Bush and Jesus both would like him too.
When you think about it, religion has probably been at least as destructive a force in human history as it has been a force for good. The destruction of the Republican Party is pretty small stuff compared to the Spanish Inquisition, or the genocide of the American Indian. Nevertheless, I am thankful for this small thing, and if I believed in Him, I would thank Jesus for it.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 01:33 PM
Lance, you asked for a book. That book is written and it's "Conservatives Without Conscience," written by John Dean. Dean started the book with Barry Goldwater, who wrote "Conscience of a Conservative," and was disappointed to see where the conservatives had gone. Dean's book outlines Digby's point, that the current crop are neither truly conservative --or have any real philosophy other than to grab and maintain power by whatever means necessary.
Dean's book is based upon some very good research done by Robert Altemeyer, who explains some of the psychology of authoritarians, especially the people who are attracted to strong authoritarian leaders.
The point that the modern so-called "conservative" movement is demonstrably corrupt and devoid of any ethics is well presented by both Dean and Altermeyer.
Posted by: AZrider | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 02:22 PM
I would echo the above, that the demise of the Repulican party is to be welcomed but that the rich will find some other way, some new party, to enrich themselves and maintain power. Far more fundamental change would be needed in order to change direction.
I read Kevin Tillman's piece last year and can't read it again because it's too heartbreaking. (Same with the excellent Sports Illustrated profile of Pat that was published around the same time.) We can hope that more people are waking up to the truth, and Kevin's televised remarks will only help in that regard.
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 02:53 PM
Nixon_Agonistes by Garry Wills covers the Nixon transformation of the Republican Party very well. Written in '69 it seems amazingly prescient in light of how things turned out. Nixon's proteges simply went underground with Reagan and let the likeable, grinning idiot be the pacifier that allowed them to subvert democratic rule. The Rovians found that they could come back out in the open with the religious nutcases that populate America. They were so taken with the idea that "reality" could be denied through religious indoctrination that they seized upon this population of malleable fools and created a new market. With truth now a commodity, subject to market rules rather than empirical verification, they were free to engage in the most reprehensible attacks on the American democratic and constitutional tradition in the history of the nation. It will end badly. The loss of the Republican Party will surely be one of the lesser tragedies that lies in wait.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 04:12 PM
Ok, here come the books:
Jonathan Rieder's Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism.
Rieder shows the complex knot of events and environment that drove urban white ethnics from their long connection to the Democratic Party into becoming Reagan Democrats.
Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.
Following Orange County's political history from 1960 to 1970, McGirr shows how this critical community for the right moved much farther to the right over the decade and closely linked itself with Reagan and Goldwater's 1964 campaign.
James Patterson's Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft
This biography of Taft, published in 1972, is still surprisingly his only biography, who is precisely the figure whom Lance is searching for. Of course, Taft was the integral leader of the Republican party precisely from the Depression (Taft opposed the New Deal and worshiped Hoover), pre-WWII isolationism (Taft was a secret force behind America First), HUAC (Taft was intimately involved in pushing Nixon forward into the spotlight) - and, of course, Taft-Hartley. You want to know Republicans, you have to know Taft (besides the Taft clan being integral to the Republican party since the nineteenth century - did you know that the Bush clan were originally Ohio protege's of the Tafts?).
Thomas Sugrue's The Origin of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Again, shows how the Right rode race antagonism to electoral successes, here in Detroit in 1945-1970. How Reagan Democrats were created in the environment of Detroit.
Posted by: burritoboy | Thursday, April 26, 2007 at 08:23 PM
Vic Gold, a Goldwater conservative, recently brought out a book on this subject called "Invasion of the Party Snatchers."
He is completely dismissive of the current regime, although from the interview I heard, he was more upset about the debt/foreign adventure aspect of the GOP today than their corruption or sense of entitlement.
Where does an honorable young conservative go in America today? That's a very good question. As far as I can tell, no one has an answer.
