Righteous Right Lesson #1: Ye Shall Reap What Ye Sow

[For] more than 30 years, the Republicans have been sucking around for a campaign just like this one. They knew full well that their "base" was heading into the wild places, and they did nothing to stop them. They did nothing to arrest the spread of abject wingnuttery in the various state houses, from which came the generation of young Republicans stalwarts who won in 2010. They played footsie in the South with the Council Of Conservative Citizens, and in the West with the more polite fringes of the militia movement. For mean and temporary political advantages, they allowed more and more of the fringes into power in the party until, finally, there was no "Republican establishment" any more. And now, too many respectable conservatives are wandering around, blinking, and wondering how it all happened that their party has lost its mind. You were there, kids. You just didn't care.

"The big difference is that the protesters don't believe in governance," David Brooks laments in today's New York Times. Well, where in hell does he think they learned that? From Glenn Beck? More likely, they first learned it from the sanctified Republican dimwit who said, in his first inaugural address, "Government is not a solution to the problem. Government is the problem." It's a little bit late for people like Brooks to decide they don't have the stomach for the politics of Reagan's Children, or for the presidential campaign they were bound one day to produce.

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A party that dedicated itself long ago to the notion that government is the problem has finally run out of reasons why we should allow them to run the government they so insist they despise. A party that dedicated itself long ago to the politics of expedient division has finally run out of credible tactics through which they can pretend to unite us. A party that dedicated itself long ago to placating the social fears and paranoia of the people whose money they were relentlessly shipping upwards to the folks at the top of the food chain has finally run out of distraction and misdirection. (Willard Romney seems to have settled on a campaign theme of, "Yeah, I'm rich. Deal with it, proles.") All they have left now, lying there on the track with the ambulance idling lowly off to one side, is each other, and, god knows, that's all they really deserve.

  Charles Pierce