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

[one_voice]

The emerging conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is being vanquished by the GOP establishment, based solely on the fact they are beating primary challengers, is exceedingly myopic. If you believe that, you have a very superficial view of what constitutes “winning.” These primaries are forcing the allegedly mainstream candidates to move far to the right and the performance of the past few years proves that when this happens the Party stays far right as a result of this threat. Primaries can be very effective tools if used properly — and if they are backed up by money and influence, which the far right certainly is, they are formidable instruments of discipline

*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.

*snip*
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/11/tea_partys_horrifying_cousin_here_comes_%E2%80%9Cconstitutional_conservatism%E2%80%9D/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

[derby378]

1. "Cousin," hell - it's the Tea Party's endgame

And it's neither "constitutional" nor truly "conservative."