“A Confederacy Of Zealots”: A Tea Party Purge Among The GOP
The Republican Party has reached its Ninotchka period. Ninotchka, you may recall, was the eponymous Soviet commissar played by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 MGM comedy, released one year after Stalin’s show trials resulted in the execution of all of the tyrant’s more moderate predecessors in the Soviet leadership. “The last mass trials were a great success,” Ninotchka notes. “There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
Like the Stalinists and the Jacobins, today’s tea party zealots have purified their movement — not by executing but by driving away those Republicans who don’t share their enthusiasm for wrecking their country if they can’t compel the majority to embrace their notions. Today, there are fewer but “better” Republicans — if “better” means adhering to the tea party view that a United States not adhering to tea party values deserves to be brought to a clangorous halt. NBC News-Wall Street Journal polling last week turned up a bare 24 percent of Americans who have a favorable impression of the Republican Party — a share almost as low as the 21 percent who have a favorable impression of the tea party.
Also like the Stalinists and Jacobins, today’s Republicans devour their past leaders. To the hard-core right wing, the Bushes, Mitt Romney, Bob Dole and John McCain are irritating vestiges of the party’s pussyfooting past; none was sufficiently devoted to rolling back the federal government when he had the chance. Thankfully, the Bushes et al. haven’t met the fate of Bukharin and Danton — but they are as conspicuously absent from today’s Republican rallies and state conventions as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin are conspicuously present.
If anything illustrates just how far today’s Republicans have drifted from their traditional moorings, it’s the dismay with which their longtime business allies have greeted their decisions to close the government and threaten default. Such pillars of the Republican coalition as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation have called for an end to the shutdown and an increase in the debt limit. Bruce Josten, the chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, told The Post last week that his organization is considering backing primary challenges to tea party incumbents.
Today’s tea party-ized Republicans speak less for Wall Street or Main Street than they do for the seething resentments of white Southern backwaters and their geographically widespread but ideologically uniform ilk. Their theory of government, to the extent that they have one, derives from John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification — that states in general and white minorities in particular should have the right to overturn federal law and impede majority rule. Like their predecessors in the Jim Crow South, today’s Republicans favor restricting minority voting rights if that is necessary to ensure victory at the polls.
The remarkable resurgence of these ancient and despicable doctrines is rooted in the politics of demographic and cultural despair. A series of focus groups that Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg conducted of evangelical and tea party Republicans (who, combined, constitute a majority of party members) found that they entertain a widespread and fatalistic belief that the United States is well on its way to becoming a socialist state by virtue of the growing number of non-white Americans’ dependence on government. Encapsulating the groups’ perspectives, Greenberg writes: “Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.”
It does not register with these Republicans that Obamacare, which facilitates more widespread access to privatized insurance, is nowhere as socialistic as Medicare and Social Security. It seems that some believe that Obamacare is socialistic because they fear it will chiefly benefit the welfare queens of Republican lore, while Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries include millions of deserving people just like them — the disproportionately elderly and white Republican Party’s members.
It should not have been surprising, then, that demonstrators waved Confederate flags at the tea party demonstration Sunday on the Mall while demanding that congressional Republicans not succumb to the pressure to compromise and that the Obama administration open the Mall’s monuments, the World War II memorial in particular. The tea party’s theory of government and the fear and loathing that many adherents harbor toward minorities find a truer expression in the Confederate flag than in the Stars and Stripes.
It’s not clear whether those waving the Confederate flag on Sunday favored opening the Lincoln Memorial. I suspect, however, that the Republican enshrined there wouldn’t have favored them.
By: Harol Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
“Deep Seated Racial Antagonism”: Tea Partiers React With Fury To A World They Can’t Control
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many pundits and political observers were eager to expunge the nation’s brutal and long-running history of stark racial oppression. They spoke of a “post-racial” society freed from the divisions of tribe, healed of the deep wounds that ached and bled along the color line for centuries.
Even those who were less sanguine about the disappearance of racism — myself included — believed that the election of the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of greater racial harmony and understanding. Surely, a nation ready to be led by a black man was ready to let go many of its oldest and ugliest prejudices.
But that was a very naive notion. It turns out that Obama’s election has, instead, provoked a new civil war, a last battle cry of secession by a group of voters who want no part of a country led by a black man, no place in a world they don’t rule, no home in a society where they are simply one more minority group. Call those folks “Tea Partiers.”
