Many analysts seem shocked at the unity of Republicans in Congress. They should not be.
It goes all the way down to the grassroots. (To the left, Virginia GOP chair Jeff Frederick and his family. By all means do follow him on Twitter.)
There is a tremendous depth of feeling on behalf of what are called Republican Principles, among the rank-and-file. They may be a minority, even a small-and-shrinking one, but in that unity there is strength.
And danger. Just ask the people of California.
Documentary film director Alexandra Pelosi calls what is happening to the GOP a grieving process, but it may be something far more insidious, as you will understand with a little history.
The modern Republican Party has its genesis in World War II, in the all-out struggle against Hitler and Japan. This was a galling time, because until December 7 a substantial part of the party had been isolationist. In the effort to root-out people like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, the party became hyper-patriotic, and sought from then on to out-do the Democrats in that area.
McCarthyism was the result. (Republicans still prefer to call it anti-communism.) While there were some Democratic McCarthyites (like Pat McCarran, after whom Las Vegas' Airport is named) it was primarily a Republican phenomenon. It was, in many ways, a natural reaction to the unity of purpose shown (or seem to have been shown) by our enemies. McCarthyites like Richard Nixon sought to create that same unity of purpose here.
Once you understand that modern Republicanism goes back almost 70 years, you start to see what is happening now in a new light. What was in our time called neo-conservatism, the conservatism of the Iraq War, is at its heart. Goldwater turned that rage into an ideology, billionaires like Richard Scaife turned that movement into institutions, and the addition of Fundamentalist Christianity only added to the brew.
What was built, over time, was a political movement of internal consistency and intense loyalty. Anyone who questioned was quickly isolated and banished. You can see this in what happened to David Brock after his well-publicized conversion, in how conservatives now feel about former Nixon official John W. Dean, or the complete political U-turn blogger John Cole had to go through after questioning Bush policies. (Dennis Miller and Ron Silver drew critics, and Joe Lieberman drew a primary challenge, but none endured death threats.)
Those who question Republican principles, in other words, are shunned as thoroughly as ex-Mormons or ex-Scientologists.
When any American political movement loses decisively, recovery takes decades.
Liberalism took decades to reform itself into Clinton's Third Way, and Herbert Hoover spent the bulk of his 34-year post-Presidential life trying to regain the reputation of his ideas. It took Democrats two generations to become a majority again after the Civil War.
In all these cases what rose and what fell had little in common. Parties have to go through more than a grieving process. They have to replace many of their ideals, jettisoning some outright and going yeah-but to some of their opponents' principles, before they even have a chance to build something new. That something new, as I've said, must rest on a new generation, a new medium, and a new format for making political decisions, in order to take hold.
What concerns me is the violence inherent in the right's rhetoric, and the ease with which that rhetoric can be turned into violent action. Before 9-11 the biggest American terrorist was an American conservative, Timothy McVeigh. (Above, McVeigh's handiwork.) The racist and militia movements of the 1990s found legitimacy and validation in the policies of George W. Bush after 9-11. We have already seen post-Bush terrorism in this country.
While attaching Republicans to future violence and branding those who engage in such violence as the terrorists they are may win elections for Democrats, it will not destroy the far-right movement, as the Weathermen destroyed America's far left after 1969. The reason, as I've noted is that its roots run much deeper. The length of its history is more akin to that of the racist attitudes that lived on for for 100 years after the Civil War, and in some ways survives still.
Until Republicans as a mass reject what their party is today they can't hope to return to power, because Americans are by nature a non-violent people, slow to anger and tolerant of differences.
We will know that turn is coming only when conservatives lose Republican primaries, and when violent Republican rhetoric is seen by other Republicans as an invitation to terror. I don't see that happening.
We are far more likely to see civil war over the next decade than a civil peace.
