Hullabaloo

Sunday, August 23, 2009

 
Flank Stake

by digby


I haven't given this a lot of thought, but this post by Howie makes me wonder if the next few years in American politics aren't going to be incredibly volatile ... and fascinating. He contemplates the odd fate of:

stop listening to hate-talk sociopath Glenn Beck earlier this month. Now it looks like Inglis-- like two other South Carolina conservatives, Henry Brown and Joe Wilson, who consider themselves more in line with Reagan Republicanism than Limbaugh Republicanism-- may well be in for some serious trouble holding onto his seat.

[T]he 2010 election will test whether Inglis’ strongly Republican-leaning constituency in the South Carolina’s 4th District believes he is conservative enough. That’s because the six-term congressman has drawn four Republican primary challengers who argue that he isn’t.

Republican State Sen. David Thomas, when he launched his primary campaign in June, said he was “disappointed” in Inglis for voting in early 2007 against the buildup of U.S. troops in the Iraq conflict-- a policy, instituted by President George W. Bush, known as the “troop surge”-- and for voting in late 2008 for the financial industry assistance, or “bailout,” measure (PL 110-343).

Candidate Christina Jeffrey, a professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, said in a statement on her Web site that Inglis is “symbolic of the path many Republicans have taken over the past few years as he has continued to compromise our conservative values.”

Other candidates include Trey Gowdy, a prosecutor, and Jim Lee, an information technology and business consultant. Gowdy, on his Web site, said there is a “near total disconnect between Washington and the people of the 4th Congressional District,” while Lee derided Inglis as a man who has “lost his focus and is now part of the system he originally went to Washington to change.”

When Inglis returned to Congress in 2004 he was less of a radical right firebrand and more of a pragmatic conservative. He backed a few Democratic proposals, though not as many as, say, far right kook Eric Cantor. Inglis grouses that he's drawn so much opposition this year to his own party's lunatic fringe. “Apparently I don’t spit and flail enough,” he said.

The right-wing website, We choose to keep Glenn Beck and replace Bob! may auger rough sailing ahead in a crowded primary where Inglis needs to get 50% to avoid a run-off that could expose him to a major push from the kinds of passionate far right Know Nothings who are overwhelming Charlie Crist in Florida and giving wild-eyed extremist Marco Rubio wins in all the GOP district straw polls.

Looks like it isn't just the Democrats with a little explaining to do to their own base.

Think about that. You have the bases of the two parties challenging their leftmost and rightmost congresspeople to move further left and right. Now, I would make the argument that the leftmost are not nearly as far left and the rightmost are far right. After all, if we were like the teabaggers, we would be showing up at town halls packing heat and demanding the nationalization of industry and worldwide revolution. But the general phenomenon is the same.

I would suggest that this is different than the 70s and 80s when the Democrats fell apart. They immediately distanced themselves from what was perceived to be their crazies and, in fact, nominated a conservative southern Christian at the first opportunity. Sure, there were still big protests against nukes and the like, and the Jesse Jackson coalition in the 80s was widely considered to be a "far left" endeavor. But for the most part, once the Dems lost it in 1980, the party very quickly moved to the center, even though the press continued to pretend that it hadn't.

What we are seeing now is a right wing that has ben mobilized and animated by a certain set of ideas and kept alive by a separate communications infrastructure which will likely not allow the party to drift back to the middle as it might naturally do. And so the party stays in the far right quadrant. And the left, rightly believing that they voted in a Party which should be answerable to their concerns, is flexing its muscle at the same time. It makes for an unbelievable amount of personal tension.

My personal belief is that in a case like this, the political establishment should throw off its Nehru jackets and toss their Madonna bustiers once and for all and grok that times have changed. This is a period where active citizens are going to demand that their political institutions, especially congress and the presidency, use their power to the maximum effect whether to achieve or obstruct.

It would be unpleasant and somewhat brutal, I have no doubt. But it is also a perfectly legitimate way to govern. A liberal party and a conservative party can simply exercise their institutional prerogatives and take the results to the people every two, four and six years. There is nothing in the constitution requiring that the whining Kent Conrads be allowed to have veto power over legislation. (And there is nothing that says progressives can't bring the hammer down on their leadership the same way the Republican base does theirs.)

As average folks without a lot of institutional juice, we citizens don't have a whole lot of options. So we do what we can. But there is one thing we should all probably recognize and deal with: the president, the congress and the media of both parties are all in agreement about one thing: they do not like the rabble at both ends of the spectrum making demands. Remember, it's their town.

And I include the president in that for a reason. It's not a matter of him "miscalculating" or failing to understand the nature of the opposition. He, like all establishment politicians, has an interest in maintaining the status quo, and I would imagine that the fear among all establishment politicians is that this phenomenon might actually bring about real change (as opposed to the fluffy, Madison Avenue version they like to sell.) After all, the president has large majorities and a huge amount of power. It's hard to believe that if he wanted to get real health care reform passed that he couldn't do it. It's not 1994 and the Republicans aren't in ascendance and dominating the discourse. It's not outrageous to make the obvious assumption that he's not doing it for the simple reason that he doesn't want to. And it's not ridiculous to think that one of the reasons for that is that it would empower the base of the Democratic Party and inflame the base of the GOP. At this moment that particular problem appears to be the biggest threat to the permanent political establishment of both parties there is.

Let's face it, the most potentially destabilizing political battles right now are within the parties --- between the leaders and their most ardent adherents. That's actually somewhat encouraging to me. I'm not sure how you could ever break through the ossified structures of the village without something like that. Whether anything actually happens remains to be seen. But it's interesting to think about.


Update: As Greenwald once again thoroughly documents, the media establishment frames all politics as being the Real Americans vs the hippies --- and I'm sure the Democratic establishment couldn't be happier. The Republican establishment actually has a harder task, which may or may not be fortunate for us.


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digby 8/23/2009 04:00:00 PM |