According to writer Kim Messick, America since its founding has suffered three serious breaches of political trust, the last of which is ongoing and results from “the readiness of Republicans to violate long-standing norms of institutional conduct in order to advance a highly divisive, intensely partisan agenda” that’s implacably hostile to most functions of government. (In Messick’s view, Breach #2 was the Civil War.)
In a Thursday piece for Salon, Messick touched on Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian mullahs and John Boehner’s invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu as recent examples of the congressional GOP’s “disregard [of] any limitation on their pursuit of conservative purity” as well as of “its own hermetic vision of the conservative ‘cause’– a cause that transcends national boundaries. Its adherents find it easier to cooperate with the leader of Israel’s Likud Party than with their Democratic colleagues in the American Congress.”
Messick implied that the final sentence in the preceding paragraph would be as valid if you replaced “Israel’s Likud Party” with “the Iranian right.” As he put it, “The logic of fanaticism can be hard to resist. Just ask Tom Cotton.”
From Messick’s piece (bolding added):
Political actors must accept the constraints laid down by the rules (formal and informal) that define legitimate behavior, and must trust that others will do so in turn. When this trust lapses, confrontation replaces compromise and the political system lurches into crisis.
There have been three moments in our history when something like this happened. The first arose very early, when anxieties about revolutionary France led the Federalist administration of John Adams to propose a number of measures, including the infamous “Alien and Sedition Acts,” intended to enhance executive authority and to repress domestic dissent. This led the Anti-federalists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to draft a series of resolutions defending the right of states to nullify federal statutes they deemed unconstitutional...
The second moment, of course, was the Civil War…The third is much more recent, extending over at least the Obama presidency but with roots as far back, perhaps, as the Clinton impeachment. It involves the readiness of Republicans to violate long-standing norms of institutional conduct in order to advance a highly divisive, intensely partisan agenda…
…[T]he GOP [has a] growing sense of itself as primarily a congressional party. As it gradually loses the ability to compete for the presidency…its power base in Congress and legislative prerogatives generally are more important to it…
But…the deepest source of the GOP’s behavior [is] a mutation that spread through the party as a whole when white Southerners flocked to it after the passage of Civil Rights laws in the mid-1960s. Until that time, the Republican Party, while “conservative” in the spectrum of American politics, largely accepted the modern state constructed by politicians…of both parties…
…The white Southerners who bolted the Democratic Party for the GOP didn’t view the modern state as a necessity; they saw it as apostasy…
To maximize its appeal to these new Southern voters, the Republican Party adopted an increasingly radical version of conservative thought and expressed it in increasingly harsh rhetoric…
Full of scorn for their own government, the ideologues who control today’s GOP feel free to disregard any limitation on their pursuit of conservative purity. The letter to Iran, and the invitation to Netanyahu, merely enact this principle in the realm of foreign affairs. The real concern of the Tea Party isn’t the modern American state, which it despises, but its own hermetic vision of the conservative “cause”– a cause that transcends national boundaries. Its adherents find it easier to cooperate with the leader of Israel’s Likud Party than with their Democratic colleagues in the American Congress…
President Obama remarked that the Republican outreach to Iran’s leaders resulted in “an unusual coalition.” One of the many pleasures of Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” – and of the sublime 1962 film with Angela Lansbury and Lawrence Harvey — was its suggestion that ultimately all fanaticisms merge and all fanatics, no matter how sharp their visible differences, become potential allies. Lansbury, an anti-communist Lady Macbeth to a vile, Joe McCarthy-like politician, plots to install her son (Harvey) in the White House with the help of China’s Communist Party. In the fractured world of the film it all makes a terrible kind of sense. The logic of fanaticism can be hard to resist. Just ask Tom Cotton.
