Tea Party’s horrifying cousin: Here comes “constitutional conservatism”

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/11/tea_partys_horrifying_cousin_here_comes_“constitutional_conservatism”/



***SNIP


The fight within the GOP, to the extent there really is one, is over strategy and tactics not goals. As much as it pleases some Village wags to think there still exists a moderate GOP that wants nothing more than to knock back scotch and sodas at the end of a long day of bipartisan horse trading just like Tip and Ronnie supposedly used to do, it doesn’t. And while it also pleases some liberals to think that there exists a genuine populist impulse on the right wing that can make common cause with Democrats, I’m afraid they too are whistling past the graveyard.

The right is organized, both philosophically and institutionally as an enemy of New Deal liberalism. There may very well be discrete issues in which a few of the libertarian types can make common cause with Democrats on civil liberties, and it’s always possible that the party may find it’s useful from time to time to pretend to care about Big Banks as much as Big Government. But history suggests that conservatives’ righteous opposition to anything lies more in who they are opposing than in what. (And yes, liberals fall prey to this too — all you have to do is look at the support for surveillance programs under Bush and Obama. Still, there remains a far larger consistent civil liberties faction within the Democratic Party than the GOP.)

Right now there is little reason for the Republicans to stop doing what they’re doing. They are getting much of their agenda enacted simply by doing nothing. (In fact doing nothing is their agenda.) But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some new twists to their old story.

Kilgore points out that there might actually be a new factor that could change the equation if the rest of the GOP wakes up to what it is:

I do worry that the still-emerging ideology of “constitutional conservatism” is something new and dangerous, at least in its growing respectability. It’s always been there in the background, among the Birchers and in the Christian Right, and as as emotional and intellectual force within Movement Conservatism. It basically holds that a governing model of strictly limited (domestic) government that is at the same time devoted to the preservation of “traditional culture” is the only legitimate governing model for this country, now and forever, via the divinely inspired agency of the Founders. That means democratic elections, the will of the majority, the need to take collective action to meet big national challenges, the rights of women and minorities, the empirical data on what works and what doesn’t—all of those considerations and more are so much satanic or “foreign” delusions that can and must be swept aside in the pursuit of a Righteous and Exceptional America. I don’t think at this point “constitutional conservatism” has taken over the GOP, but its rhetoric and the confrontational—even chiliastic—strategy and tactics it suggests are becoming more common every day, even among hackish pols who probably don’t think deeply about anything and would sell out the “base” in a heartbeat if they could get away with it.

[underpants]

1. I still don't get their internally created drama

Is it new leaders trying to take control or is it that they finally grew up to realized they had been lead around by the nose for 35 years and instead if re-thinking the lies they are reverting to an infantile state where everything was just as they had been told!

[Uben]

2. Its the American ISIS/Taliban/Idiot movement

Doncha just love to give them names like they do us?

[ancianita]

3. It is bone deep sexist, as well, which is why a ratified ERA is still crucial for half of us.

[Gothmog]

4. Right now, several SCOTUS opinions reflect the concept of “constitutional conservatism”

I disagree with these opinions strongly but right now Kennedy is the swing vote and he has sided with this view more than once. The Democrats have to win in 2016 to keep the court from going even further right

[Ikonoklast]

5. Meh. When your message sucks, you continuously need to re-brand.

It's known as "flailing around".

Teabagging has run its course, they need a new meme.

[TheKentuckian]

6. Yup, dead on. Same store, same management, same shitty products, new sign

TeaPubliKlans are all TeaPubliKlans, by whatever name the stink is the same.