The Republican Party is an Apocalyptic Cult

Mike Lofgren, long-time Republican congressional staffer who just retired, has this to say about his fellow Republicans:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. . . . .

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. . . .

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit.

I agree with every word of this, except that I think China has more prisoners than the US. I also agree with Lofgren about the root cause: the slowdown in the improvement of middle class living standards. Modern societies buy loyalty by making people constantly richer, and most Americans, depending on which numbers you believe, are either just holding their own or actually falling behind. Neither party is offering any solution to this problem, and this leaves undecided voters subject to easy manipulation about side issues.

The "government" is not the problem, or rather it is "the problem" only to the extent that WE are the problem, because our government is us. We tell it what to do. The government is how we, the people, act together. Certainly it happens that rich, well-connected insiders sometimes manipulate the government to advance their own interests, but that is only because the voters are not paying close enough attention. If voters are angry about "corruption," they should find out which politicians really are in the pockets of corporate interests and vote them out.

For 30 years now the Republican party has been spreading the myth that our government is somehow inherently corrupt and inefficient, and then acting to make it more corrupt and inefficient. For example, Republicans have been running up the deficit and then complaining that "the government" can't live within its means. As Lofgren explains, this works in the sense that it makes undecided voters disgusted about the whole system. We need to hold Republican leaders, not "government," accountable for their misdeeds.