The Republicans are the problem
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
A dirty word not so long ago and a sure-fire political loser, right-wing extremism is back with a vengeance.
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Thus spoke Barry Goldwater in 1964 as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination.
Goldwater never got to apply his extremism. Lyndon Johnson trounced him in that year’s election, and the GOP also took a beating in Congressional balloting. Amid the Cold War and its threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD), the American people were more than a little wary of extremism.
At the time it seemed that it would be a long, long stretch before the Republican Party, and especially its ultra-conservative wing, would rule Washington again. Yet only four years later, in 1968, Republican Richard Nixon was sitting in the Oval Office.
Amnesia, along with the paranoid streak, according to Richard Hofstadter, is the bane of American politics. By 1984, the right-wing faction of the GOP had been almost fully rehabilitated and had come roaring back in the person of Ronald Reagan.
Later, it seemed the United States had touched bottom during the reign of Bush/Cheney (2000-2008) with its reverse Robin Hood domestic policies, its disastrous Iraq war, and its myriad other illegalities, from torture to warrantless wiretapping. Yet even those tragic eight years of Republican misrule could not have prepared us for what was to come: a Republican Party entrenched, so fiercely and monolithically, on the very extreme right of the political spectrum as to make Ronald Reagan almost seem moderate.
Reagan’s resounding electoral victories were indeed a watershed in the right-wing takeover of the GOP. But it was only a first step, albeit a giant one, in a process which continues to escalate. Reagan, for all his bellicose rhetoric, ultimately came to terms with the Soviet Union, and his two wars, the covert aggression against the Sandinista government and the tragicomic invasion of Grenada, were merely applications of the odious but well-established Monroe doctrine. Before Reagan there was Eisenhower in Guatemala, Eisenhower and Kennedy in Cuba. Then after came George H.W. Bush in Panama. This was just business as usual in the backyard. And, on the domestic front, Reagan, faced with the big deficit his own administration had created with a huge tax cut, eventually raised taxes – even on the rich.
George W. Bush did Reagan one better by giving the rich a huge tax cut and later doing nothing to control the colossal deficit caused by his tax cuts and wars. Internationally, Bush tried to extend the Monroe Doctrine to the whole world through his invasion of Iraq and the doctrine of preemptive war.
Today’s Republicans, in Congress and on the campaign trail, are topping even George W. They advocate attacking Iran, a much bigger and more powerful country than Saddam’s crippled Iraq. They also refuse to raise taxes under any circumstances and for any reason, including the huge deficit that the Bush administration and the Great Recession handed Obama. Congressional Republicans have gone so far as to use the prospect of a calamitous default on the U.S. debt to blackmail President Obama into cutting the deficit on the backs of those least able to pay.
Obama for his part has been willing to bend – to a fault. But when the president has bent over backwards to reach a compromise, Republican fire-breathers have taken it as an opportunity to kick him in the shins and, in the process, to overrule and humiliate their own Speaker of the House, John Boehner, after he had negotiated an agreement with the president.
If the actions of Republicans in Congress have been outrageous, the rhetoric of some of the members has been even more so. Exhibit A1 is freshman Florida Representative Alan West, a retired career armed forces veteran with a questionable military record. In a party with much more than its share of magical thinkers who dismiss the science that supports the reality of global climate change and even evolution, Alan West may be the most delusional.
During his campaign, West boasted that he had a higher security clearance than the president of the United States, a patently absurd claim. A recent video captured Representative West charging that there are between 78 and 81 Democratic members of Congress that belong to the Communist Party! Who knew the CP has been so successful in penetrating the U.S. Congress. In his heyday, even Joe McCarthy never made such a ridiculous accusation against his own colleagues.
The reactionary turn of the Republican Party has been so sharp, its vicious war against President Obama and every one of his policies so unrelenting, that even members of establishment think tanks are finally feeling the necessity to speak out.
Last Sunday, for instance, Thomas E. Mann of the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the very conservative American Enterprise Institute published a provocative article in The Washington Post. Its title: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
The Republican Party, Mann and Ornstein write, “is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Among much evidence that supports their analysis, the authors cite a recent study by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that, on the basis of congressional votes, found that Republicans today are more conservative than they have been in more than a century.
About the media’s reluctance to assign blame where blame is due, Mann and Ornstein write that “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”
To which, as one who has been saying the same thing for a long time, as a veteran of a now defunct, ideologically targeted think tank, and as someone banished from the city’s mainstream media for thinking liberally while Cuban, I can only say: Amen.
