A party at war with itself

SUMMARY

The Republican party is undergoing a civil war, pitting the establishment Republicans against a tea-party alliance of evangelicals and small-government fanatics. The tea party is using a wide range of tools to gain the upper hand against the establishment Republicans, and the Old Guard are currently in retreat on issues such as Medicare. Both factions are racing to find their ideal presidential nominee, with the establishment deciding whether they can stand Romney, and the tea party trying to find someone who can stop Romney. This confluence of phenomena could lead to a number of possible outcomes for the 2012 election, most of them bad for the GOP.

This article has five sections:

The development of two Republican factions
How the war is going
The war in 2012
A century ago -- which details a situation eerily similar to this one, in 1912
The Democratic coalition

Revolutions seldom end in a tidy way. Revolutions are launched by radicals, extremists who are very angry, very rigid, very averse to compromise. If they are lucky, they will be led by someone like Reagan, who led a revolution by convincing the various factions, the war hawks, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, a handful of moderates, to hold together, and to compromise with each other if not with The Enemy. If they are less lucky, they will split into a dozen impotent factions like the Palestinians of the 1970s and 1980s, or slaughter each other like the revolutionaries who mismanaged France between the fall of the Bourbons and the rise of Napoleon.

The Reagan revolution initially went well. The Wall Street/corporate fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, war hawks and moderates got along well enough to hold the coalition together and win a lot of elections. But then, following Reagan’s death, the fiscal conservatives altered the equation. They created a fifth faction, the astro-turf tea party activists, never believing this Frankenstein monster would break free from its constraints and turn against their creators.

The teahadists declared war on the moderates and “apostates” and worked to ither force them to repent, or drive them out of the party; they went after McCain, Bennett in Utah, and Crist. They attacked Gingrich and Lindsey Graham, who impeached Clinton, as too moderate. Mike Huckabee said clearly that in today’s GOP even Reagan couldn’t win the nomination: he was too flexible.

Michael Steele, himself suspect in the eyes of the tea drinkers, tried to mollify them as RNC chief, by hanging a “No Moderates” sign on the front door of the party. "All you moderates out there, y'all come. I mean, that's the message....The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front.... Understand that when you come into someone's house, you're not looking to change it. You come in because that's the place you want to be." In other words -- we don't want to hear your actual opinions, we just want to exploit your votes so we can win elections.

While this was going on, the war hawks fell into disrepute because of the follies of the Bush era, and fell into retreat. And the deaths of Saddam and bin Laden left them with no serious bogeymen to frighten the voters with.

This left three powerful factions: the old fiscal conservatives, the teahadists whom they created, and the evangelicals, the social conservatives. The teahadists then decided to turn against their fiscal masters, whom they assign part of the blame for the nation’s current woes, and ally with the evangelicals instead. So now there are two factions, the tea party/evangelical faction and the corporate GOP.

The teahadists and evangelicals were a natural fit, both coming from the vast pool of xenophobic conservative populism across the south and the heartland. Each group respects the aspirations of the other, although they are driven by different core issues, and occasionally the small-government ethos of the tea people clashes with the evangelicals’ desire for intrusive policies on issues such as abortion.

This faction proved Obama abundantly right in his description of them: "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” These people are often insulated from the real world; often they know no blacks, no gays, no Jews or Mormons, no one who’s been caught having an abortion; most have never needed FEMA; many never learn about politics or policy except from Fox and Rush, who has a monopoly on talk radio in many areas. They have the power of a coalition, since they embrace fiscal and social positions popular with conservatives, and they have the power of their votes.

They are a vivid contrast to the polished, well-heeled fiscal conservatives, the elite party members who have actually governed states and dealt with real-world fiscal and political problems. The fiscal conservatives have the power of money, but they only appeal to one kind of voter, the fiscal conservatives: social conservatives look upon them with suspicion.

The tea party, to the extent it is being led by all, is run by a small network of major players, including the well-funded Jim DeMint in the Senate, Rush Limbaugh to a limited extent, Sarah Palin who wants to ensure that the party’s 2012 candidate sounds a lot like her, Michele Bachmann who wants to not only lead but control the tea movement, and the Club For Growth, a powerful group which decides whether a Republican is sufficiently limp-wristed on key issues to warrant being primaried from the right.

