One of the things I find continually baffling in today's Republican Party is the constant embrace of failure. And I'm not just talking about continually embracing failed policies, though it's pretty clear that laser-based missile defense simply isn't workable given our scientific and technological knowledge. It's just as obvious that the war on drugs has been an unmitigated disaster that has resulted in countless needless deaths, the empowerment of brutal terrorist regimes in Latin America, and a breakdown of trust between law enforcement and many communities. It's also clear that insufficient regulation, coupled with an unwilligness to enforce what little legislation exists on the books, has turned out rather poorly.
But this is all beside the point. The Republicans feel that they've found the answers, and that they just need to find the right person to implement them. The problem is that they seem to keep listening to people who have failed to do these things. The equivalent of having Newt Gingrich as the GOP's preeminent intellectual would be for the Democrats to trot out Jimmy Carter. No, wait, that's wrong. Jimmy Carter, regardless of his administrative skills is actually a bright and warm man, and would likely have worthwhile insights to make about public policy. Gingrich was roughly as successful as Carter in terms of getting things done, which is to say not very (though both had some accomplishments), and the metaphor extends even to the point of both having a culminating disaster that led to an intraparty coup (successful in Gingrich's case though not in Carter's). If Gingrich is the right's success story, then Carter ought to be given the same deference by the media as Gingrich. Indeed, by all accounts Carter is much more of a success--he reached a higher office than Gingrich, he was largely responsible for the Camp David Accords (one of the watershed moments in the history of Israel), and his deregulation of several industries wound up paving the way, in both good ways and bad, for the road to our deregulated economy. And yet, alas, Jimmy Carter is generally held to be an abysmal failure as president, while Newt is inexplicably hailed as a success story as speaker. To be clear, I feel that both men ultimately failed in their respective tasks, but Carter's problems were only partly of his own making. Gingrich, on the other hand, failed to pass much of the Contract With America, torpedoed any further ambitions to higher office by shutting down the government unless he got deep Medicare cuts, and then pushed the Lewinsky impeachment while he himself was sleeping with a woman that was not his wife. In all fairness, she ultimately did become Gingrich wife #3.
And what about Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? The two men perhaps more responsible than any others for the Bush Administration's downfall are still influential conservative opinionmakers. I'm not exactly sure why anyone would take advice on what direction the party should take from the man who helped ruin the party in the first place, but he's definitely giving it. In between secret prisons, unnecessary wars, torture and the rest of it, Cheney has become an exponent of the sort of brutal, authoritarian "conservatism" that Republicans now champion. Rove has become even more ubiquitous than Cheney, more than he ever was before, popping up frequently on Fox News and in his Wall Street Journal column. After brashly predicting a permanent Republican majority--one which didn't last his boss's term in the White House--he is forever linked with a scorched earth campaigning style that seeks to divide and conquer rather than to unite and lead. The nastiness of Rovism is the biggest reason why so many young people are now Democrats--if you had come of age and this was all you ever saw of Republicans, what would you think?
But I suppose this shows just how deep the Republican dogma really goes. After all, these are the people who name big think tanks after Herbert Hoover and whose public intellectuals often defend the likes of Hoover and Coolidge while trying to trash the reputations of actually successful presidents, like Franklin Roosevelt. And we haven't even gotten to exhibit A: George W. Bush, a man who was such a failure at running small businesses that the next step, obviously, was the United States. The results were, when viewed in this light, predictable.
So what is behind the GOP's cult of failure? Republicans receive healthy majorities of support when it comes to investors and businessmen, especially among small businessmen, who were the primary motivators behind the rise of Barry Goldwater, as Rick Perlstein tells us in Behind The Storm. Certainly they gather much support from wealthy, succesful people. Businesspeople tend to be risk-averse, no-nonsense, reality-based, and nonideological. So, why is the GOP more interested in running failed businessmen like Bush instead of successful ones like Romney? Why do they keep setting themselves up for failure? And why embrace it?
I must admit that I don't have an answer to these questions. Outside of Reagan, I haven't seen too many conservatives that seemed to actually believe that they could achieve anything--they've mostly seemed dour and helpless against the power of the "liberal elite" to keep conservatives down. Hopelessness leads to bitterness with time, and I think that explains part of the conservative mythos, but it's something that merits further exploration.
