Mr. Jindal’s Neighborhood: What’s gone wrong with the GOP?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I made this like Mister Jindal photochop. Call it another one of my minor talents that I’ve cultivated from time to time. I figure that if Bobby Jindal is going to speak to the nation as if we’re four years old, I’ll compare him to another figure on TV that talks like that (except Mr. Rogers’ intended audience actually was four-year-olds.)
Won't you be my neighbor, Mister Jindal?
Let me tell you a secret. I wasn’t always as liberal as I am today. I used to be a libertarian, and I used to vote for Republicans at least as often as I voted for Democrats. Now I won’t vote for a Republican for dog catcher. What happened. What drove me away from the GOP?
Let’s start with the delusional, inflexible ideology. It wasn’t always this way. We used to have a saner, more reasonable GOP. We didn’t used to have the monomaniacal focus on the God, guns & gays style wedge issues. Fiscal conservatism used to mean something – the Republicans used to fight for a lean, efficient government that provided essential services from Social Security to national defense at a cost which was reasonable. Today, “fiscal conservatism” means a government that cuts all services and leaves them to the private sector, leaving ordinary people out in the cold. Follow that up with an ideology which pushes a “Taxes are Bad!” message through mindless Pavlovian conditioning. You can stop drooling now. I hate paying taxes as much as anyone else who works for a living, but I’m not so inflexible in my thinking that I refuse to recognize that taxation at a reasonable level is necessary for paying for government services we all need to live in a civilized society. The rejection of programs like unemployment insurance and infrastructure construction in favor of tax cuts is another sign of the inflexibility that has permeated the GOP. Even in the face of depression, caused by eight years of the wasteful spending, tax cuts and deregulation that the GOP has advocated and implemented, they still refuse to change their policies or adapt to the times.
Moving on, we get to the flagrant lying, cheating and stealing that has become standard operating procedure in the Republican Party. Maybe it’s because the politicians in the GOP have become greedy, or maybe it’s because the ideology of the GOP has become so warped that they can’t sell it if they’re honest. Either way, there is a long-established pattern of bad behavior. Bobby Jindal’s speech is but an example. Bobby Jindal’s response to Obama’s address, on top of being insultingly condescending, contained a story about Bobby rallying rescuers with boats in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but as it turns out, that story was a lie. That is but a recent example. Our nation has been subjected to eight years of an administration that spewed a constant stream of lies, corruption and destruction that left our economy in the ditch, left our cities, schools and infrastructure crumbling, and entangled us in two wars with nearly incalculable cost in blood and treasure, for ends which benefit only a privileged few. We’ve become wise to those games, and we’re sick of the crap.
They don’t even know what the American people want of their government anymore, and even if they do know, they’re so consumed by corruption and hubris that they won’t change course even if they knew they could. Their current strategy comes from game theory. As their analysis goes, if Obama succeeds and they support Obama, they lose. If Obama fails, and they support him, they lose. If Obama succeeds and they oppose him, they lose, but if Obama fails, and they opposed him, they win. Thus, by their logic, the only course of action is to oppose Obama. Except there’s a problem with their analysis. They assume that we’re not wise to the fact that they’re putting their political gain ahead of the welfare of the country and the American people. Jindal talked to us like we’re four years old, and that reflects what the Republican party thinks of us. But we’re not children, and while we don’t always pay attention, the current economic crisis has left many of us out of work, and the rest of us wondering if we’ll still have a job tomorrow, and demanding action from our elected officials. We’re waking up to the fact that we’ve been screwed for at least the past decade. We’re seeing right through their patronizing gimmicks, and no longer behaving as their theory states we should behave. Two elections in a row, we’ve tossed the Republicans to the curb. They’re still going by a game theory that does not reflect the reality of how the country has changed and how the American people perceive them, and until they change their game, they will continue to be defeated.
In other words, the Republicans are out of touch. Governor Jindal’s speech can be used as a metaphor for the troubles that plague the Republican Party. They’re trapped in a web of bad ideology and deceit of their own making, and the strategy they think could help them in 2010 is actually entrapping them even further. They try to use buzzwords, fads and gimmicks to get traction with the public, but they’re finding that it’s not helping. The audience has changed. We’ve grown up, and find the old ways to be wrong-headed, offensive and absurd.
Could the GOP go the way of the Know-Nothings? Who are the Know-Nothings? Most people who haven’t studied history much haven’t heard of them, because they’ve been extinct for more than a century. They were a political movement of the 1840′s and 1850′s known primarily for nativism and intolerance (mostly against immigrants and Roman-Catholics). When most people learn about them, the reaction is usually “What a bunch of jackasses.” If the Republican Party does not change its ways, it risks going the way of the Know-Nothing movement. Most political parties, when they face electoral defeat, moderate their positions and retool themselves so they can adapt to new political realities. The GOP has utterly failed to do that. Instead of moderating, the GOP has driven out moderate folks and turned to extremisms. They’ve become like the Know-Nothings in that they’ve adopted nativism, and taken an anti-intellectual stance, choosing people like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin as their standard-bearers. As long as they continue doing this, they will continue to lose support. Will they disappear entirely? Probably not, but they’re likely to spend a couple decades wondering in the wilderness as little more than a regional party with no power in the Beltway. At the same time, the odds of them disappearing entirely as a political force in the United States is greater than zero. The very survival of the GOP is now not entirely certain.
The GOP needs to adapt to survive. Maybe in the future, they’ll moderate their positions and bring a new generation of leaders that will win the support of the American people. But in the meantime, expect more of the condescending, out-of-touch behavior that Governor Jindel’s speech has shown to be emblematic of the GOP.
