Unraveling a "conservative" tangle

Just as John Boehner was spooking the pseudoconservative herds this week with his paranoid humbug about the Obama administration's goal of "shoving" them "into the dustbin of history," the NYT's Tom Edsall, perhaps on John's more responsible behalf, was clanging every realistic alarm: 

[R]eactionary forces have a death grip on the Republican Party, and their power has been cemented by the party’s institutionalization of closed primaries and caucuses (neither independents nor Democrats can participate) in more than half the states.

Yet, adds Edsall, those who ask that the party "reform" its institutionalization of inescapable doom are "asking groups of people to change who were brought together by their resistance to change. Their opposition to change is why they are Republicans."

From Edsall that's a key, unspoken distinction--they're Republicans, not conservatives. What's throttling contemporary Republicanism isn't traditional conservatism; what's throttling Boehner's disintegrating obscenity of a party is a profoundly false conservatism, which is why I intro-ed this post with yet another tiresome reference to pseudoconservatism. (I've been banging this Hofstadterian drum so long I have by now forgotten my thumping's date of origin.)

But of course "opposition to change"--a non-characteristic of authentic conservatism--stands in formidable opposition to reactionaryism, which aggressively agitates for immensely radical change, of the backward sort. So Boehner gets squeezed from every conceivable counterproductive side.

The fast-approaching budget and sequestration fights have created a dilemma for Republican House leaders. If the party backs [what Edsall calls] its conservative wing and allows the country to go into default later this year or submits to the draconian cuts mandated by sequestration, Republicans in swing districts could turn the House over to Democrats in 2014. If Republicans go in the opposite direction and compromise, significant numbers of House members will face primary challenges from the right.

Thus the loopy paradox of any real conservatism today: It is exceedingly hazardous to "conservative" Republicans.

Which is why--just to pick up my drum again--it is equally insane for Democrats in center-right swing districts to avoid exploiting the label of "real conservative." 

Comments

[japa21]

I always said that Obama was in one of those "Damned if you do and damned if you don't" situations.

As far as I am concerned, the current GOP is just damned, and it is a self-inflicted damning.

As to when you first started banging the drum, it depends on which calendar was in effect at the time, the Julian or Georgian.

Oh, and I agree that smart Dems in purple or reddish districts should call themselves the real conservatives, ready to conserve Medicare, SS and all the other "liberal" programs that most people are actually for.

[Robert Lipscomb]

A retired general onced defined good leadership for me as being like leather: strong and flexible. Bad leadership is like steel: strong and rigid. Steel breaks. So will the GOP.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Pseudoconservatism is accurate but not precise. What type of pseudoconservatism?

It seems to me that the GOP philosophy went off track through the extrapolation and bastardization of Reaganism.

Self-described neoconservatives focus on the military and foreign affairs. They see a muscular foreign policy in a post-Cold War era, known as the New American Century. This is in contrst to Reagan's hyper-anticomminism. At least it is well defined.

The Culture War has been well defined for a generation, and pretty much over. The biggest evolution osince Reagan has been islamo-fascist terrorist as an all encompaasing threat. Thus Islam has become a bad and threatening culture. Personally, I am most worried about gay islamo-fascists who are here as illegal aliens - but that is just me. :-)

The third leg of current leg of GOP philosophy is what I have been calling neo-Reaganomics, but I certainly am not championing that term. In this philosophy, taxes must ALWAYS be lower, "entitlements" must ALWAYS be smaller, and regulations must ALWAYS be fewer. Budget deficits are only relvant when Democrats are in power.

It is the ALWAYS in this part of the philosophy that strikes me as the least conservative and most onerous. It also happens to be the favorite of those Americans with the most hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, I continue to hope for a Democratic Party built as a labor party in opposition to "neo-Reaganomics". :-)

[Peter G]

Now if I had a first rate campaign organization which I no longer needed because I wasn't running anymore I think I would use it to help our Republican friends back to sanity. The Republicans have gerrymandered so many safe seats and closed so many of their primaries that if their next obvious move is allowed to proceed then the US will have interesting times indeed. Changing voter registration rules and early polling times were counterproductive. But changing purple or even blue states whose state legislatures they control to proportional electoral college votes will make further Democratic presidents impossible to elect regardless of the popular vote. And that is clearly what they are trying to achieve. I propose using the campaign organizations to persuade a lot of Democrats to switch party allegiance and invade the Republican closed primaries. If you want to beat them, join them.