Change Isn't Something You Want To Rush

I sat in my car yesterday afternoon, late for an appointment but transfixed, as Rush Limbaugh launched into Michael Steele. I honestly don't know what to say, because Rush's demand for absolute fealty and Steele's immediate, abject apology makes it absolutely clear that the inmates are charge of the Republican assylum.

I found myself wondering if the Republican Party will survive. I know there are all kinds of institutional advantages for the two big parties, recognition in law and habit that make it nearly impossible for them to die and others to rise up. But jumpin' Jehoshaphat, the tiny little remnant of the G.O.P. seems absolutely commited to its death spiral. To be honest, watching Republicans today is a lot like watching the Democratic Party in the 1980s.

Part of this has to do with the nature of history and fundamentalism. Great historical movements tend to devolve into fundamentalism. The upheavals of the 1960s were liberal -- civil rights and anti-war -- and changed the world. A political generation was forged in the crucible of those movements, and related everything that followed to lessons learned in times that grew ever more distant. The inevitable result was ridiculousness.

I saw that ridiculousness on display when I attended a convention of the Kentucky Education Association about 10 years ago. Topic A of the meeting was the disinterest young teachers had in joining the union. I stood at the back of the room and listened to the KEA leadership try to stir the crowd with tales of injustices 30 years old -- injustices in coal mines and northern factories, without so much as a word about problems in the classrooms of today. The leadership linked arms and sang union songs and were oblivious to the stream of young teachers headed out the door.

For years the KEA's membership dropped and still the leaders would tolerate no apostacy, because they knew, because they had been there on the picket lines and protests. They had become fundamentalists, convinced absolutely of the purity of the things they learned the hard way, coming up. That's what fundamentalism is: absolute belief in some text or another, to some orthodoxy, to The Word. Fundamentalists are convinced of the purity of The Word -- whatever that word might be -- and any digression from The Word is dealt with most harshly.

The particular Word that dictates Republicanism today is the idealized recollection of Ronald Reagan, who confronted a certain set of circumstances with admirable fortitude and pragmatism -- and who changed the world. That the world has changed since then matters not at all; they're committed to seeing the world as Reagan saw it. (Without, for example, more than 20 years of deregulation, huge tax cuts, giant deficits, globalization, diminished industrial capacity, a fallen Soviet Union, the Internet...) And God help anyone who departs the fundamentalist orthodoxy, because the morality police are always nearby, ready to denounce anyone who strays from the fundamentalist line.

Yesterday I sat in my car, listening to Rush rant and rave at the brand-new head of the Republican Party, who got his job to put a face to the party's openness to change. Michael Steele has encountered, however, a party almost entirely controlled by people who are inclined toward orthodoxy. He presides over a disfunctional party of activists dedicated to The Word.

Before the Republican Party can even think about beating Democrats, it is going to have to beat the entrenched has-beens of a Great Conservative Victory fought and won more than a generation ago, in a different world.

Comments

[Greg]

The controversy about Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh (who I don't really particularly listen to anymore) is more than about Rush. When the liberal talk show host said that CPAC looked like a bunch of Nazis Michael Steele nodded in agreement.

Some said his nodding wasn't in agreement with that statement but still at the very least he was quiet and did not speak out against that outrageous statement.

This is more than about Rush the person. This was about the speech he gave and if you listened to the speech and agree with it then it is not only Rush but you, and all other grassroots conservatives that Michael Steele has rebuked in the harshest of terms.

Well, if that is the way the "leader" of the GOP feels about me then I say no, no, no, not God Bless the GOP, GOD DAMN the GOP. It isn't the party I thought I knew!