Jumping Ship

Once a month I attend a local meeting of Democrats who gather to talk, to drink, and to eat, finding fellowship (as the Baptists would say) with like-minded folks in a parish dominated by Republicans and the far-right. During the course of our conversations, several of us have confessed to having voted for a Republican president at least once; others have confessed that they were once fiscal Republicans. Now they sound like--and are--Democrats, concerned about public education, the rights of women, the economy, unemployment, the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, corporate domination of politics, the environment, climate change. It's not that these folks have changed that much--it's that the Republican party has changed significantly. Once, I think, we could have counted on both parties at least to do the best they could to steer the ship of state; they might differ in exactly to what degree to turn the wheel, but there was a balance of power that held the ship on a fairly reasonable course (not that there weren't mistakes).

That's no longer the case, and  Republicans who are publicly and loudly jumping ship indicate just how far right the Republican party has turned.

The latest conservative to publish a screed against the far-right turn of the party is Michael Fumento, who writes in Salon that

Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse. ["My break with the extreme right," posted 24 May 2012.]

Fumento joins the ranks of David Frum , who writes that he is "haunted" by his experience in the Bush administration. Frum is no liberal, no Democrat; he penned the phrase "axis of evil" that the Bush administration used so well in its march toward war with Iraq.  But here is what he writes about Fox News and Talk Radio:

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling...[snip]...We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information. ["When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?," in New York Magazine, 20 November 2011.]

Another conservative who has jumped the ship of extremism is Michael Lofgren, who retired after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer last year and publicly let loose his inner frustrations over the far-right turn of his political party:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. [in "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative who Left the Cult," Truthout,  3 September 2011]

Lofgren does not pull any punches; he has plenty to say about Democrats, too, and notes that he is not a supporter of Obama, but that when Barack Obama won the presidency, he wanted Obama to succeed because he wanted his country to succeed. But his harshest criticism is leveled at his own party:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant...[snip]...Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The number of such apostate Republicans is growing. Before Lofgren, Frum, and Fumento, there was Bruce Bartlett, President Reagan's domestic policy advisor and a critic of his own contribution to Reaganomics [The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward]. Bartlett, an old-time fiscal conservative, makes no friends with today's Republican extremists with his criticisms of Republican fiscal irresponsibility. On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bartlett reminds us that "[t]the Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act, was essentially the same thing that Republicans had been pushing themselves only a few years earlier"  and that higher taxes in the 80s and 90s actually led to a booming economy rather than to recession that Republicans had predicted. "I think the dirty secret," Bartlett says, "is actually that Obama is a moderate conservative, and if I were a liberal Democrat I would be pretty upset" [segment posted on Raw Replay, titled "Bruce Bartlett: Chunk of GOP either stupid, crazy, ignorant, or craven cowards," 28 July 2011].

While those of us meeting once a month at a local restaurant to discuss Democratic policies and the ship of state may feel vindicated by these criticisms aimed at the Republican party, how can we derive real comfort from our united concerns? They just reinforce our own fears that the ship may soon crash on the shoals of extremism.