The ultraconservatives who have taken over the Republican Party are motivated by many things — antipathy toward the federal government, conservative religious beliefs and a traditional Republican suspicion of taxes, among them. But the most powerful force animating their fight is a deep-seated racial antagonism.
Don’t take my word for it. Democracy Corps, a political research and polling group headed by Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, has published a report from a series of focus groups conducted with segments of the Republican Party — moderates, evangelicals and Tea Partiers.
The report confirms that Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers, “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority. The race issue is very much alive.” It also notes that “Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters.”
Tea Partiers believe that the Democratic Party is intent on expanding the social safety net in order, basically, to buy votes. They see “Obamacare” as a sop to that alleged 47 percent of lazy Americans who don’t want to work, don’t pay any taxes and live off government handouts. And, of course, those lazy Americans are, in their view, voters of color.
One focus group participant actually described the mythical America he pined for this way:
“Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. … Very homogeneous.”
Democracy Corps isn’t the only research group that has ferreted out the racial antagonism at the heart of Tea Partiers’ radicalism. Writing in The New York Times, journalist Thomas Edsall shared portions of an email exchange with political scientist Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. Parker said that “reactionary conservatives” believe “social change is subversive to the America with which they’ve become familiar, i.e., white, mainly male, Protestant, native born, straight. ‘Real Americans,’ in other words.”
None of this should come as any great surprise. In 2010, a New York Times poll of Tea Partiers found that more than half said the policies of the Obama administration favor the poor, and 25 percent thought that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public. Their racial paranoia has long been clear.
If anything has been surprising, it’s been the potency of their hatred, the irrationality of their tactics, the venom in their backlash. But, as they see it, they are fighting for their way of life — their control, their power.
This is an existential battle, and they’re willing to burn down the country to save it from people of color. That’s why they’re willing to risk defaulting on the nation’s debt for the first time in history.
The only whiff of good news is that Tea Party supporters tend to be older than average. Their cohort is diminishing and will be replaced by a younger voting bloc whose members don’t hew to their antediluvian views.
But the Tea Partiers are going to be with us for a while, and it’s going to be a wild ride.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 12, 2013
“The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways”: FEC Investigation Into Michele Bachmann’s Election Campaign Now Focusing On Marcus
In 2011, Michele Bachmann claimed God spoke to her and told her to run for president. Apparently, the Lord works in mysterious ways. The Minnesota Congresswoman’s presidential campaign was a disaster on the inside even more than on the outside, as evidenced by all the ethics investigations she’s facing. Now Marcus Bachmann, the Congresswoman’s husband, is the subject of a Federal Elections Commission investigation, according to the New York Times.
“The latest is a federal inquiry into whether an outside ‘super PAC’ improperly coordinated strategy with Mrs. Bachmann’s campaign staff, including her husband, in violation of election laws,” the Times reports
In a complaint to the F.E.C. in February, Peter Waldron, a Florida Republican operative hired to enlist evangelical Iowa pastors, described overhearing the president of the super PAC ask Brett O’Donnell, a senior campaign adviser, about radio and TV stations.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Waldron said Mr. O’Donnell had replied, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Election law prohibits substantial coordination, though not all contacts, between campaigns and super PACS, Mr. Ryan said.
Mr. Waldron, who calls himself a whistle-blower, also disclosed an e-mail from Mr. Bachmann describing a phone call Mr. Bachmann made to a donor asking for $7,000. In the e-mail, Mr. Bachmann wrote that the donor had agreed to give the money through the super PAC. He concluded: “Praise the Lord!! Thank you Peter for your servant leadership.”
Mr. Ryan said the call appeared to violate a rule against campaign staff members raising more than $5,000 for a super PAC.
Regular readers of The New Civil Rights Movement are all too familiar with Peter Waldron, Bachmann’s evangelical outreach director who has ties a top advocate of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.
Even the Times notes Waldron “has a controversial past,” and adds:
In 2006 he was jailed briefly in Uganda for possession of assault rifles, according to news reports. In the 1990s he led a Florida youth charity that received more than $600,000 in state and local grants before it collapsed amid questions about its effectiveness, according to The St. Petersburg Times, now The Tampa Bay Times.
But there’s so much more.
Waldron, who one year before the 2012 elections announced that the Holy Ghost had told him Michele Bachmann is the one for president, just published a new book, Bachmannistan: Behind The Lines, that claims Rep. Bachmann fired a staffer who had seven children, and another on the way, on Christmas eve.
