When the "Big Tent" Collapses

One has to wonder what is happening to the Republican Party and its members. Is the party’s establishment having a Grinch moment, finally coming to its senses on a myriad of issues, growing a heart where one did not seem to exist before? Or is it having a Scarecrow moment, finally realizing that having a brain is about whether one actually uses it? What about its members? Are they having the opposite experience, rejecting both the Grinch and the Scarecrow?

Those are some of the questions that hover over the GOP national convention in Tampa, Fla., this week. While the party of Lincoln appears united in its desire to defeat President Barack Obama, it seems more divided than it has been in some time, with various factions trying to out conservative the others, instigating a battle over such hot button social issues as abortion, making xenophobia part of the party identity, and articulating a disdain for government that has made the GOP far too extreme for most Americans.

Even Republicans – from Dan Quayle to George Pataki to Chuck Hagel to David A. Stockman to Jeb Bush to Mike Lofgren – have articulated the problems stemming from the party’s hard-right turn.

“The Republican Party needs to re-establish its philosophy of the big tent with principles,” former Vice President Dan Quayle told The New York Times recently. “The philosophy you hear from time to time, which is unfortunate, is one of exclusion rather than inclusion. You have to be expanding the base, expanding the party, because, compared to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is a minority party.”

Former New York Gov. George E. Pataki said: “What I fear is that that very positive desire to limit the power and the role of the federal government could turn into a philosophy that is antigovernment. Sometimes, those who I fear have that antigovernment view, as opposed to the limited-government view, rise to the center of the nominating process. I think that is not a good thing for the Republican Party.”

Indeed, the GOP has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan, the man neo-conservatives praise repeatedly as their beacon, would not want to be part of it, according to Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. Senator from Nebraska who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“Reagan would be stunned by the party today,” Hagel told Josh Rogin for a story posted in The Cable on Foreign Policy’s Web site in May. “Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending....

“Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party,” Hagel said.

Hagel compared the battle over the soul of the current Republican Party to a similar battle in the 1950s, when such moderates as Dwight D. Eisenhower fought such conservatives as Joseph McCarthy. The moderates won that battle. Their heirs are losing this one.

“Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before,” Hagel said. “You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first eight years of the century, it was under Republican direction.”

Hagel decried the current Republican Party as schizophrenic and intolerant of dissent. He cited the resignation of Republican senator Lamar Alexander from a leadership post last year as a clear indication of how the party has changed. “There has been a litmus test, purity factor that has been applied over the years. I saw it in the Senate myself,” said Hagel, who was in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Hagel is not alone in his assessment.

In an Aug. 13 op-ed piece in The New York Times, David A. Stockman, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, described Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “the same empty conservative sermon.” Stockman should know since he was the person that oversaw Reagan’s budget office.

“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to ‘job creators’ (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” Stockman wrote. “Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neocon conservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion ‘defense’ budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.”

Stockman went on to say that Ryan folded “like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout.” (Ryan the shrink-the-government radical also sought federal dollars to save a GM plant in his hometown, the same one he has repeatedly accused President Obama of failing to protect. GM announced in June 2008 that it was closing the plant, which happened in December 2008.)

“But the greater hypocrisy is his phony ‘plan’ to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade,” Stockman said. “A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing.”

The criticisms of the GOP by its old guard go further than just the budget lies being told by Romney and Ryan, and the abandonment of what were once Republican principles. Jeb Bush assailed the party for its harsh anti-immigration stance, saying in essence that the GOP is becoming the party of angry white people. Bush urged his colleagues to recognize that the shifting national demographics mean that the party must soften its rhetoric if it wants to lead.

Possibly more revealing was the warnings presented by Lofgren, who spent nearly 30 years as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. In a September 2011 article for Truth-Out.org, Lofgren lambasted both the Democrat and Republican parties for their ties to corporate America. He also described each as being rotten, but he was especially harsh on his fellow Republicans.

“Both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” Lofgren said. “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. 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.”

The “crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center” of the GOP today, Lofgren said. “Steve King, Michele Bachman, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” he said.

“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,” Lofgren wrote nearly a year ago. “This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

He is right.

Diasppearing in Wisconsin

Is Wisconsin in the First or Third World?

It's hard to tell by the recent action in Madison, the state's capitol. The idea that an entire party would disappear from a chamber of the state legislature in an effort to block legislation sounds like something out of a banana republic.

Parliament is in session. The opposition does not like the government's action. The opposition party walks out or resigns en masse.

It just happened in Bahrain, where the opposition party representing Shiite Muslims decided to quit Parliament over the Sunni government's crackdown on pro-democracy Shiite protesters. One can understand the actions of the Shiite leaders in light of the killings and beatings at the hands of government thugs. It is a life-and-death situation.

But in Wisconsin? In the heart of America? In a state that was once seen as progressive? Is this the new democracy?

Don't get me wrong. The legislation offered by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is indeed onerous, an attempt to cloak anti-union sentiments in fiscal responsibility. It must be defeated. However, hiding from one's responsibility, which Senate Democrats are doing, seems a childish way of doing the state's business.

