The Hologram of a Republican Party

The inception of a Republican presidential primary season that begins almost a year and a half before the election takes place is an elaborate magic act, a set of mirrors and lasers projected into every nook and cranny of the media and designed to distract the electorate from the underlying and fundamental fact that this is a party whose primary mission is to dismantle government and impose an as yet unimagined array of austerity measures. The longer this show goes on, the more distance there is from the reality of how Republicans actually behave when they take office. Had an election taken place in the immediate aftermath of the paralysis the government experienced throughout 2010 and 2011, there is a good chance that the voting public would have come out in large enough numbers to throw the curs out of both the halls of congress. And it is about numbers. Turnout in the Republican primaries has been low in almost every state, not really a surprise when the choice is from a slate that consists of an erstwhile moderate Republican pretending to be more reactionary than he is (in an effort to energize the one constituency among Republicans that still cares, namely, the ultra-right Evangelical types who co-opted [in what has become typical Republican newspeak] the Tea Party label from a group of colonial rebels their inborn Tory inclinations would have had them opposing in the 1700s), a young man whose eyes are red-rimmed with the rapture, a has-been pseudo-intellectual from the 1990s who can barely contain his rage, and an affable country doctor who wants to crucify the country on a cross of gold. European observers, it is said, are either mystified or amused at the character and caliber of the men this country considers suitable for so powerful an office.

Though it seems to fly in the face of reason, I await another rabbit pulled from a Republican silk hat. This year’s Sarah Palin may still be, (barring some as yet undisclosed skeleton that would preclude his having a run at the presidency), Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey. Those who discount him because of his weight or his somewhat coarse style overlook the intelligence and deftness this former federal prosecutor displayed in imposing his austerity measures on the state of New Jersey. It is possible that none of the present candidates will go to the Republican National Convention with the required number of delegates to gain the nomination. There is a real possibility that we will be treated to a deadlocked convention and will see a “Draft Christie” movement emerge. Such drama would serve to electrify the now depressed and moribund Republican Party.

If what we have in the Republican Party at present is a hologram invented with the cooperation of the mainstream media, this is not to say that the last three years of the Obama administration have demonstrated any less political sleight of hand on the part of Democrats. By November of 2008, the Bush administration had been taken over by the permanent government types on the Iraqi War Commission and decades of Republican (and Clintonian) dismantling of economic regulation had thrown the American economy into utter chaos. Conditions were remarkably similar to those that prevailed when Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the presidency after the 1929 Crash and the ensuing depression. Obama’s election was a cri de coeur from the American people. So disappointing was the actual performance of the man the country had chosen as its savior that by the elections of 2010, most voters abstained and essentially by default allowed the so-called Tea Party types to play out a feeble version of a mass movement of the angry and the disenchanted. There would be no universal health care, no restoration—in spite of the ponderous and tepid Dodd-Frank bill—of the regulations introduced during the New Deal to rein in the greed of the speculators, no public works programs, and a stance on the crisis facing American schools that has at its center a generalized freudenschade with regard to the fact that teachers were among the remaining few American workers who still had unions and pensions. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in the White House did not hesitate to bomb Libya back to the stone age and employs that most chilling of phrases, “we are not taking anything off the table” when it comes to Iran’s insistence on pursuing its nuclear program while remaining mute on the hundreds of nuclear warheads possessed by Israel.

Only the erstwhile communist regimes in Russia and China now fail to go along and take their cue from Washington and its allies in the capitals of Europe. Hayek and Friedman have replaced Marx and Lenin and even John Maynard Keynes. Just as revolutions are spear-headed not by the poor but by the middle class, it takes liberals like Franklin Roosevelt to save capitalism when it is in crisis. We are now, particularly in an era of globalization when conditions are not localized, on new ground. If people are a little tense right now, it is because that ground seems to be shaking.