A Gathering of Old Mentalities

Republican Eric Cantor, diagnosing Republicans this weekend before a group of his state's Republicans:

If we want to win, we must offer solutions to problems that people face every day. We have not done this recently and it has allowed Democrats to take power, it has allowed them to push their partisan politics, and even worse to enact their leftist agenda.

Chris Cillizza complains that Cantor omitted from his analysis a rather essential something-or-other: even one solution to any problems "that people face every day."

Cillizza sees this as a problem, yet anything problematic about Cantor's omission was more than compensated for by Cantor in his emphasis on Democrats' ruthlessly partisan politics and their enactment of a "leftist agenda."

Here is an incantation that both internally pleases and historically fulfills. To Cantor & Co., Obama's a leftist (and more than that, he's a partisan leftist), just as Clinton was a leftist to Gingrichites, just as Mondale was to Reaganites, just as Carter--Jimmy Carter!--was to lunging New Rightists, who rehabilitated Joe McCarthy and his besotted assaults on domestic liberalism as foreign socialism, which not only followed but vastly intensified two decades of hardcore reactionaryism against a commonsensically pragmatic center-leftism as some sort of burrowing Trotskyite rot. 

Though comically repetitive, the Republican pattern here is also deeply anti-pluralist and thus profoundly anti-democratic. Throughout President Obama's tenure much has been made by sober commentators about the right's efforts to "delegitimize" the administration, which in itself is true enough, however for nearly a century the right has sought to delegitimize all opposition as fundamentally unAmerican.

FDR was not merely a "communist" but a communist cripple--real American presidents don't preside from wheelchairs--just as biracial Obama is a black Kenyan socialist. Which is to say, Roosevelt, too, was an Other, merely by virtue of his other-than-Republicanism--which in itself defined him as a rather redundantly unAmerican "leftist," notwithstanding his essentially conservative remedies of a broken system, a la Obama. 

The right has for so long professed a self-monopoly on all that is politically virtuous and philosophically legitimate, these professions alone have come to represent the core of Republicanism--indeed, even its small-r interpretation. Actual policies are by now intrinsically superfluous, for the right has virtue on its side, and that's all that's needed. Outside the right's self-containing conceit, everyone else professes nothing but unAmerican crap. 

And by now the right's conceit is more pathological than tactical. Thus Cantor & Co. can make stabs at a diagnosis, but its diseased self-distortions are sure to make little more than a mess of it.