Gov't Shutdown Reflects Struggle Within Capitalist Republican Elite

[BelgianMadCow]

Some insightful and candid analysis on the Real news Network:

We forget how far to the right--admittedly, what the Tea Party--very much in sort of the shock troop vanguard ever since 2009--but how far to the right the Republican Party--and in fact the whole party system in this country--has been moving over the last three decades plus of neoliberal politics in the United States. There was a government shutdown in the mid 1990s carried out by Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich. They didn't call themselves Tea Party. In many ways they might as well have. I've been calling the Republicans half jokingly for the last few years the Teapublicans.

...

In the process of doing that, however, they've really cultivated a group of people who are motivated by some pretty dark, almost proto-fascistic, certainly racist, what the American historian Richard Hofstadter called paranoid-style [incompr.] people who don't seem to know where to stop and really are just sort of, you know, Ted Cruz stand your ground, who are willing to go all the way, you know, go to the wall to stop this horrific Obamacare, which they have been told by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the right-wing talk machine noise machine is some sort of incredible socialist government intervention in the health care system, which is, of course, completely preposterous, 'cause Obamacare is a fairly center-right corporate-friendly health care intervention. It was designed in part to head off the real social democratic and majority-supported health reform, which was single-payer.

It's so refreshing to get, well, real news. The piece is here.

On edit: and part two is here, with this bit:

What I think really horrifies elite interests is the notion that the right, in its ideologically, culturally driven paranoid obsession with supposedly socialist Obamacare will refuse to allow the raising of the debt ceiling. And I think that's when things really get serious, because then you're talking about the undoing of America's status as the investment location of last resort for multinational capital.