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3.) Try to imagine the GOP today WITHOUT fear, anger and resentment as animating factors. It could not exist. The talk radio industry, the conservative websites, the faux “Tea Party” pressure groups constantly begging conservatives for donations so they can fend off the pending collapse of Western civilization for one more day — the entire conservative infrastructure relies on divisiveness as its mother’s milk. They are in favor of nothing and against everything, because that’s where the money is.
That last point is critical and loaded with irony. We’re watching what happens when a political party that worships the profit motive above all else tries to apply that principle by thoroughly privatizing itself. If you think about how the modern GOP now works, it has abdicated all of its major functions — its messaging, its strategy, its selection of leadership, its goal-setting — to those whose primary goal is generating dollars for their own profit.
Free-market ideology says that ought to work great. When everybody is doing what is most profitable for themselves, theory says that the goals of the larger entity are somehow served, but it often doesn’t work out like that. In this case, the outsourcing of its central functions has left the Republican Party with no entity that is capable of making a decision for the party’s greater good and then seeing that the decision is enforced. They are instead driven by what sells — not what’s best for the country or the party or conservative principles, but what sells — and what sells is anger and resentment.
To compound that irony, the party that stresses the fact that the United States was designed as a republic — governed by representatives but not directly by the people themselves — has itself become thoroughly “small d” democratic, subject to the whims and fears of its base without an intermediary to govern them.
That too is not Obama’s fault.
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