The Collapse Of The Republican Circus Tent

By Cernig

There's got to be more than a little schaudenfreude involved for Dems watching the G.O.P.'s meltdown as the worst-run Republican campaign in recent history gasps its way towards the finish line. The theocrat Family Research Council is accusing the NRCC of "abandoning social conservative candidates". McCain aides are already sending out resumes because they're already certain they won't be getting jobs in the next administration. Sarah Palin seems to be working for herself, rather than her running mate, even while the old wardog is still trying to guard her back from media spotlights.

E.J. Dionne calls it a conservative civil war - which is hardly the one the extreme Right have been looking forward to for so long. He writes:

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity -- and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

And then there is George W. Bush. Conservatives once hailed him as creating an enduring majority on behalf of their cause. Now, they cast him as the goat in their story of decline.

... Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush's apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the "real America" is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin's speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

For years, the Right has had a big tent - full of bread and circuses for Joe Sixpack, Joe Biblebelt and not-so-poor Joe Plumber - while the Left has been herding cats in a fractured coalition that couldn't find anyone or anything worth coalescing around. Now the tabels are turned, bigtime. Schaudenfreude? Pass the popcorn!

Comments

[HyperIon]

Dionne says: It isn't working anymore.

My question: why did it ever work?