Each of the Republican factions considers the others to be either illegitimate, or at best (if they behave and vote as ordered) as Useful Idiots. (I agree, but for different reasons. There are no Conservatives left.) What all of these factions seem to agree on, regardless of their specific issues, is despising most US citizens and absolutely everybody else, extremist judicial activism, and election dirty tricks, such as gerrymandering and voter suppression. Things that the Democratic Party has plans for outlawing in a new and improved Voting Rights Act the next time we take the House. Then we can pass all of those bottled-up measures that the public so strongly approves of.
The conventional wisdom of the MSM and the Very Serious People is that Democrats are in trouble in this election cycle, with so many seats to defend, but they have reckoned without the Republicans' growing propensity for unforced errors, particularly by extreme Tea Party candidates. But now it's all of them. There is not an incumbent more Establishment than Mitch McConnell, who is being denounced for lying about repealing Obamacare but keeping Kentucky's Kynect ACA exchange and apparently all of its Federal Obamacare subsidies.
For some time to come, Democrats still have to hammer Republicans of various kinds on the issues, and especially have to GOTV, but increasingly Republican purity trolls and other Useless Idiots are doing our work for us, casting each other into the outer darkness, while millions of their children fall away each year, or "backslide", as the Religious Right puts it.
Did you see the NRA denouncing Open Carry Texas for setting back gun rights? And how fast they walked that back? That's what I'm talking about, when the NRA is insufficiently pure for the True Believers. But they all do it to each other in one way or another.
Republican Big Tent
You can come in, but only if you stand over there and cheer when we give the signal. No, no, our signal, not theirs.
It is not only current Republicans who get this treatment, and it is an even bigger problem for Republicans that there is, in fact, nobody left to recruit to make up for their ever-declining youth vote. Oh, many, particularly Establishment and college Republicans, would like to at least give the appearance of making nice with women, immigrants, Blacks, possibly even LGBTs,…actually anybody who, in their view, should be espousing traditional Conservative American values, which means of course voting against their own interests. But we don't hold those values, which come down to greed, hate, and delusion (as Buddhists sum it up), and the Base isn't having any of it. Anybody from any of those groups who is stupid enough or venal enough is welcome to become a Republican, but the Party cannot provide any inducements for doing so, and the Base will require the proselytes to pass the total purity test, and will, like the Inquisition of old in its treatment of former Jews and Muslims turned Catholic, always vehemently suspect them of apostasy.
Current Republican factions and the entitlements they are owed in their fevered imaginations, regardless of what the majority wants, include
- Country Club/Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street/1% (or less): Greed; tax cuts, union-busting, deregulation, and regulatory capture.
- Old-line Southern Strategy racists: Hate; Cut any and all social programs, even those for Whites. Per Reagan strategist Lee Atwater, it's OK as long as Blacks get hurt worse.
- Neo-Confederates: Hate and delusion; States' rights, shut down and destroy the Federal government, White supremacy, the Lost Cause, Yankee tyranny
- Establishment Republicans: Greed; Jobs, jobs, jobs, by which they mean the jobs of incumbents, and therefore unlimited campaign donations, bribery and corruption, gerrymanders, voter suppression, and whatever they can say to rile up the Base and turn their votes, and to convince Democrats that voting isn't worth the trouble.
- Fossil carbon interests: Greed and delusion-mongering; Global Warming Denialism and deregulation. See also the 1%.
- John Birchers, including the Koch brothers: Greed, hate, and delusion; Anything the government undertakes for the public good is Stalinist Collectivism.
- Religious Right: Hate and delusion; Abortion, contraception, gays, Creationism, Armageddon in the Middle East
- Libertarian: Delusion; Isolationist, anti-Fed, anti-Civil-Rights, but to the credit of some of them, opponents of the War on Drugs
- Tea Party: Hate and delusion; Kill Obamacare, tax cuts, cuts to most social programs but hands off others, no bailouts
- 2nd Amendment absolutists: Hate and delusion; in the extreme case, any and all gun laws are a step toward registration, confiscation, and Tyranny!!!!
with a great deal of overlap and a great deal of splintering within each. Every one of their issues, apart from undoing the War on Drugs, is failing in the long term even as they pass more and more draconian implementations in the states that they currently control. That is, the public already favors undoing all of them, and is held back only by gerrymanders, the Senate filibuster, and the Supreme Court. Dealing with those three issues requires us only to take the House and pass a new Voting Rights act, and to held the presidency long enough to replace Kennedy or Scalia.
None of these Republican notions of entitlement makes sense unless you understand the fundamental concepts laid out in The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, which explains what they want and why they are impervious to empathy; and When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger and others, which explains why they (but not so much their children) are impervious to reality.
