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GOPocalypse Now

Republican control of the White House and Congress hasn’t resulted in lights being turned off in Cabinet agencies or enormous garage sales of office furniture. Instead, Uncle Sam is still looking like Marlon Brando at the end of his career: bloated, sweaty and slow moving. The GOP has become a Brando-like parody of its former […]

Republican control of the White House and Congress hasn’t resulted in lights being turned off in Cabinet agencies or enormous garage sales of office furniture. Instead, Uncle Sam is still looking like Marlon Brando at the end of his career: bloated, sweaty and slow moving. The GOP has become a Brando-like parody of its former self, reading its lines about cutting government without plausibility or passion. ~Jonah Goldberg

The Brando that the GOP resembles most is the bulky, bald Brando playing the mad Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, not the obese but jovial “Don Octavio de Flores” of Don Juan de Marco, as the GOP has, like the movie’s Col. Kurtz, gone into the heart of darkness (i.e., D.C.) and been reduced to the level of savagery that it found there.  As in Heart of Darkness, there are decapitated heads on display where GOP-Kurtz dwells, representing the principles that it once held but later sacrificed to its own power-lust and madness.  There are so many candidates for the modern counterpart of the lunatic journalist-cum-cult member played by Dennis Hopper that you cannot choose just one. 

This may seem unduly grim, but my view of the end of the GOP majority is not one of these “silver lining,” “let’s step back and reassess things,” “the Republicans need a swift kick to the rear” views.  It is not a view that says GOP control is basically desirable, but has gone slightly awry (pity about the disasters and the treachery!).  It is a view that says two things: there is something profoundly unsound about the structures of our political institutions that feeds the sort of degeneration that the GOP and the movement underwent in the last ten years (in the short version, this is massive centralisation and consolidation of power and the huge revenue-collecting apparatus of the government); as of right now, a continued GOP majority would represent an embrace of every bad tendency inherent in the structures of our political institutions.  This is true whether it involves lying about costs of programs (see Medicare D), lying about war (see Iraq) or lying about about the treatment of prisoners (see administration statements on the treatment of prisoners).  It is hardly as if deceit had been uncommon before unified GOP control, but the GOP leadership today appears to have an almost insatiable need to deceive, defend the deceptions of other party members or be determinedly indifferent to these deceptions.  Perhaps this is always true of the party in power, but it seems to be an acute case with these people.  GOP defeat in November, which I still expect to happen, should not be the moment when conservatives start to “take back” a party that was never really theirs, brief flashes in 1964 and 1980 notwithstanding, but when they finally count the costs of what allying themselves to this party has done to them, their principles and their integrity.  November 8, 2006, the day after the election, can be the day when conservatives declare their intention to be far, far more independent of the GOP, or it can be the day when they decide to redouble their efforts to get The Party started again.   

There are, it is true, more and more Republicans and conservatives jumping off the sinking Bush ship, and there are many who are complicit in the madness who now run for cover like snitches whose cover has been blown.  The snitch comparison is not chosen at random, as there is nothing that better captures the essence of the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency than disloyalty in matters of principle (if we are generous and assume that many of these people did indeed hold the principles they originally espoused and later betrayed), which is perhaps not the least surprising since we have a President who is unusually obsessed with loyalty to his person, who is surrounded by a willing body of servitors willing to glorify and praise him and whose administration chooses staff for its most high priority policies on the basis of their loyalty to the master.  

Some might say, so what else is new?  Disloyalty goes hand in hand with democratic politics (perhaps another solid argument against democratic politics?).  Arguably, every politician makes commitments he cannot keep and all politicians betray the causes they purport to defend, but rarely do this many betray so much so nakedly in such a short time.  Perhaps the old, decent liberals confronted with the abuses of the New Dealers experienced something similar–I can think of few other really good comparisons.  

There is a striking scene from the Ninth Circle of Inferno that describes Judas being chewed for all eternity in the mouth of Satan, as the paragon of traitors suffers most in that circle reserved for traitors, who are the worst of all the damned.  To the extent that conservatives and Republicans betrayed the principles and oaths they vowed to defend and uphold, they will receive a taste of the just retribution meted out to those who not only betray those who trusted in them but those who, by betraying their word, have betrayed themselves.  The horror, the horror, indeed.

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