Wisconsin, like many other states, has a major deficit. To balance the budget, the state's Republican lawmakers decided to ask state workers to assume a greater share of pension and health care costs. Such a request seems reasonable considering government workers in Wisconsin contribute less than what workers in other states contribute.

The problem is Wisconsin's anticipated budget gap for the next fiscal year -- an estimated $137 million -- was self-inflicted, created by Republican efforts to reward their supporters. According to one fiscal group, Wisconsin recently approved $117 million in tax breaks for businesses. If not for that tax give away the state would have a surplus, the fiscal group concluded.

According to Republicans, the problem isn't the tax cuts. No. It's the fact that government workers, including teachers, can negotiate benefits beyond their base wages. The Republicans want to eliminate collective bargaining rights for state workers, limit contracts to one year, and drop pension and health care from bargaining.

If the goal is to reduce the state's share of benefit costs then reopen contracts and seek concessions. Unions, corporations and governments have been doing it successfully for years. However, taking away collective bargaining rights strike at one of the things that has made this country great.

While unions have become big business in many industries, the lack of collective bargaining units will return us to the days of when workers were at the mercy of employers. Yes, some employers sought to pay workers well in an effort to keep unions out. Even more did the opposite, paying low wages, firing anyone who missed work, and threatening those who sought any semblance of dignity in the workplace.

Apparently the Republican majority in Wisconsin wants to return to those days, when employers could remove employees without cause, when workers too sick to work were fired. They are not alone. The anger that swept Republicans into power in several state houses and the U.S. House of Representatives is being vented in legislatures where social issues are being spun as fiscal sanity.

It sounds like the kind of thing Third World youth are fighting against.

Not So Lame Duck

After the results of the mid-term elections had been recorded, the 111th Congress seemed poised for a stalemate. Republicans were swaggering about, drunk on election results that saw them gain six seats in the Senate and control of the House of Representatives. Democrats, on the other hand, were licking their wounds; reeling from what President Barack Obama called a shellacking, and pointing fingers at each other.

Now that the 111th Congress has ended, one might wonder if, in some demented way, the rise of the Republicans will prove good for America. Power concentrated in the hands of a few is deadly. When those powerful few are intoxicated with arrogance and their own sense of self-importance it can be devastating. We need only look at the results of the 1994 mid-term elections when the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, took over the House of Representatives then quickly acted with utter disregard for what was in the best interest of the country. Arrogance led Gingrich and company to assume that they could do as they wished, including shutting down the Federal Government. It backfired on them.

It appeared that the Democrats, after they took control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives in the 111th Congress, had not learned any lessons from the Gingrich years. Party leaders acted with impunity, ignoring the seeds of discontent being sowed throughout the country. Democrats argued among themselves, seeking not to lead, but rather to dictate through extremes. As a liberal, I am more than elated that we have a national health-care plan. I am also overjoyed with many of the other legislative initiatives enacted in the last two years. Yet I am also disappointed that others were not completed – a revamping and strengthening of No Child Left Behind, for example – and that some of those initiatives that I cherish were set in motion through arrogance and a disregard for debate.

Democratic control of the 111th Congress reminded me of a conversation I had with a white postal worker in New York City after the 1993 election of Rudolph Giuliani as mayor.

"It's our time," the white postal worker proclaimed. "Now we're in control."

His statement carried the threat of revenge, a sense that it was time for white New York to lash back at the liberal agenda New York City had experienced. Enough with that liberal agenda and its leader, David N. Dinkins, the city's first black mayor, the postal worker argued as we continued to talk. White men had regained their rightful place in New York and they were ready to serve up retribution, he appeared to be saying. In his voice, and in the actions of many, there was a sense of entitlement and self-importance, a sense that now he and his put upon friends could finally put the city's minority population back in its place.

The comments that followed the 2010 mid-term elections carried the same threat. After two years of refusing to work with the current administration in an effort to win back Congress and make Obama a one term president, Republicans swore to continue their march, blocking all legislative action until they got what they wanted – a continuation of the tax cut for the wealthy. They did, indeed, receive what they sought. But at what price?

After the initial bellowing and grandstanding, several Republicans finally stood up and did the right things. The results were not totally to my liking, just as I am sure they were not to yours. But for the first time in many years, Washington seemed to at least be moving toward solutions to the problems that plague us as a nation.

Of course, this is not to absolve the far right of the Republican Party. They were obstructionists for the last two years, and they will seek to be obstructionists for the next two. Nor is it meant to coddle the far left of the Democratic Party, for many of them acted with the same arrogance as Gingrich's GOP majority.

At least, for a few days, we can bask in the sense of accomplishment that permeated Washington for the last few weeks. In doing so, we cannot forget that the afterglow of the lame-duck session of the 111th Congress was created by cross-aisle communication. And with a new year approaching, we should pray that leveler heads will prevail and more legislators will have the gumption to stand up, reach out to their counterparts and say, "Let's fix what we has been broken for too long."