(From this article:) So where should the Republican Party go from here? How about trying to have a conversation with the middle class? What about talking about the need for better jobs at better wages? Why not?
Why not? For one thing, the GOP has been the party of cheap labor for well over 100 years. And the GOP’s plan to take back the women’s vote involves transvaginal probing.
But, yeah, freeedom!
When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.
Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.
At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.
The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing.Paul Krugman
The following video is a nicely realized slice of bright-eyed Tea Party angst concerned with the problem of young voters and reconfigured GOP party rules. (*)
video via Constitutional.War.org.
We are talking about voters who, by and large, vote against their own economic self-interest time and time again and who, quite honestly, are the biggest suckers in the history of representative democracy. They continue to support policies that render their states into third-world sweatshops for corporations headquartered thousands of miles away. They doom their kids to inadequate schools and themselves to the whims of free-market medicine. The problem, of course, is that the rest of us have to live with the consequences and, it should be noted, pay a fkload of the bills for it besides. Charles S. Pierce, Esquire Politics
(In the video I am most amused by the aside early in the video about ‘George Washington not wanting two parties’ because without knowing anything else about what Dude understands about early American history in the founding era, I’m fairly confident he could reel off an impressively loopy mash-up about that history and rope in Washington.)
(*) Proponents of the “compromise” ignore the enormously destructive problem of the proposed Rule 12. Rule 12 would enable 75% of the Republican National Committee later to eliminate their “compromise” and to destroy or make drastic changes in dozens of other rules which have served our party well over the years.
In practice, Rule 12 would enable an RNC chairman to enact almost any rules change he or she desired, because an RNC chairman already has so much power and influence that he or she can almost always can get 75% or more of the RNC members to vote for or against anything. A chairman already has the enormous “power of the purse,” and should not have also the power to change party rules at will.
There is already quite enough power flow from the top down in our party. Instead of approving more power grabs, we should be looking for ways for more power to flow from the bottom up. That’s how to attract more participants into our party. Red State September 2012
Hopefully during the recess the Tea Party will be making a ruckus at all the local get togethers and town halls so as to hasten the GOP fratricide. Although, it is a strange kind of fratricide which pits an obese thug Chris Christie against the oily hypocrite Ted Cruz or the smart-as-a-chair Rand Paul. Keep in mind the GOP agrees at least in the need for a race to the bottom. Cheap labor and the hegemony of the makers remains the GOP objective.
The thuggish Chris Christie, the Koch Brothers, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Steve King, John Boehner, and the whole lot of GOP ideologues, propagandists, polemicists, plutocrats, racists, and, fundamentalists, do have a program for the middle class and I call it: Sorting.
Utopian Sorting is an even better term.