How the war is going

The tea party is attacking the establishment GOP because Boehner betrayed the tea party on a number of issues, particularly during the budget battle, when Boehner threw the anti-abortion activists under the bus and resisted the temptation to give the tea party the show they desperately wanted to see, the shutdown of the government. A key test of strength will come this summer when the tea-party people, who want to play hardball on the debt ceiling, clash with the establishment Republicans who share Wall Street's fear that a default would cripple the economy.

They are seeking to escape the financial control of the fiscal conservatives, by using people like Bachmann to prove their fundraising prowess.

The tea party is weakening the “fiscals” by stealing their message of reducing taxes and regulation; it is much easier for a tea drinker like Bachmann to sing the cut-taxes-and-regulations music of the fiscal conservatives, than for a fiscal conservative like Romney or Huntsman to convince primary voters that he really is a hardliner on tea-party issues.

A key advantage for them, in this regard, is the cap-and-trade issue. Paradoxically, this is a key issue for the corporate backers of the fiscal conservatives, but it is the fiscal conservatives who are vulnerable on cap-and-trade, while the tea party candidates have mostly retained their virginity on the issue. Fiscal conservatives like Huntsman embraced cap-and-trade and then had to recant, while people like Bachmann have long track records as global-warming deniers. So when corporate and Wall Street donors go looking for candidates who will cover their backs on environmental issues, they actually find more trustworthy spokesmen in the tea-party faction than among their acolytes like Romney.

The tea party will use groups like the Club For Growth to hunt down fiscals they don’t like, by painting them as RINO’s.

The tea party gained sufficient power that the RNC assembled a purity test for candidates, which was mostly aimed at attacking Democrats but also at flushing out wobbly conservatives. This works in favor of the tea party by exposing corporate Republicans who have strayed from the party line on health mandates, cap and trade, or whatever.

Two other factors work in favor of a tea candidate: momentum is now in their favor, and a couple of the tea people, Palin and Bachmann, can raise money superlatively, which means they have less need to kowtow to fiscal conservatives to open their wallets.

The tea party is angry at the fiscals about 2012: at this point they are demanding a voice in picking the presidential nominee, they think that beating Obama means motivating the tea voters to show up at the polls by nominating a tea candidate, and they believe the fiscals are blocking the flow of money to tea-party candidates. They want Bachmann, Paul or Cain; Gingrich and Santorum have failed to catch fire in places like Iowa, and Pawlenty is having trouble registering too, although sources say Pawlenty oddly hopes the tea party will like him simply because the fiscals don’t.

The Wall Street wing of the party will try to regain control of the party: they like exploiting the votes of the tea party extremists, but they are frightened of where the teahadists are leading the party, and they have the financial clout to make their concerns heard.

The fiscal conservatives’ view was typified by Lindsey Graham who told his state convention he wants a party who can compete not just in the Bible Belt but further north. A man in the audience hollered “You’re a hypocrite!” Graham responded: “I’m a winner, pal….Winning matters to me. If it doesn’t matter to you, there’s the exit sign.” By the same token, Haley Barbour waded right into the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference and warned the hardliners that the quest for purity would split the party and reelect Obama. 

The fiscal conservatives fear people like Palin and Bachmann, and they want to use their financial clout to choose an established candidate with stature, or else they could sit out 2012, which would doom the GOP. They want someone who could actually win, someone like Bush or Christie, or perhaps Perry. It’s a telling sign that those are the best names they can come up with, and that’s an advantage for the tea party: if the fiscals had a Reagan waiting in the wings, rather than one of these baggage-laden governors, they would be in a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the tea party. The tea people look at those names and say “if we’re going to choose a weak nominee, let’s at least pick someone who shares our views without exception.”

You’re going to see more and more red-faced presidential candidates and party “leaders”, disavowing moderate positions they took years before all the tea drinking began. Romney has had to tapdance on health care, Romney and Huckabee were both explaining a number of moderate non-crazy things they had to realistically do as governors, Newt got slaughtered for speaking the truth about the Ryan budget, Pawlenty had to humiliate himself by publicly admitting error on cap and trade while also running away from his expressed desire for outreach to women and minorities, Crist tried to avoid extinction by disavowing the stimulus package. No less than five Big Names, Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Huckabee and Palin, had to flipflop on cap-and-trade.

