THE BUNDY RANCH IS NOT A BATTLE IN THE SO-CALLED REPUBLICAN CIVIL WAR -- WHY?
We've been hearing lately that the tea party is losing its battle with the Republican establishment. Establishment candidates are swatting back tea party primary challenges. Fat-cat Republican donors are withholding money from candidates who might shut down the government or press for a U.S. debt default. The old guard is winning. Crazy radicalism is being contained.
But then there's Fox News, with its wall-to-wall coverage of Cliven Bundy's standoff with the Bureau of Land Management.
The GOP is trying to look responsible, but its Ministry of Information is cheerleading anarchy and violent insurrection. (It's not just Fox, of course. Here's National Review, reputedly part of the thoughtful wing of conservatism, giving Bundy a thumbs-up.)
But do you notice what's not happening? Insurgent GOP candidates aren't demanding that incumbent Republicans take sides on the Bundy Ranch. They're not digging up old, seemingly innocuous votes to fund the Bureau of Land Management and portraying them as evidence that veteran GOP officeholders are freedom-hating enablers of big-government totalitarianism. This doesn't appear to be an issue in Republican primaries at all. It's just a media event.
This tells me that the so-called GOP civil war has evolved into a sort of gang truce -- or, to mix the metaphor a little more, it's turned it into a good cop/bad cop act. Establishment Republicans (after moving further rightward, though not all the way into Ted Cruz territory) are now winning the elections -- but the read-meat-craving teabagger base is getting its jollies from a battle far outside the electoral sphere. Hold your nose and vote for Lindsey Graham, then turn on Fox and cheer on a bunch of revolutionaries in Nevada. Barcalounger radicals get their vicarious 1776, the Chamber of Commerce gets its stable corpocracy. Everybody wins!
Um, everybody wins except for America's non-conservative citizens. And that's the problem: this is a nice equilibrium point for the GOP. The party looks less crazy and more electable. The wacko-bird base doesn't alienate America's middle. The crazies have their fun, and the Lindsey Grahams and John Cornyns just keep winning.
5 comments:
Hmm..... an armed rabble evicting the representatives of the national government from property of that national government. I'm confused: is the "Praetorian Guard" officially part of the Russian military or not?
There might have been a thoughtful wing of the GOP, but there has never been a thoughtful wing of the American conservative movement.
I think this is correct, Steve but it may have more to do with the place of this event in the electoral cycle and vis a vis things like KEystone X than just the devlovling gangs theory.
I mean I think market segmentation enables Fox to go 24/7 on Bundy while the kinds of people on Fox who usually offer you the very pointed moral hang back. Because there are any numbe of potential morals to this story and not all of them are conducive to the goals of the money part of the party. For instance although Bundy can be used as a flashpoint to get out votes in an election the conflict is too far away from the next election to be useful. The base will be riled up about something else by then or it can be used, like Benghazi, to keep some people interested in politics when the time comes. There's no advantage to the political republicans in power to jumping on the bandwagon yet, especially since no one wants to have their name on a shootout where people actually die.
Second of all I think the money end of things is slightly worried about the image/concept of the sturdy farmer resisting government and corporate forces since Keystone is going to require a lot of overriding of local interests by national forces.
And our cowardly, complicit, and compliant MSM will continue to provide the GOP cover.
Second of all I think the money end of things is slightly worried about the image/concept of the sturdy farmer resisting government and corporate forces since Keystone is going to require a lot of overriding of local interests by national forces.
Oh, but they'll be asked to cede power to oil interests, which, on the right, are by definition the good guys. Very, very different. Holdouts will be damned as treasonous scofflaws, and no one on the right will see anything the least bit hypocritical about it.
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