A while back, I came across a book entitled The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank. Its subtitle is “How Conservatives Rule,” the central premise of which is that mainstream conservatism—as refracted primarily through the prism of the Republican party—has as its central tenet establishing a government that does three things: 1) insures the consistent domination of the Republican party; 2) puts in place policies, institutions and agencies whose clear ineffectiveness drives home the key mantra of the Reagan years—that government isn’t the solution, government is the problem; 3) insures that the “bottom line” interests of business—both big and small—are protected and that the apparatchiks within the party reap significant financial benefit from doing so.
One’s memory doesn’t have to be long to recall the early years of this decade when Tom DeLay was busy fashioning a permanent Republican hegemony in Texas by essentially buying a redistricting of the state that created a plethora of districts Democrats could scarcely run in, much less win.
DeLay was also a major player in the “K Street Project,” the thrust of which was to force businesses to hire only conservatives to lobby for them, and—more importantly—to contribute financial support only to conservative politicians. While DeLay got most of the press—and ultimately the punishment—for the K Street Project, it was actually the brainchild of Grover Norquist, whose career as a Republican strategist goes back to the Reagan years when he was one of the architects of College Republicans—the group which essentially formulated the three goals listed above.
The self-serving corruption DeLay and Norquist epitomized during the Bush years leaps to mind now because the country has just returned control of the House to the Republicans, dealing the President what most pundits are calling a “humiliating” defeat. It’s entirely possible, given the mood of the country, that Republicans would have taken the House under any circumstances, but the flood of money the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision made available to “independent” advocacy groups, nearly all of which were dedicated to producing attack ads on Democrats, certainly contributed.
Frank’s book has an interesting section relevant to that which underscores the endemic quality of “anything to win” (see point 1 above) in the Republican party. In the late 1970’s a man named Terry Dolan became director of a group called the National Conservative Political Action Committee (“nick-pac” for short).
Dolan’s innovation was to use nationwide direct-mail campaigns, the content of which was largely scare-mongering half-truths or outright lies, then use the money raised by those to finance local ads which themselves set new standards for viciousness and lack of truth. Dolan bragged that he could get Mickey Mouse elected to the Senate, and once, in a public forum, told a senator to vote his way on a piece of legislation or face attack-ad consequences.
“Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process,” he told the Washington Post. “ We could say whatever we wanted about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the Senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”
What’s scary is that Reagan’s Republican party gladly accepted nick-pac’s work. Indeed, with nick-pac’s help, it unseated four of the six Democratic senators it targeted in 1980.
My point, and I’ll have more to say about this in future blogs, is that the Republican party has a history going at least as far back as Reagan, of being very cynical about the whole notion of government being a force to protect the interests of its people, viewing it rather as a system relatively easy to game for big personal profit and for the protection of the big money interests that support the Republican party and enrich its members.
No comments:
Post a Comment