A startling phenomenon occurred in the infamous special election in New York involving Scozzafava: the mainstream Republican was primaried by a tea-party candidate, people like Gingrich supported the regular GOP nominee, and the tea people hollered for Gingrich’s blood.

Sadly, when Republicans were being beaten up by the far right, it was often for telling the truth and doing the right thing, like Romney on health care and Gingrich on the Medicare issue. All this is a sign of how quickly and violently the GOP has jumped to the right in the last decade: even old-time rightwing bomb-throwers like Gingrich and Lindsey Graham are seen as demi-socialists. They didn’t move to the right, but the party certainly did, passing the old-timers as they went by.

The tea party movement will also be leaning hard on congressional candidates. The movement has taken the stance that the latest wave of GOP House freshmen owe their House seats to the tea party, and accordingly the tea party, in the form of FreedomWorks, has taken it upon themselves to direct the freshmen to dive right into the incredibly dangerous Medicare issue, and issue them their talking points.  FreedomWorks also plans attacks in congressional town halls this August, just like they did two years ago.

Rush Limbaugh is putting his flabby shoulder behind this effort also, arguing, in total defiance of logic and the facts, that Obama fears far-right candidates and wants to run against a RINO in 2012.

It could be that whichever of the two factions unites behind a presidential candidate first, to include priming the money pump and getting that gusher pointed toward a single candidate, will gain ground. Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, a key progenitor of the tea party movement, is focusing on herding support and money toward a single tea-friendly candidate with the specific aim of preventing someone like Romney or Gingrich from getting the nomination; they think Pawlenty would stand a better chance than Bachmann of surviving against Obama. Meanwhile the fiscals at least have a name, Romney, but they clearly want another name.Currently Romney is starting to solidify a lead nationally and in the early primary states, so the tea people will be pushing hard, and soon.

The RINO-hunting has even spread to far-right internet forums. One conservative site threatened to ban any forum members, even long term members, who speak up in favor of the dreaded RINOs like Romney.

I think that if the fat-cat party donors can’t unite behind someone like Romney and open their wallets for him, while the teahadists manage to borrow the Obama 2008 blueprint and steer massive amounts of grassroots money to someone like Bachmann, the tea boys win. Particularly since they have home-field advantage in three of the four early primaries, and in the southern contests on Super Tuesday.

Looking at the whole field, the fiscal conservatives have Romney, but they are unenthusiastic and are looking at Huntsman, Bush, Christie and Perry, all of whom have baggage of their own. The tea party has Cain, Paul and Santorum, but will wait for Bachmann or Palin. Pawlenty and Gingrich are trying to appeal to both groups, with meager results.

Perhaps the money boys could use their clout to put a man like Romney at the top of the ticket, and placate the mob with an extremist pick for VP. But it could also work the other way: if someone like Bachmann grabs the nomination, someone like Daniels might run with her.

The people who bet on Intrade seem to think a fiscal conservative will win out: their top picks are Romney, Pawlenty and Huntsman. But that could be because the bettors are money people, stock market types, rather than evangelicals.

The war in 2012

Paul Krugman argues that the 2010 election may have damaged the GOP by putting the extremists in charge, with the illusion that they could “go the whole way and keep winning elections.” In 2012 someone must hold this coalition together and then sell their brew of extremism to enough voters to win 270 electoral votes against an incumbent President, before the increasingly skeptical voters decide that the tea party has been turning the country upside down long enough.

The tea party will be forcing more and more Republican candidates to dive to the right in the primaries and then back to the left in the general, and hope no one notices that the tone of their rhetoric jumped fifty degrees to the left between March and October. Unfortunately, the rest of us have Google and can track the “evolution” of their statements. The larger problem here is bridging the gap between the far right and the rest of the country: by 2008 the gap was already so wide that McCain was unable to bridge it with his vice-presidential choice -- his staff told him that the party would reject a moderate selection like Ridge, forcing him to go with Palin.

The tea party is forcing the nomination of extremist candidates in a number of races, who are crushed easily in the general election, or cause embarrassment upon winning, like Rand Paul.

A particularly brutal problem for the GOP: how can they resolve their civil war and find a candidate who can persuade the donors to spend and persuade the tea party to organize and vote with the intensity of 2010? Which candidate can inspire one group, let alone both?