Posted by: Kit Stolz | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 02:15 AM
Posted by: Warren Linam | Friday, April 27, 2007 at 03:27 PM
Lance's theory here is based on an interesting, although unstated, premise. That there are TWO Republican parties (and I think the same could be said of the Democrats, too). There is the "Party," which includes anyone who has a ghost of a chance of getting nominated to run for, and then be elected to, any office; and then there's the "party"--the party signatories who don't do much other than add their names to voter registration forms and slog out in the rain on election days to back the candidates. The ranks of the Republican party (lowercase p) have actually grown, and continue to grow, while the ranks of the Democratic party (lowercase p) have diminished. If their leaders are such thugs (and they do seem to be), one has to wonder why that is? It certainly doesn't suggest the demise of the Republicans, so we'd better not get comfortable.
Meanwhile, check this out:
http://alternet.org/waroniraq/51150/
I think it's relevant.
By the way, Bill, none of this has a thing to do with religion, and it never has, never will. So put the Christian-bashing to rest. It's as tired and irrelevant as a Dan Brown plot.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 10:33 AM
Rick Perlstein has written one book on the GOP's transformation (through the '64 Goldwater election) and he's publishing another next year called Nixonland and the American Beserk (from 65-72). The first one was a real page-turner, very illuminating, and the next promises to be the same.
Posted by: scott | Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 03:05 PM
Not that it would be right or correct if it were too happen but when I saw Kevin Tillman up there I sadly wondered whether, instead of learning lessons from what was being said, he would be the next John Kerry who "turned traitor on his fellow soldiers."
My second thought was that I hope Kevin Tillman doesn't get into politics because becoming a politician would make him a lesser person. (I hope you read that in the best intent that I mean).
Posted by: Temple Stark | Monday, April 30, 2007 at 01:15 AM
By the way, Bill, none of this has a thing to do with religion, and it never has, never will.
Right. Abortion, stem cells, Terri Schiavo, gay marriage, "faith-based" government programs, abstinence-only sex "education", Justice Sunday events with Republican Congressional leaders prostrating themselves to James Dobson and his peeps, John "Maverick" McCain realizing he has to kiss Jerry Falwell's ass instead of kick it, etc, etc, etc. All of that has to do with quantum physics, not the hijacking of religion for political ends. Please. When part of the scandal with the Department of Justice is how many Bush appointees are graduates of Pat Robertson's university, excuse me for seeing at least a portion of Mr. Altreuer's point, despite your well-argued, carefully-documented refutation, mr. macgillicuddy.
Posted by: mds | Wednesday, May 02, 2007 at 11:06 AM
"All of that has to do with quantum physics, not the hijacking of religion for political ends. Please."
For political ends--or power--WAS my point, mds. As I said, nothing to do with religion...in fact. Just ego, the quest for power, exploitation of the path of least resistance: All of your examples help make my point. Even worse, the perpetrators know it has nothing to do with relgion. If they could do it by harvesting grapefruit, they would use that tactic. But we shouldn't take over LM's blog to indulge our points of view further.
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Wednesday, May 02, 2007 at 12:27 PM
If they could do it by harvesting grapefruit, they would use that tactic.
And yet, somehow, purely at random, they chose American fundamentalist Christianity, and it worked out for them like gangbusters. What an amazing coincidence. To assert that it's really about power is to ignore the simple possibility that it can be about both simultaneously. Religion has hardly ever remained outside the political fray, throughout history, and has in fact usually attempted to co-opt greater temporal power for itself. Where is this "actual" religion of which you speak?
You're right that this could veer off track really easily. But I don't think religion can be left completely out of it, either. We have a political party that has increasingly relied on a religious school of thought asserting that those doing "the Lord's work" are incapable of doing wrong, and it turns out that this selfsame party is full of people that believe that laws or the Constitution itself don't apply to them. Meanwhile, the DoJ, government internships, Congressional staffers, etc, are flooded with graduates of Regent University or Patrick Henry College. Again, that's a heck of a coincidence.
Posted by: mds | Wednesday, May 02, 2007 at 01:06 PM
Why would I need a book? REM did it in 4:24 (though, in fairness, Stipe has always cited the song as one that could have used some further refinement).
Posted by: Ken Houghton | Saturday, May 05, 2007 at 11:44 PM