said that if Republicans could write half of every bill that would be “the kind of bipartisanship that would make elections irrelevant.”
“It’s a deeply elitist view if understood in that context,” he added. “We’re in the majority, so we have the power and responsibility to foster bipartisanship. But it takes two to tango.”
Hoyer explained that “ultimately, the keys to bipartisanship are respect, decency, and fair input. What matters is listening attentively to our opponents, responding to them with facts, not emotion, and with arguments, not with talking points. What matters is never questioning the motives of the other side.” (Emphasis mine)
This is the way liberals talk and think. ‘Bipartisanship’ is a rational discussion between two parties with the best interests of all in mind. But that isn’t the way Republicans think.
The GOP is still fully engaged in Kulturkampf — Culture Warfare. This basic conservative political paradigm precludes the very possibility of rational discussion; Culture Warriors presume to know what is best because they have the authority of scripture (Leviticus or Milton Friedman; it’s all the same). Indeed, the word ‘authority’ is the key to understanding Culture Warriors: they are authoritarians, and they anoint themselves by the authority of gods.
They never hesitate to question motives; today’s line of attack on the stimulus bill is that Nancy Pelosi wants to bail out endangered mice. Yesterday, GOP House rep Marsha Blackburn expressed her “deep concern” about Obama’s decision to run the next US Census from the White House. Last year, they hammered Obama over a flag pin; now they scream at him to put on his jacket in the Oval Office. And these are not isolated incidents.
Why has the GOP become so shrill and banal? Quite frankly, they are victims of their own strategery (sic). By playing to the worst impulses of America for so long, they have internalized the inherent hypocrisies that their earthly gods — Reagan, Nixon, et al — used so cynically to gain political power. That power was its own end, and they were willing to wield it as a weapon against their political opponents.
Indeed, to fully understand this moment in American politics, we must adopt the language of warfare. Whereas Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Kulturkampf is the continuation of war by political means.
In that dialectic of Kulturkampf, Obama destroyed the unspoken bastion of the GOP’s political theology just by being elected. The GOP sees his agenda — health care for all, peacemaking abroad, and active, competent governance — as a threat to their very ability to wage Kulturkampf. Not for nothing have they fostered mistrust of the very word ‘government’ and conspired to “drown it in a bathtub.” There was no coincidence in the Bush doctrine of incompetent government.
Kulturkampf is both means and end to the Culture Warriors. It is no coincidence that their target demographic has bought 60,000,000 copies of the apocalyptic Left Behind series: this is their political End Times. The stakes cannot be higher. What we’re seeing right now is a classic Last Stand,
a loose military term used to describe a body of troops holding a defensive position in the face of overwhelming odds. The defensive force usually takes very heavy casualties or is completely destroyed, while also inflicting high casualties on the opponent. Except in rare exceptions, such as Rorke’s Drift and the Battle of Longewala, the defending force is usually annihilated. (Emphasis mine)
Leaders invariably tout these suicidal battles as ‘the last hope.’ In the last stand of an authoritarian regime (Hitler’s Berlin being the obvious, though clichéd, example) the defending force is exhorted to believe victory is still possible, that the enemy can still be beaten. Indeed, Republican opposition to the stimulus bill represents exactly this sort of thinking.
But last stands usually fail. If they are truly dedicated, the survivors turn to guerilla warfare. Representative Pete Sessions, R-Tx, exemplified this last week when he favorably compared Republican opposition to the Taliban insurgency. This is what ‘legacy projects’ and think tanks are for: they are the madrassahs of future insurgency.
Unless Obama takes the stimulus package experience as a lesson in what the Republicans will do to his agenda — and gives up on the pipedream of ‘bipartisanship’ with a party interested only in obstruction — the organs of Republican orthodoxy will create their own version of history. Just as the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy eventually culminated in the GOP’s Southern Strategy, the Republicans will raise a new generation of recruits to continue the Kulturkampf.
Can anything be done about it? The answer is yes — but that’s for a future post.
