Confounding Fathers (2)

by Sean Wilentz
From The New Yorker 10/18/10


Some Republicans have tried to extend the Buckley tradition, but to little effect. The commentator David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, lost his job at the American Enterprise Institute after he complained about the Republicans’ obstruction of health-care reform and called the right-wing surge a threat to conservatism. In June, the congressman Bob Inglis, of South Carolina, a tough conservative who nonetheless backed Bush’s financial bailout, lost a vicious primary fight with a right-wing insurgent named Trey Gowdy. To his amazement, Inglis was confronted on the campaign trail by voters who were convinced that numbers on their Social Security cards indicated that a secret bank had bought them at birth. “And then, of course,” he recalls, “it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff.” Not even Karl Rove can afford open dissent with the Tea Partiers. Appearing on Fox News the night of the recent primaries, he described the Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, as probably unelectable and said that some of her statements were “nutty.” Instantly, criticism came from Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and other right-wing Republicans. Within days, he was back on Fox, proclaiming himself “a huge Tea Party fan,” endorsing O’Donnell, and affirming that the National Republican Senatorial Committee would give her its full backing.

So far, Rove, an unlikely dissident, is the only prominent Republican leader to so much as gesture at stepping forward, as Buckley and his allies did. Even strong conservatives like Inglis have been pushed aside, as have such former G.O.P. stalwarts as Charlie Crist, in Florida, and Mike Castle, in Delaware, both beaten in the primaries by Tea Party candidates; Crist is now running a long-shot campaign as an Independent. Desperate for gains in the midterm elections, the Republicans are neglecting the struggle it took to make politics safe for Reagan.

Fifty years ago, President Kennedy deplored the far right’s “counsels of fear and suspicion.” Today, Obama’s White House is still struggling to make sense of its enemies. In the absence of forthright leadership, on both the right and the left, the job of standing up to extremists appears to have been left to the electorate. Candidates like O’Donnell may prove too eccentric to prevail, or voters may simply become disillusioned by politicians who campaign on their hatred of government. After the election, mainstream conservatives may well engage in what Richard Viguerie has forecast as “a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.” (Already, Rove and some leading Bush political operatives, including the former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, have been quietly supplanting the battered G.O.P. establishment in the effort to raise funds for this year’s candidates.) But, according to a recent poll, more than seventy per cent of Republicans support the Tea Party, and it seems almost certain that a Republican Party that has unstintingly appeased the far right will enjoy a strong and perhaps smashing victory in the coming midterm elections.

In 1906, early in the Progressive era, the humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional barroom sage, Mr. Dooley, put the social and political tumult of the day into perspective. “Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun iv a revolution,” Dooley remarked. “It’s on’y th’ people iv th’ United States batin’ a carpet.” A century from now, or even a year from now, Americans may say the same about the Tea Party. For the moment, though, it appears that the extreme right wing is on the verge of securing a degree of power over Congress and the Republican Party that is unprecedented in modern American history. For defenders of national cohesion and tempered adversity in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs. ♦