Guest blogged by D.R. Tucker
Mike Lofgren’s new book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted
Lofgren, who spent nearly three decades as a Republican congressional staffer working at various points for then-Rep. John Kasich of Ohio and then-Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, garnered national attention last year for a Truth-Out.org piece entitled “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.”
In that piece, he famously declared, “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.”
The Party Is Over is more than an extension of the Truth-Out piece; in fact, it is the best description of the intellectual and moral collapse of Washington since Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism…
Lofgren makes it clear at the outset that the Republicans can get away with their insanity in part because the Democrats don’t fight aggressively enough for sanity:
Lofgren notes that when he first started working in Washington, bipartisan coalitions were still possible, and members of his party still valued facts, reason and logic. Thanks to such figures as Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove, the GOP gradually and “collectively lost its mind” and became the party of Grave Overarching Partisanship:
This led to the development of GOP talking points that depicted the Democrats as weak on national defense, anti-religious and elitist — talking points that were able to take hold in the vacuum of an eviscerated corporate mainstream media [emphasis added]:
Thanks to Gingrich and Rove (among others), the GOP is no longer a conservative party in the Burkean sense, Lofgren charges, but a “radical right-wing party” that “is no longer a party of governance, because it has no positive, workable agenda with which to exercise power: it has become the ‘anti’ party par excellence.”
A fetish for the military-industrial complex now defines the GOP: Lofgren notes that the “authoritarian national security and law and order mentality that has gripped the Republican faithful” has created a situation in which the party’s base gleefully accepts limitations on civil liberties:
Of course, there’s a reason the GOP gets away with this madness:
The ideologically juiced-up GOP has been able to bamboozle the public with empty catchphrases (Lofgren sarcastically notes that the so-called “job creators” have created most of those jobs in China!) and half-truths (the “Half of Americans don’t pay taxes!” talking point), all of which are promoted not only through Republican media but also through the “corporate-owned business press.”
As a result of this brainwashing, too few Americans realize how obsessed the GOP is with unlimited military spending and warmaking (much of which is advocated by “the neoconservative Weekly Standard, the supposedly liberal New Republic, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and increasingly that of the Washington Post“) and scorn for climate science (based on donations from fossil-fuel companies and a distorted understanding of Scripture).
Lofgren specifically rebukes the rise of “the belligerent frat-boy conservative, a political lifestyle and performance art launched in the 1980s by P.J. O’Rourke” and most recently exemplified by “the late Andrew Breitbart and his protégé, James O’Keefe.” The frat-boy conservatives, writes Lofgren, “earn their bona fides by praising belligerence and touting ignorance of world affairs as a moral virtue, notwithstanding the fact that they have no core of fixed moral beliefs at all, religious or intellectual.”
However, Lofgren repeatedly emphasizes that the Democrats have their own maladies, namely what Current TV host Cenk Ugyur calls “corporatist Democrats,” including such figures as Sen. Max Baucus of Montana and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. Lofgren strongly denounces the Obama administration for continuing many of President Bush’s “antiterrorism” efforts, and attacks “left-leaning think tanks” (such as the Center for American Progress) for not being more vocal against President Obama’s foreign-policy decisions.
“The [Department of Defense] budget grew more under Obama than it had been projected to grow by the Bush administration,” Lofgren declares. “Various illegal or unconstitutional regimes involving surveillance, detention, and trial instituted by Bush have been retained, consolidated, and strengthened under Obama. On the domestic front, Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Wall Street messenger boy, saw to it that there would be no CEO compensation limits in the Dodd-Frank bill, and that the bill as a whole would be more façade than substance.”
Lofgren concludes by noting that there is a way to reform the American system: “Get money out of elections — get all private money out of our public elections. Federally funded campaigns will undoubtedly create new problems, but can they be remotely as bad as the auctioning of candidates that occurs today?”
A “reasonable but limited amount of free [televised] political advertising” and the elimination of grotesquely gerrymandered congressional districts would also produce the reforms necessary to get both parties back on track, he writes. (Lofgren also embraces the controversial concept of “open, nonpartisan primaries with the top two finishers contesting the general election.”)
However, those reforms will not become reality until and unless the American people demand these changes. “It is long past time,” Lofgren writes, “for average Americans to switch off Entertainment Tonight and become well-informed citizens on foreign and national security policy issues…If you want politicians to treat you as a citizen rather than as a subject, don’t give them reasons to regard you with contempt.”
You can’t watch it in a theater or on DVD, but The Party Is Over is one of the best political documentaries in years. Washington will hate this book. It stands to reason: doesn’t the criminal always hate the prosecutor?
D.R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer and a former contributor to the conservative website Human Events Online. He has also written for the Huffington Post, the Boston Herald, ClimateCrocks.com, FrumForum.com, the Ripon Forum, Truth-Out.org, TheNextRight.com, and BookerRising.com. In addition, he hosted a Blog Talk Radio program, The Notes, from August 2009 to June, 2010. You can follow him on Twitter here: @DRTucker.