Another issue: will the tea party intimidate Republican office-holders into withholding their endorsements from suspect candidates like Romney and Huntsman?

The teahadists could split off and form a third-party candidacy, if they don’t have someone they like on the ticket, preferably at the top. The tea party has already begun running their own candidates against Republicans whom they dislike, but it is piecemeal – so far. Every time the tea crowd does something like this, it makes Democratic victory much more likely in those races. Sometimes top Republicans even endorse the tea candidate over the GOP candidate, and it’s very telling that the GOP leadership didn’t retaliate, out of fear. A third-party run could happen at the national level: Paul, Palin, Bachmann, Trump. Trump once mentioned the idea, unprompted.

A successful third-party would depend on building a solid structure, a clear doctrine on a range of issues since one-issue movements are hard to sustain, build on existing third-party movements and advocates like the Club for Growth, try to capture the zeitgeist, find credible leaders perhaps from the business world, and undoubtedly peddle the populist nostrums of hate down south, fear of the blacks and browns, hitting the crime issue, guns, immigration, Obama, hatred of big government which will attract donors, taxes, gays, abortion. It would probably need to happen soon, before the momentum of the tea party movement stalls, if it hasn’t already.

Meanwhile, moderates who were thrown out of the party, or who are repelled by the message of the new, extreme GOP, could stream into the Democratic camp, people like Specter and Jeffords. How about Snowe, Collins, Crist? Wouldn’t an Obama/Crist ticket be a shocker? Party identification seems to be swinging back toward the Democrats these days.

All of this could cause a permanent decline in the fortunes of the GOP. In American politics, five symptoms of a political party that is in danger of collapse and death are failure to find credible leaders, failure to craft an effective message which middle America can swallow, acquiring a reputation for representing only rich fatcats and crooks, internal divisions, and taking the wrong side on a war or major political cause. The current Republican party is the first party in U.S. history to exhibit all five symptoms, and they show no sign of even accepting that there is a problem. Every time they manage to lie their way back into power, winning with lies about Iraq, lies about Kerry, lies about health care, they convince themselves that America really loves rightwing extremism.

The death of the GOP is not impossible. The Republicans, in their quest for purity, have declared war on so many groups – blacks, women, Hispanics, gays, Muslims, working families, police, teachers, firefighters, students, the young, the old, the sick, the unemployed, people who care about the environment, and anyone who loves democracy, by crippling the Congress with obstruction and by using illegal efforts to stop Democrats from voting and participating in the political process – that all they have left are middle-aged healthy employed straight white southern Anglo-Saxon Christian men who neither work for, nor get service from, the government, or unionized labor, and have no young, old or sick people in their household. And who have no brains, no morals, no clue. And who like being lied to. People who forgot, if they ever knew, what America is all about, all while proclaiming they are the “real Americans”. That’s their base. Their rapidly shrinking base.

In the more likely event that the party survives, the thing to remember is that the tea party is sustained by lies, which eventually will be overcome, and anger, which eventually will fade away. This will leave the corporate Republicans in charge of the party as they always have been, based on a human phenomenon which will never fade away: greed. The only thing that can rival the corporate wing of the party is the one political phenomenon which, as Machiavelli warned us, is the only political undercurrent you can always depend on: fear. A group which can foster and sustain a permanent climate of fear can challenge not only the corporate Republicans but also the Democrats. The Republicans managed to sustain fear of the crumbling Soviet Empire for 40 years, but sustaining such emotions for such a length of time is difficult: the tea party tried with only modest success to create fear of Obama, but if they’re clever they will focus on exploiting fear of a permanently declining America, with a permanently declining white power structure at its center.

Another issue that works in favor of the corporate Republicans: the power of the evangelicals comes mostly from older voters. Younger evangelicals aren't all that interested in politics. So time is not on the side of the politically-minded evangelicals.

A century ago

We could see a repeat of that happened a century ago. Picture the scene: America is angry, and heading into a historic presidential election. The Republicans think they have the nation behind them. They have a frontrunner, a Romney-like man who doesn’t follow conventional Christianity but is liked by the big-money boys on Wall Street and corporate America, the men who have always run the party.

