Comments on: Ron Paulians Had Nothing to Do with the Tea Party. Move Along.

By: daveg

daveg — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:07:19 +0000

I still remember the Republicans being against intervention in Haiti and Bosnia.

George W Bush even railed against it during his campaign.

The Republicans were not always this war crazy, and I do agree that for 30% it is just unthinking partisanship.

By: tessellated

tessellated — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:49:47 +0000

I think you are right in that the vast majority of partisans in any party do not do any real political navel-gazing. I think it’s by and large true that they certainly would rally around a republican President who represented a significant break with Bush II on military power and its application. I’m not calling these “thirty-percenters” neocons either. They are simply hyper-loyal brand consumers. It’s the meme itself not the hosts that must be dismantled. It’s certainly under assault, but I don’t think it’s going to disappear. I don’t know if that’s even possible let alone likely, and every time I turn on right-wing radio or similar sources in other media those doubts are reinforced.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:19:18 +0000

I don’t necessarily disagree, though I’m not really sure how many of that 30% are actual neocons. My hunch is that most of them are just pure partisan tribalists who, if our next Republican president were a Buchanan-esque isolationist, would suddenly spin round to that position as if they’d held it the whole time.

By: tessellated

tessellated — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:55:49 +0000

I’m not saying the GOP is monolithic in its attitude to the use of military power. I am saying that very recently one style was in ascendancy, and furthermore that it could happen again. Bush STILL enjoys some 30% approval rating or so. His supporters are not likely to ammend their views — ever — and I could imagine a strong, charismatic candidate reigniting that part of the party all over again. That scenario is considerably less likely for the reasons I already stated but the potential will always be there so long as that philosophy enjoys refuge inside the Republican tent.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:50:02 +0000

Well, even up to Bush II there was a very significant and most times dominant strand of Republicanism that was if not anti-war than at least isolationist enough to resist foreign adventurism. Vietnam was a Democratic war, more or less, and Clinton was fairly on par with Reagan in terms of actual shooting action. Prior to 911, a case could be made that hard-nosed Kissinger/Skowcroft sort of “pragmatism” was the dominant Republican thinking, with a big undercurrent of Pat Buchanan style withdraw from the world.

What’s interesting to me is if you listen to the Republican party these days, there are signs that they have dropped the whole neocon thing like a hot potato. It is no longer an issue which anybody seems much interesting in grinding, which is both understandable but also a marked, marked difference. I think Obama will go a long way to diffuse this among the GOP base—his foreign policy is a pretty decent mix of elements that combine to effectively neutralize most criticisms of him from the right (though he may get some from the left). And I think Bush also certainly has.

In that sense, back to the post at hand, I find it interesting that the GOP, at this point, seems more interesting in throwing in with libertarians on economic points than in throwing them under the bus on foreign policy ones. Taking a step back, that’s a pretty giant leap from where we were even a few years ago.

By: tessellated

tessellated — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:17:36 +0000

I’ll agree that the actual record of Reagan doesn’t always match his mythologizing and it is his now mythic image in the GOP to which I refer. Hard-core republicans — the kind who like to toss around words like ‘appeasement’ or disparage the UN or incessantly dron on about being on the wrong side of history — these people just want someone whose first impulse is always to fight. To them that means strength, and on a national or international stage, that sort of strength is what they mean by strong national defense.

I agree that these things weren’t always so tightly bound together, certainly they weren’t prior to WWII, but times have changed.

By: daveg

daveg — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:07:48 +0000

Eh, truth is Reagan was somewhat reasonable when it came to foreign policy. He was willing to change direction and/or admit he was wrong. And the cold war presented a completely different (and more real) threat.

I don’t think it will be too hard to decouple exceptionalism from foreign military adventures, and I don’t think that coupling was always present.

By: tessellated

tessellated — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:01:07 +0000

To do that you will need to decouple the concepts of a strong national defense from american exceptionalism and imperialism. To be fair, I think that unwinding is underway already. It helps to have a figure in the White House that is mistrusted plus the recent, abject failure of Bush to constantly point to on these very ideas. Still, that undercurrent is very, very strong and all it would take to re-ignite it, I think, is a candidate who could plausibly play the role of Reagan II.

By: daveg

daveg — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:40:53 +0000

I thought this post was most insightful:

[S]peaker after speaker drummed up pro-war jingoism with constant exhortations about �9-11� this, and how �Obama is in bed with the terrorists,� and how he was opposed to the concept of �American Exceptionalism.� This was all punctuated with chants from the stage of �USA! USA! USA!� ... I thought I was going to puke. ... I was handed the mike and started to say, �If you want to end taxation, we need to end the war, and bring the troops home.�

Until the Republican party gets off the war bandwagon they will continue to be losers.

By: angelatc

angelatc — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:39:56 +0000

I read Malkin, skipping over her anti-Islam rants and knowing full well she’s going to let me down hard come next election season. But she is not a pure partisan hack – she is very much a fiscal conservative. She has criticized the GOP consistently over the years over their spending. Even though I have a love-hate relationship with hter, I find that I do get good news from her site.

When she was live-blogging the TARP debate, she even wrote “12:20pm Eastern. Ron Paul is on the floor blasting more debt, more appropriations, more spending, more credit in the market. That is what caused the problem. Ron Paul is right. There I said it.” http://tinyurl.com/3nfok4

But the problem with her is the same problem we’re going to have with the rest of the GOP, best exemplified by the tea party sign that read “Don’t blame me – I voted for Sarah.” As much as they say they want change, they won’t actually change a darned thing.