This book (confession?) appears to be in the same vein as Sandy Weill’s recommendation to reinstate Glass/Steagall. I’ll paraphrase… “I’ve done all I can to corrupt the system in favor of the 1% and corporations. I’ve become super rich because of my actions, so now I can come clean before I die.”
I won’t buy the book.
The federal government on (driven by both sides of the aisle) must shrink. I have little hope that it will happen.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/08/15/there-ought-not-to-be-a-law
“the plutocracy that runs the country”
Mike Lofgren got that right on the money.
Davey Crocket doesn’t get it, and, judging from the comments he’s left at this site, I seriously doubt he ever will.
The problem is not and never has been the size of the federal government per se. The problem is whether government complies with its constitutionally recognized function of promoting the general welfare or is used simply as a tool to secure unchecked corporate wealth and power.
The GOP has never truly been concerned about the size of government. To the contrary, federal spending under every Republican administration since Reagan has far exceeded that under Democratic Presidents.
Republicans love big government when it comes to the military, wars, and controlling the personal lives of ordinary citizens (e.g., the war on women, the war on drugs).
The GOP’s true concern is the accountability that accompanies democratic governance and the rule of law.
They and their Wall Street cronies treat the national treasury as if it were their personal piggy bank. They create massive deficits because those provide a great excuse to destroy the New Deal. Outsourcing, a war on unions and the middle class, an unlimited ability to flood the airwaves with the type of political propaganda that only corporate wealth can buy and the elimination of the New Deal safety net all serve as a means to disarm the Democratic opposition — all with an eye toward oligarchy in which billionaires like Charles and David Koch become the masters of us all.
It is corporate tyranny, not big government, that is the true threat to liberty in the 21st Century U.S.
Canning,
Personal attacks in your opening statement…no surprise…
You are under the impression that all of the government bureaucrats are pure as the driven snow and anxious to deliver life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Meanwhile they have conferences, hire clowns and drink the night away http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/opinion/collins-send-in-the-clowns-and-cheese.html?_r=2.
You are delusional. I am not.
The larger the government, the more the waste.
Davey– There was nothing personal in Ernest’s observation of your comments. You have shown an inability to have an informed discussion on this site.
Ernest– Nice post, a book I will buy.
D.R. Tucker– Nice article. Thank you.
Davey @5-
1. It wasn’t a personal attack. It was an expression of opinion that you don’t get it. In my dealings with you I’d have to agree.
I’d add that you yourself make weird, personal, gratuitous jabs not infrequently. In your last comment in which you mentioned me, after we’d had a bit of back and forth, you described me as tightly wound, or something, whatever that might mean.
2. As is your style, you completely fabricate some wacky point of view(“You are under the impression that all of the government bureaucrats are pure as the driven snow..”), irrationally attribute it to someone else(Ernie), and then get all self-righteous about him holding crazy views that he’s never expressed. Makes no sense. Again.
3. Gratuitous name-calling(the sort of personal attacks you so decry)–“You are delusional”.– The self-delusion here is you ascribing views to Ernie he does not hold.
4. Then you finish strong by returning to your original point as if Ernie never presented any of the actual coherent arguments that he did and which you completely ignored. Again.
5. This is why people think you’re a troll. You seem incapable of following opposing views and argument and responding with anything resembling sense. But you do take up a lot of time.
David Lasagna @8 in his statement that the first sentence of my comment @4 was not a personal attack, but, instead, simply an observation.
Mr. Crocket’s ad hominem reply @5 attests to the accuracy of that observation.
In assessing the true nature 21st Century GOP that so concerns Loftgren, it is perhaps useful to consider the description of “the American fascist” offered by Vice President Henry Wallace at a time when our nation was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism in Europe. In an April 9, 1944 New York Times op-ed, Wallace wrote:
They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.
Ernest A Canning you have really hit it out of the park on both post. I couldn’t agree more. The republican party is using deceit and Fox propoganda channel is feeding their cult members the big lie-spin and they eat it up. Thank you for your wisdom. I was watching a program where they had this professor on and he started to tell what the corporation were doing to get out of paying taxes and hoard profits and the moderator cut him off real quick. At one time we used the media to watch the goverment and Corp’s but that has completely changed.
Vote stealing in the primaries. I noticed in the 2008 election, the states that used voting machines went for hillary, caucus states went for Obama.
Here is a comment from the Bangor Daily News online in Maine re. to the republican party disenfranchising Ron Paul supporters. I might add that most of the commenters were appalled at the way they were treated, even if it was their own party.
“There is no taking over. The only people allowed at the state convention are the people eleceted at the delegations. It is litterally impossible to ‘take over’ the convention. These are the people who where chosen to go to the convention. It is done this way to prevent people from taking over a convention. Does it seem strange that the delegation states were predominantly Ron Paul, while the states that had open voting that used voting machines that have been proven to be unreliable went to the person trying to buy the presidency?”