The glee of Republican Party conservatives about the departure of Arlen Specter from their ranks because it serves
their quest for an ideologically pure party would seem to be counterintuitive. How can you possibly want a party in which there is no dissent from a doctrinaire party line that represents
only a 20% (and shrinking) portion of the American electorate? Are they waiting for the
Quiverfull babies to grow up and take their place in the ranks of wingnuttia? Isn't that kind of taking for granted the willingness of these child armies to stay in the fold?
Perhaps the reactionaries (I refuse to call them conservatives) that have taken over the Republican Party are simply more comfortable being a minority party. After all, it's difficult to be credible as an aggrieved minority, as the white fundamentalist Christian males who now dominate the GOP seem to feel they are, when your party controls the White House, the Judiciary, and both houses of Congress. Not that this ever stopped them from feeling aggrieved -- during the Bush years, these people felt themselves assaulted on all sides by gay marriage, relentless abortions, uppity Negroes
(sic), people who speak Spanish, and other heinous transgressors against the Doctriine of White Male Privilege. The feelings of persecution among these peole have made radio and TV personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Glenn Beck, Melanie Morgan, Laura Ingraham, Michael Reagan, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter -- the list goes on and on -- very, very wealthy. What would these people do if they ever did get their dream world of a Christian theocracy in which women are barred from the workplace and instead stay home and clean and cook and pop out babies until they die from sheer exhaustion; in which gays remain in the closet, in which no one has sex outside of marriage (except for things like Rush's underage sex tourism in the Dominican Republic and David Vitter's search for a Pampers Princess in a New Orleans brothel), and in which black people know that their place is to shine the shoes and clean up after the white people? Against what would the gasbags of right wing talk rail during the 24/7 broadcast cycle?
It seems clear now that during all those years that the Republicans were saying that all the left knows is its grievances, they were largely projecting. They always trot out the usual suspects of the left to show how "fringey" the Democrats are, but "Free Mumia!" has never been part of the Democratic Party platform, or anywhere else outside of the same few stray signs that show up at every demonstration. A.N.S.W.E.R. not only doesn't have the stranglehold over the Democratic Party that the "teabaggers" have over the Republicans, this crowd doesn't even have any credibility with the netroots. In fact, the Great Orange Satan himself
recently compared the teabaggers to the A.N.S.W.E.R. and Code Pink folks as how NOT to effect the change you want. After all, what would the fringe groups on the left do if Mumia WERE ever freed? Easy: find something else completely irrelevant to the lives of most people for which to agitate. It's no different on the right. What IS different is that the right's fringe now controls the party, whereas despite the frantic vapors in wingnuttia about the highly mainstream Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, the Democrats have never, ever made a place at the table for Code Pink, never mind allowing them to be the voice of the party. On the Republican side however, the entire party apparetus has now allowed itself to be dedicated to the enrichment of Rush Limbaugh.
It's ironic to watch, for those of us who lived through the 1960's and saw the Democrats tarred and feathered for a generation with the brush of being captive to its extremes, after responding to the antiwar movement by nominating Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and then doing everything it could after 1972 to make sure a candidate like George McGovern could never get the nomination again. The Democratic Party never made Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis its standard bearers, nor did it ever regard the Pacifica radio stations as their official broadcast arm. But the Republicans have gone just the opposite direction, allowing the right's most extreme fringe, now including the teabaggers, who are essentially just the black helicopter crowd with more benign signage, to own the party.
Of course if the Republicans were still in power, they'd actually have to do something about the mess that the wastrel they allowed to represent them wrought during his eight years in office. This way their representatives don't get anywhere near policy; their job is simply to keep the rank and file complaining.
