The Truth About American Politics
May 29, 2012
The Truth About American Politics
Posted by George Packer
Every four years, the torrent of political books that pours from the presses tells you something about the underlying movement of American politics that campaign coverage usually fails to see. The thematic zeitgeist this year is so basic and longstanding that it could have dominated book publishing four years ago, or eight, or even sixteen: the extremism of the Republican Party and how it’s destroying American politics.
This is the subject of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s thorough historical study, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” It’s the angry complaint of “The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted,” a memoir-cum-jeremiad to be published in August by Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer. It’s the underlying diagnosis that’s not quite made explicit in the title of Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein’s new book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.” And it’s the disenchanted theme of “Patriots,” a new novel by the writer David Frum.
That’s an interesting lineup of authors drawn in different ways to the same subject at the same moment. Kabaservice is a young history professor, but the others are, in one way or another, longtime Washington insiders—frogs who have steeped for decades in this particular pot of water and, contrary to the cliché, recognized when it reached a level of intolerability. Lofgren worked for almost thirty years on Capitol Hill. When he arrived, in 1983, he was a moderate Midwesterner looking for short-term employment in government. He found it working for a series of Republican deficit hawks. Back then, there was room in the party for someone like Lofgren, who saw himself above all as a professional congressional staffer with an expertise in defense budgets. For the usual reasons of exigency and inertia—that is, life—he stayed put in his job, while his party and institution deteriorated.
Last year, Lofgren retired in the wake of the Tea Party sweep. Almost immediately, he wrote a devastating essay, “Goodbye to All That,” which described the Republican Party as an “apocalyptic cult” given to lying and delusional thinking in the manner of certain authoritarian political movements of the early twentieth century. (Lofgren did graduate work on German history.) He wrote about how the party took advantage of a profoundly ignorant electorate, an easily conned and distracted media, and a cowed Democratic Party to press the ideological struggle in spite of the deep unpopularity of many of its positions. If all of this had come from a Nation columnist, it would have been unremarkable. Instead, it came from a mild, inconspicuous Hill staffer who hadn’t written a political word in thirty years in Washington. The essay had the feel of a long-repressed confession and the authority of an insider’s testimony, like the anti-war views of a decorated infantry officer. Perhaps the novelty will have worn off by the time the book-length version comes out, but Lofgren’s ideas are trenchant and far-reaching enough to outlast the dog-bites-man quality of the original essay.
Frum is much better known. Most of his earlier books were written from the point of view of a conservative who saw his own side lacking the courage of its convictions. But something changed for Frum in the wake of the Iraq War and other disasters of the Bush Administration, in which he played a small, early role. In 2008, in “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” he urged Republicans to embrace less rigid, more centrist positions on the environment, social issues, economics, and other matters as a way back to power. But that book was quickly overtaken by the party’s rabid reaction to its 2008 defeat and Obama’s Presidency. Instead of moving to the sensible middle, it doubled down on its own extremism, both ideologically and as a matter of strategy. Frum entered into a series of scraps—with the radio loudmouths Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, and with his own employer, the American Enterprise Institute, which fired him after he published a critique of the Republican strategy in trying to kill health-care reform.
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