Christian family values?
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, September 6, 2013
“The End Of The Evangelical Era”: The Stamp Of Approval Of Christian Conservatives Has Become Far Less Meaningful
Saturday, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz, two of the many candidates whose names are being bandied about for the 2016 presidential race, made a pilgrimage to Iowa to speak at the Family Leadership Summit. There, as part of a nine-hour marathon of speeches to an audience of 1,500 evangelical Christians, Cruz and Santorum joined a host of conservative politicians and public figures—including Donald Trump, that standard-bearer of wingnuttery—in lambasting Obamacare, the Internal Revenue Service, and the GOP establishment. Pastor Rafael Cruz, father of Senator Cruz, spoke vividly and at length about liberals’ attempts to turn the country into a socialist paradise. “Socialism requires that government becomes your god,” he said. “That’s why they have to destroy the concept of God. They have to destroy all loyalties except loyalty to government. That’s what’s behind homosexual marriage.”
More than highlighting the candidates and issues that will drive the 2016 primaries, the event illustrates the waning influence of Christian conservative leaders like Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, the summit organizer. Most GOP contenders will seek a blessing from multiple evangelical heavyweights—Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, to name a few—but these are, increasingly, empty rituals. Even if the aging scions of the Christian Right can agree on the best GOP candidate (which, in 2012, they struggled mightily to do), their stamp of approval is far less meaningful for evangelical voters than it was two decades ago.
At the summit, Congressman Steve King, the Iowa arch-conservative, encouraged pastors to defy the Internal Revenue Service, which forbids religious leaders whose churches have tax-exempt status from speaking out on partisan issues, and preach politics from the pulpit. Ted Cruz mocked his Republican colleagues for their failure to repeal Obamacare and suggested that the U.S. reform its tax code by dismantling the IRS. Santorum scolded moderate and libertarian Republicans for abandoning social issues like same-sex marriage. These are red-meat issues for older conservative Christians, but could hurt Republicans among younger and more moderate evangelicals. For example, a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that a slim majority of young white evangelical Protestants supports same-sex marriage.
Other potential 2016 candidates are already in Vander Plaats’ sights, even if they were absent at the summit. Texas Governor Rick Perry attended last year’s Family Leadership Summit and Vander Plaats has spoken approvingly of Senator Rand Paul. Notably, however, Vander Plaats is less enthusiastic about politicians with even a whiff of moderate sympathies; he decried Senator Marco Rubio’s bipartisan work on immigration reform, saying there was “no way” Iowa evangelicals would vote for him in 2016. He also had critical words for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; according to Vander Plaats, Christie’s conservative credentials aren’t strong enough to capture the nomination.
George W. Bush was the last Republican candidate who was considered sufficiently socially conservative to garner approval from evangelical leaders like Robertson and Jerry Falwell and still win a general election. In January 2012, faced with the prospect of Mitt Romney—a moderate and a Mormon—as the presumptive Republican nominee, 150 members of the evangelical old guard gathered on a ranch in Texas to reach a consensus on the best alternative to Romney. After mulling their alternatives in the motley GOP field, which included Bachmann, Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich, the leaders endorsed Santorum, a Catholic with a strong emphasis on social issues and a sharp contrast to Romney the business maven.
Their followers’ response, in the primaries that followed, was mixed. Romney’s eventual nomination remained almost certain; conservative evangelicals’ support for Santorum only helped delay the inevitable until May. But in the general election, nearly eight in ten evangelicals voted for Romney.
“The days of evangelical leaders crowning political princes are well behind us,” says Robert P. Jones, the CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit public opinion research organization. “Evangelicals are still a huge part of the GOP base, but they’re no longer taking their cues from a handful of well-known leaders.”
Keeping the spotlight on Iowa is one of the best ways for Christian conservative leaders to retain some influence over the nomination process. But preserving their foothold will be an uphill battle. To Vander Plaats’ chagrin, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, a Republican, is threatening to do away with the Ames Straw Poll, an event that’s traditionally been important for party fundraising, saying that it has “outlived its usefulness.” The Straw Poll, which was first held in 1979, has been a crucial way for the Christian Right to advance their agenda in the presidential race since 1988, when Pat Robertson pulled off a spectacular first-place finish, setting the tone for the rest of the primary. If the Iowa Republican Party scraps the event, Vander Plaats says, his group is ready to fill the gap with another Family Leadership Summit in 2015. But it wouldn’t be the same kind of media magnet as the Ames Straw Poll, which offers fried butter on a stick as well as GOP candidates.
