The Party of No

Republicans have shown an adroit tendency to enact the material instantiation of postmodern ideas in the past decade. First was the recount of 2000, where they used revisionist and deconstruction discourses to disable democracy, callously arguing that a recount would undermine the will of the people and that machines were clearly superior to humans. They reinvented their own history (including that of Bush himself) to now claim that recounts were somehow unconstitutional and for maybe the first time in their history became strong anti-federalists (or federalists in the parlance of the constitutional convention), arguing that the Supreme Court should trump state power, leading to one of the most partisan and absurd decisions in recent jurisprudence (lest us forget Plessy v. Ferguson and the Dred Scot decision). Since then they have enacted a series of language games that have been very effective in winning popular support for their deleterious policies including changing the inheritance tax to the “death tax,” advocating a “war to protect the peace,” rearticulating that war when no WMDs were found as the exportation of liberal democracy, speaking of 911 and Hussein together so often most Americans came to believe Saddam himself planned the attacks, claiming global warming as a plot by liberals to destroy capitalism (based on scientists who are almost invariably funded by oil companies) and an endless list of other examples.

This tendency has continued with the recent debates on healthcare, including absurdist complaints about the government advising people to die and blindness to the long-term effects of taking no action. Cheney et al have rewritten the history of the “war on terror” (http://rawstory.com/2009/12/massa-cheney-has-political-tourette) and have even convinced some that the current financial crisis is either Clinton, or more humorously, Obama’s fault. The most interesting aspect of their new strategy might be a nod to Adorno’s idea of the negative dialectic or Derrida’s perpetual critique. The Republican Party argues against everything Obama attempts to do, demands modifications to all major bills, and then still votes in unison against them. And interesting article by Fortune columnist and famed Reaganite Bruce Bartlett calls them out of this position of imminent critique: http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/30/republican-voting-politics-government-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html. He argues that current Republican obstructionism to the estate tax reauthorization is yet another example of negation as strategy.

The Republicans believe they can regain power simply by following the lead of the lunatic fringe and pundits like Limbaugh and Beck, becoming the obstructionist party of negation alone. The problem is the media irresponsibly reports their attacks without adequate accountability to the line between what they say and what they do and this strategy could succeed. The blurring line between fact and fiction is where the party resides today, in the desert of the real. Yet can we govern from this position? What will be done about the continuing financial crises, the rising costs of healthcare, the worsening position of too many Americans, the growing disparity between rich and poor, the looming environmental catastrophe, the continued irresponsible behavior of corporate and financial leaders and the declining economic prospects of America in the world? The market remains the answer to too many of these Reagan acolytes. And yet it is the same market that has caused all of the problems enumerated above. Negation alone cannot make the world a better place, particularly when that negation is only of change. You can never enter the same river twice, but Republicans seem to think they can damn that river and then reverse its course, returning us to a utopian past as fictional as their revisionist history. They claim the superiority of their position based on being realistic and pragmatic. But how pragmatic is existing in language games? If we continue to follow their lead, we end up in a literal desert of the real – America slowly marching toward its ultimate demise (with the whole planet to follow at some future date). Let us hope that a more authentic realism, intermingled with a healthy dose of idealism, stands in their way.