2011-10-14

Republican party headed for civil war; Democrats to follow?

The decline in social mood has led to the first genuine political shift in a generation. Establishment Republicans are worried about the Tea Party because members of Congress in Washington are not turning into typical politicians. They have spent time in DC and unlike previous Republicans, such as the 1994 freshman, they remain opposed to the way DC operates. The war within the GOP is about controlling the direction of the party and it is an expression of social mood. People are in a mood to fight and fights are always in need of drawing a territorial boundary. At the peak of social mood, this boundary is at it's most inclusive; during the decline in social mood this boundary becomes smaller and smaller. Whether this results in a positive development or not depends on how it plays out and your perspective. As someone who believes Washington must change course, I view this as a positive and healthy trend within the declining social mood, a positive outlet to turn public anger into meaningful reform. I anticipate the Democrats may be next, with a challenger to Obama arising soon. Or, the rebellion will take place later, after a political defeat or, should Obama win, after necessary spending cuts destroy the Democrat's base, which is heavily reliant on government programs (and I'm not thinking of welfare here, but government support for industries such as education, healthcare).

Below are random quotes pulled from a very long article that is worth reading to understand the coming political maelstrom in 2012.
Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?

“I can just tell you, when I came to Congress, we were rabble-rousers, but, boy, if you’d asked any of us six months into it how we were enjoying it, we’d have said this was the greatest opportunity of a lifetime,” Weber said. “It just struck me. And it’s part and parcel of this anti-government mind-set.” I wondered if maybe the Tea Partiers’ contempt for Washington was just a kind of outsider’s shtick. “I’d feel better about it if I thought it was,” Weber said glumly.
This is just one of several quotes along these lines, showing the GOP leadership's dismay with the upstart Tea Party.
“The other things they could do,” Kibbe said, “is split off and go third party. If you end up with the wrong guy as the challenger to Obama, it potentially creates a real dilemma for Tea Partiers. And they’re going to have to make one of those decisions.” One of FreedomWorks’s vice presidents, Adam Brandon, jumped in to remind me that Tea Party activists well remember last year’s elections in Florida and Alaska, where establishment candidates for governor and Senate, jilted by primary voters, turned around and ran anyway. The insiders won’t have a lot of credibility now if they argue that bolting the party is a treacherous act.
I do not believe a third party necessarily hands the party to Obama. If the third party candidate is Tea Party, then the GOP splits and loses. If the third party candidate is Ron Paul, then he will pull Tea Party support plus Democrats upset over the war and the bailout, two major issues that Obama not only failed to address, but actually escalated above and beyond Bush Administration policies.
The following is a long bit that gets at the driving force of this trend without naming it: social mood:
“I think we’re going to have to have at least one more election cycle before people get that this isn’t just a typical wave in the business cycle of politics, if you will,” Kibbe told me. “We’ve described the Tea Party movement as a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And we mean that in the technical-economic term. You have tired leadership, and you have bad ideas and just an inability to serve customers well. And that’s when someone comes in with new management and cleans house and either restores the company or breaks it up.”
Kibbe’s metaphor sounded jarringly familiar to me, because it was exactly the kind of language I heard from liberal venture capitalists in Silicon Valley back in 2004, when they were busy fomenting insurrection inside the ranks of the Democratic Party. In fact, a lot of Kibbe’s rhetoric — about hostile takeovers and the “democratization of politics,” for instance — could have come directly from the left-leaning activists and donors who gained influence through forums like Moveon.org and Democracy for America in the latter part of the Bush era. It was this same process of “democratization,” the breakup of the party’s monopoly on money and manpower, that ultimately enabled a black first-term senator to topple his party’s presumed nominee on the way to winning the White House.
There are practical explanations for why both party establishments have undergone some version of this same devolution. The most important, and most obvious, is the proliferation of broadband Internet and the way it has redefined, within the space of just a few years, the very concept of a political movement. Another is the change in campaign-finance rules, which incentivizes ideological contributors to send their checks to outside groups or set up their own, thus creating a network of parallel parties whose influence grows with every election cycle.
But of course, what’s really going on here is a broader cultural assault on the very idea of establishments, which has affected virtually ever other industry in American life in the last 20 years or so, from television networks and music labels to carmakers and local banks. The Tea Party may fade into history, but there will almost certainly be other Tea Parties, and more of them, affecting both parties and arising in ever quicker succession. To believe yourself now to be, literally, an establishment — that is, the one legitimate arbiter of just about anything in American life — is to be tragically misguided.
And finally, the real sore spot for the party, the Ron Paul supporters.
You can imagine how this irritates longtime Republicans in Washington. “The thing I get a kick out of is these Tea Party folks calling me a RINO,” John Feehery, a lobbyist who was once a senior House aide, recently told me. “No, guys, I’ve been a Republican all along. You go off into your own little world and then come back and say it’s your party. This ain’t your party.” Feehery said that Republicans had yet to sort out their “Ron Paul problem,” by which he meant the proliferation of a kind of conspiratorial, anti-Washington rhetoric. “There’s that element of paranoia,” Feehery said. “Establishment Republicans look at these guys and say, ‘You’re nuts.’ ”

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