As shown repeatedly throughout history, we frequently end up becoming the thing we hate the most.
Usually this process happens gradually, as the hard-and-fast rules we live by are bit by bit compromised, until we can hardly recognize what it is we were doing in the first place. It is at that moment, when we have what those in recovery refer to as a moment of clarity, that the reality hits home. I am [insert antagonist] . It is tragic irony, in the Greek sense.
The modern day GOP is suffering that same fate.
By now, we've all seen the recent GOP 'Pledge to America'. It caught few off guard. Predictably, it was against nearly everything the Obama administration has done, and proposes we essentially repeal the last two years. Among the complaints (which I'm sure they'd had loved to nail to a door somewhere, Martin Luther style), was some recent environmental regulation which apparently led to the closure of two incandescent light bulb factories. This story was covered on Salon: Light Bulb Lunacy
Something struck me after I finished reading it. The GOP, in it's present form, is constantly thumping it's own chest about how it is the party of 'freedom, liberty, free markets, capitalism, etc.' This has been their mantra for at least 40 years. Yet, tragically, as so often happens, the GOP is now the USSR.
We in the USA learned a lesson in the late 19th, and early 20th centuries. Free enterprise is great. Too much of it backfires. What I mean is this: unregulated markets can, and frequently do, trend towards having total control of an industry in a single company. This is understandable, as the primary goal of going into industry is to turn a buck; and the best way to turn that buck is usually to eliminate competition. Buy outs, mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers- and as a company integrates horizontally, and vertically, you end up with US Steel, or Standard Oil.
The result? The supposed free market is now under the dictate of an enormous corporation, accountable to none.
One result of a monopoly, is that innovation is usually stifled. Picture Bell Telephones, and the same black phone we used for 50 years.
So, in rigidly adhering to a supposed 'free-market' ideology, opposed in principal to the very notion of government interference in the sacred market, the Republicans have ended up in the same tragic situation as so often happens.
The GOP of today is the Soviet Union of the past- languishing behind because they couldn't see fit to let the typewriter industry die out to be replaced by something newer.
They claim to believe in unfettered free markets- but their policies lead inexorably to singular control by something far less accountable than our government. And in decrying the push in the right direction the government has attempted to give the economy in the name of a dying industry, they have become the very foes to free-market capitalism they have always feared.