The extreme rhetoric that revved up the crowd this past weekend isn’t likely to resonate as strongly among mainstream GOP voters or even more moderate evangelicals. If the Family Leadership Summit is any guide, the efforts of potential 2016 candidates like Ted Cruz to secure evangelical leaders’ support—and, by proxy, Christian conservatives’ votes—will define the margins, not the center, of the GOP race.
By: Amelia Thompson-Deveaux, The American Prospect, August 13, 2013
“The GOP’s Limited Appeal”: New Data Shows Why The Next Republican Nominee Is Screwed
Immigration reform isn’t quite dead yet, but the political fall-out of immigration reform’s demise is pretty clear: the GOP rebrand is going to be pretty tough. Despite relatively favorable circumstances, immigration reform advocates weren’t able to drag the party toward the center. And if congressional Republicans can’t advance the rebrand by allowing losing issues—like a pathway to citizenship or background checks on gun purchases—to advance through Congress and depart from consideration in 2016, then the next Republican nominee will be left with the difficult task of broadening the appeal of the GOP.
Today, a new Pew Research survey suggests that Republican presidential candidates won’t find it easy to move toward the center. The poll shows that Republicans recognize the need for change—with 59 percent even suggesting they need to change on the issues. But when it comes to the specifics, most Republicans support maintaining the party’s current positions or even moving further to the right. When asked about the party’s current stance on gay marriage, immigration, government spending, abortion, and guns, at least 60 percent of Republicans said they thought the party was about right or too moderate.
Desire for change was greatest, if still very limited, on cultural conservative issues. On gay marriage, 31 percent of Republicans said they wanted the party to moderate. But 27 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough (do they want a return to sodomy laws?) and another 33 percent were satisfied with the party’s current stance. The numbers were similar on abortion: 25 percent wanted the party to moderate, but 26 percent thought the party wasn’t conservative enough, and another 41 percent were satisfied with the party’s current position.
On immigration, where the party’s current position is potentially less clear to voters, the Republican rank-and-file isn’t itching to get behind a compromise. 17 percent support moving to the left on immigration, compared to 36 percent who want the party to get more conservative. More generally, 67 percent of Republicans think the party is compromising too much or the right amount with Democrats.
Unfortunately, the poll offered fewer answers on economic issues, the center of much of the discussion of the Republican “rebrand.” The poll only asked about government spending, where Republicans are predictably all but unified—only 10 percent want the party to moderate, compared to 46 percent who want a more conservative stance and another 41 percent who are satisfied with the party’s current position. But the poll offers few answers on other economic issues, like taxes, Wall Street, or the various proposals for making the party more “populist” within its current ideological bounds. The degree of party unity on government spending, however, suggests that there might not be very much space for movement on economic issues.
With little Republican appetite for moderation, it’s not surprising that Rubio’s numbers have dropped. It’s also not surprising that he’s moving to reaffirm his conservative credentials on the push to defund Obamacare and ban abortion after twenty weeks. These numbers suggest that the Republicans won’t be eager to nominate someone pushing the party to moderate, at least on cultural issues and government spending. Chris Christie’s favorability ratings suggest as much: He’s only at plus-17, with 47 percent favorable and a sizable 30 percent holding an unfavorable opinion. That’s worse than Romney ever had, and it’s probably inconsistent with winning the Republican nomination.
The composition of the Republican primary electorate makes the challenge even greater. In the Pew poll, 49 percent of Republicans who participate in every primary support the tea party—just 22 percent consider themselves moderate. In last year’s primaries, evangelical Christians represented more than 40 percent of the electorate in just about every major contest, including relatively moderate Romney states like Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.
Given today’s numbers and Mitt Romney’s difficulty securing the nomination, it’s highly unclear whether Republicans could nominate a candidate who wants to moderate the party. And if the primary process is unlikely to yield a candidate who can moderate the party, then the Republican House would be wise to preemptively bail out the next Republican candidate, and relieve them of the obligation to oppose a pathway to citizenship, background checks on gun purchases, or whatever else. That doesn’t look like it will happen. Instead, it looks like Republicans will need to count on the appeal of their 2016 presidential candidate and economic fundamentals to overcome the party’s limited appeal.
By: Nat Cohn, The New Republic, July 31, 2013
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