How can the conservative GOP play the victim when they hold all the power and an honest-to-good liberal President hasn't been in office for decades? This is one of the core myths of the conservative moment - than even when they have no power evil liberals still are mighty mythic powers looming over the land. Conservatives are the angry outsiders even when they are really the powerful insider elites. This also reflects how they govern and why they are so bad at it. Government by giving your frat buddies appointments and rich friends contracts is a recipe for disaster - a Katrina for every function of government.
A century ago, it was conservative stalwarts, not liberal reformers, who were the natural party of government. And they were forthright about what they stood for as well as what they were against: They were for rule by a better class of people, for a Hamiltonian state in which business was unified with government. And conservatism is still for those things, tacitly at least. Just look at the resumes of the folks the president has appointed to the Departments of Labor, Agriculture and the Interior. Or scan one of the graphs that economists use to chart the distribution of wealth over the last hundred years. The more egalitarian society we grew up in is gone, snuffed out by the party of tradition in favor of an even rosier past that lies on the far side of the 1930's.
These ought to be easy things to deplore. They ought to arouse precisely the kind of simmering fury that millions of Americans feel toward lewd halftime shows and checkout clerks who don't say "Merry Christmas." But we have difficulty holding conservatives accountable for them, so potent is their brand image as angry outsiders.
No comments:
Post a Comment