Waiting for "mainstream conservatives" to "wake up" to the threat of Right Wing terrorism is comparable to waxing your ice skates in hell. They jumped the shark over a decade ago.
With the blossoming of full blown lunacy on the Right following the election of Barack Obama there's been a swelling chorus of plaintive cries from the left and the middle. When, such voices ask, will the responsible conservatives speak up? When will the respectable conservatives arise and retake their party and movement from the delusional fanatics that have hijacked it?
Such queries are a waste of breath, because the answer is never.
The ugly reality is that no one hijacked either conservatism or the GOP. What we are witnessing today is the culmination of a conscious decision by the GOP to make common cause with the most malignant and violent tendencies in American politics.
Some will trace the roots of this Faustian bargain back to Richard Nixon's southern strategy with its pandering to the disaffected white racism of the southern tier. Others mark the GOP's similarly opportunistic marriage to the religious right with its rampant misogyny and homophobia as a key point.
No doubt these were important signposts on the road to ruin but the GOP's current crypto-fascist state transcends the cynical pandering and opportunism that these tactics exemplified. When a former ruling political party is transformed into a conduit for violent, apocalyptic fantasies of armed insurrection, something fundamental has changed.
What's remarkable in the present circumstance is that we can actually date the moment when the GOP took the fateful step from simply exploiting such vicious, atavistic tendencies to actively promoting them.
On a recent broadcast of NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross , Gross interviewed author Taylor Branch about his new book on the Clinton Presidency. The following exchange is illuminating.
GROSS: Now, you mentioned that Clinton saw the scandals as, in part, a way of diverting him from his presidency and from trying to forward his ambitions and the Democratic Party's ambitions, and you felt the same about Waco, Texas. You say that after it was discovered that the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was from an American, Clinton's Republican opponents decided that the real issue was Waco, Texas. And they crusaded to extend the investigations of the FBI raid into Texas. And that's when a leader of the NRA called the federal agents jack-booted government thugs. The president was accused of sanctioned murder. So he saw the investigation into what the FBI did in Waco as a diversion from what happened in Oklahoma City? Why would they want to - why would the Republicans want to divert attention from Oklahoma City?
Mr. BRANCH: Because Oklahoma City turned out to be not a foreign terrorist but a home-grown, corn-fed right-winger who blew up the Oklahoma City government and mangled children and women and innocent people because he saw it as the symbol of the federal government. He was an anti-government zealot who believed the federal government needed to be destroyed, and he did it on the anniversary of the Waco events two years earlier, when there was the raid down in Waco, Texas, and the compound was set on fire.
This is a truly - almost an Orwellian moment because after the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton said logically there should be hearings into the anti-government extremism that could restore some balance as to what government could and could not do. Because here was a Christian zealot who that felt - and also a white supremacist zealot who believed that the federal government was forcing integration and government programs on the American people and that it was justified to kill and to set bombs at the federal building and blow up all the bureaucrats inside. Well, logically, you have hearings on that kind of extremism.
Instead, because the Republicans were so invested in just the opposite, that government was the danger itself, they revived the hearings from two years earlier on whether or not the federal government was inherently murderous in Waco. And there were no hearings, really, on the dangers of anti-government zealotry or on Timothy McVeigh or what his motives were. It was totally ignored and literally turned upside down. The danger here is not people who are against the government, but the danger is the government itself, and those hearings persisted. And he complained both about the fact, that unspoken mantra that the essence of our politics is to stop an inherently evil government, continued right through and despite the fact that you had this vivid evidence with 168 bodies out of the wreckage in Oklahoma City that extremists in the opposite direction were literally a mortal threat to the United States.
What's amazing in retrospect is that the significance of this obscene reversal of reality was not recognized at the time. Particularly so when we consider that, in addition to Waco, the GOP also chose to revisit the Ruby Ridge tragedy where a standoff between the Feds and a White Supremacist led to multiple deaths.
The political effect of this sorry spectacle was to send a message to every right wing extremist in the nation that they had a solid ally in the GOP. One that wouldn't flinch at shielding them even in the face of what, up to that point, was the worst instance of terrorism in US history.
The GOP may as well as hung out a sign to these lunatics saying "Y'all come." In any event, it's apparent that the extremists took it that way.
Viewed in this light, the trajectory of the GOP since Oklahoma City has been a logical progression. A steady degeneration into nihilism, contempt for legality, arbitrary rule and the worship of force and violence. These are the main ingredients of an old and rancid stew, poisonous to democracy and the cause of liberty.
It's time to face facts. The GOP as presently constituted has forfeited it's identity as a legitimate political party within the context of a free and democratic political system. It has become a malevolent force hostile to the very principles of such a system. Recognition of this is long over due.