But then the country-club Republican is challenged by a Palin-like egotistical populist who is popular with the grass roots, a candidate who loves guns and hunting in the great Northwest, almost as much as they love attention. The populist upstart leads a movement that is angry about government-imposed tax duties, hates compromisers, and uses lots of religious rhetoric, talking about battling for the Lord and Armageddon, and singing “Onward Christian Soldiers”. The populists are actually very sneaky: they managed to attract money and support from the corporations who logically would have supported the country-club candidate, and they return the favor by supporting policies that protect corporations, thus outflanking the country-club candidate. The populists are united in their desire to block the country-club candidate from getting the Republican presidential nomination.

Is this a forecast for a Romney-Palin race for the nomination in 2012, or perhaps Romney-Bachmann? Nope. This is a description of the race that happened exactly one hundred years earlier. In 1912 country-club Republican William Taft, who admitted he didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ, faced a rebellion from populist and all-around hot dog Teddy Roosevelt. Taft maintained his frontrunner status and secured the Republican nomination, but Teddy split the conservative movement and ran a third-party campaign. As a result, the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won 40 states and 435 electoral votes. A Democrat won places like Idaho, Wyoming, Oklahoma. The 1912 race, not unlike the social battles over health reform and rightwing extremism that preceded the 2012 election, was marred by violence: Teddy himself was shot in the chest just before the election, and was saved only because his fifty-page speech was in his pocket. Characteristically, Teddy went on to give a ninety-minute speech, still seeping blood. Shortly after the election loss, Roosevelt’s populist movement, which really didn’t stand for anything other than cheering for Teddy, folded.

The Democratic coalition

The Republicans, at least, have a better track record of managing a coalition than the Democrats. The coalition that FDR built, including labor, blacks, big-city political machines, New Deal liberals and southerners, began to shake apart after World War Two, as New Dealers who disliked aggressive foreign policy and southerners who loathed civil rights  split away from the party and almost cost Truman the 1948 election. Truman and Kennedy did their best to hold the coalition together, but then two Democrats came along and undertook action on their own initiative which ripped the coalition apart.

First, Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights legislation, which prompted southerners to abandon the Democrats, first supporting George Wallace and then shifting permanently to the GOP. This in itself was huge, since the south had been the heart of the Democratic party going all the way back to Andy Jackson: labor and the city machines didn’t join in force until the 20th century, populist liberals didn’t begin to join until William Jennings Bryan, and blacks didn’t join until FDR.

Second, George McGovern capitalized on the horrors of the 1968 Democratic convention by launching an overhaul of party rules, to ensure that all those wild-eyed liberals throwing bricks in the streets would instead be fairly represented on the convention floor in 1972. Inside the tent peeing out, as it were. This mob of liberals did indeed go to the 1972 convention: they took over the party and nominated none other than George McGovern.

The problem was that empowering liberals came at the expense of the old-time city machine bosses who control the money and manpower needed to win elections, and when the bosses abandoned McGovern, Nixon won by a staggering 23 points. Even worse, McGovern had broken the power of the bosses forever, thus weakening a key pillar of the party’s power.

With the departure of the southerners, with the fading away of the city machines, with an ever-shakier grip on the unions, with the liberals themselves fading in potency as the Vietnam and Watergate issues faded into the past, the Democrats, now leading only the blacks and liberals and not much else, proceeded to lose a whole lot of elections.

In other words, the Democrats, through their own actions, with the best of liberal intentions, dismantled their own coalition.

Ironically the Republicans have tried to do the same thing: appease its own extremists at the expense of everyone else. One could argue that it was Reagan who destroyed the prospects of the Republican party. Although he himself was a good coalition builder, he empowered the party’s social extremists, fiscal extremists and war hawks, who have been running the party ever since, and driving away moderates and independents. Had he focused on holding the political center, and using that as the party base, they might never have lost another election. Instead, the extremists whom he unleashed took the party to the far right.

Accordingly, Obama’s new coalition consists of all the people who have been antagonized by the increasingly extreme views of the GOP, and it’s a long list: blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, seniors, teachers, policemen, firefighters, auto workers, students, environmentalists, and so forth.

The thing to remember is that eventually the Republicans will stop believing their own nonsense and realize that their 20-year embrace of extremism and antipathy toward moderation is costing them a lot of votes, and some smart lad like Romney will lead them back toward the left, to contest the center and try to win back all those groups. So the Democrats need to cement their coalition together now, before the Republicans come to their senses.