Veblen explained the absolute imperative among almost all of the rich to remain richer than others, to make sure that everybody knows it at all times (Conspicuous Consumption), and to insist that being richer makes one inherently more intelligent and more moral, and deserving of more power and respect. This then extends to many who have even the slightest material or social advantage over others, right down to poor Whites in the South who took solace from keeping poor Blacks even lower down the ladder, or better still, as they saw it, off the ladder entirely. I laid out a bit more of this in my Diary ACA Signups: Praise and Clarifications (Update x0)
Furthermore, the entire theory applies just as much to those who pretend to spiritual wealth, those who "pray to be seen by other men" as Jesus put it. They make themselves the loudest and most visible of pseudo-Christians. They can then claim to their followers that everybody else is at the same time an idiot, an accomplished global conspirator, and an unredeemable sinner, bound for eternal damnation, and trying to drag the Righteous down with them.
Festinger and his colleagues explained the dynamics of prophetic failure, starting with a fringe UFO cult, and expanding to all of those aspects of religion that promise some impossible form of total salvation if only you believe some particular form of nonsense. When a prediction of the end of the Earth fails, the faithful make some excuse, and then double down on the purity of their belief, and on converting others to it. The book lays out several conditions under which this happens, conditions that are observed to apply to many such movements, especially in religion and politics, and also in various more or less underground conspiracies such as the more extreme militias. I summarized the theory and the conditions of its applicability in my Diary, ACA Signups: 8M Even (Updated x2)
We can also see the same effects in The Lost Cause mythology of the South after the Civil War (No! the South insists. It was not a civil war between citizens of the same country, but the War Between the States in their sovereign and independent character!) and other such failures of religion, ideology, and Conspiracy Theories. It comes right down to deskewing the polls in the 2012 election and the continuing failures of Voodoo Reaganomics and all of the other core Republican doctrines put forth by one faction or another over the decades that are contradicted by plain and evident facts.
Also Thoreau:
Men of one idea, like a hen with one chick, and that a duckling.
All of this is resulting in a variety of unforced errors, such as
- Putting up candidates every bit as bad as Todd "Legitimate rape" Akin and Richard "Rape babies are God's will" Mourdock on women's issues
- Attempting to campaign against Obamacare but for their own state ACA exchanges
- Claiming that rejecting Medicaid expansion helps their people, whose health will be harmed while their tax money goes to other states
- Passing the most restrictive voter suppression laws and anti-abortion laws they can think of
- Continuing to press their elected officials to move as far Right as the Tea Parties in order to fend off Tea Party challengers
- #Benghazi!
- #Bergghazi!
and more.
I can't even list all of the House and Senate races and Governorships that Republicans are preparing to throw away here. In particular, all six of the most embattled Demcratic Senators being targeted as the Obamacare Six are fighting back on health care, daring their opponents to come out and say that Republicans want to kill their constituents. Let me just note one more case: Mississippi is apparently about to toss out their long-time Senator Thad Cochran, unassailable by Democrats, in favor of a sleazy Tea Party candidate, Chris McDaniel, who is polling even with the Democratic candidate, Travis Childers. Cochran got 49% of the vote in his primary, compared with 49.5% for McDaniel. With neither reaching 50%, that means there will be a runoff in three weeks.
Karl Rove is abandoning Cochran. Club for Growth has asked him to step aside. The Chamber of Commerce is doubling down on supporting him, as are Mississippi establishment Republicans, led by former Governor Haley Barbour, but Republican strategists say he ran a lackluster campaign, and that the Tea Party faithful are much more likely than his supporters to turn out for the runoff election in three weeks.
LA Times: Does GOP's Mississippi showdown give Democrats a shot at Senate seat?
Business Insider: Mississippi's Surprise Runoff Could Turn Into A Doomsday Scenario For Republicans
Democrats will run centrist former Rep. Travis Childers in Mississippi in the general election, and they reportedly have conducted private polling showing a Childers-McDaniel race in a dead heat.
Democrats theorize Childers, who is popular among Independents and even some Republicans, could grab some of those votes against McDaniel. That wouldn't happen against Cochran, who himself is broadly popular with Independents and some Democrats.
"Voters even in a red state will reject what he is, which is an extremist," one Democratic strategist told Business Insider of McDaniel.
The comparison that has started popping up is between Mississippi and Indiana — where, in 2012, Tea Party-aligned Richard Mourdock made a controversial statement about abortion, starting a media firestorm and opening up a path for Democrat Joe Donnelly to win.
McDaniel, some GOP strategists worry, is prone to a mistake that could land him in hot water. He has made controversial remarks in his past about immigration and gay marriage, and made critical comments of hurricane relief.
Unforced errors. Get organized now, and be ready to pick up the other fumbles to come, and run with them. I predict that we will pick up seats in both the Senate and the House, and that Republicans will, in the best tradition of Cognitive Dissonance, attribute it all to voter fraud, as the unskewers did when Romney lost to Obama, just as the polls had predicted.