Why the GOP is Losing It

The Party of Ideas isn’t really out of ideas. They’re just doubling down on the crazy ones:

Their budget ‘proposal’ amounted to a quasi-flat tax. Income would be taxed at ten percent to $100,000 and all income above that would be taxed at twenty-five percent. In other words, the GOP would solve America’s problems by robbing the poor and middle class to give the rich their biggest tax cut in sixty years. That might be appealing to, say, five percent of Americans for legitimate reasons — their taxes would go down — and it would fool about another twenty percent of Americans who confuse ‘simple’ with ‘fair.’ But any sane half-wit with a real job knows this is stupid.

This is more than tone-deafness. Yes, the Cessna Conservatives are out of touch, but it’s no longer a matter of being out of contact with the concerns of average REAL plumbers named Joe. Their budget proposal had a distinct absence of numbers because a flat tax is not a data-set, it is a utopian theology. A dissertation on Original Sin would not come with mathematical proofs, either. And since the movement is responding to its November defeat by becoming more, not less conservative, they are doubling-down on the crazy:

Michele Bachmann was responding to speculation in the press about China’s desire to move away from the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Of course, Bachmann is compacting that very early, very new discussion with something completely different: a move to replace the dollar as America’s official currency, which is not in discussion anywhere outside of science fiction.

Let’s be clear about this: the United States has the sovereign right to print money and value only that money within its borders. But every country on the planet has that same right. What’s being discussed — and again, the discussion is only just beginning — is the gradual replacement of dollars as the currency that countries use to buy from each other, especially in the oil markets. Bachmann’s jumping on a red herring that speaks to her ‘base,’ which is increasingly shrunk down to the wingnut crazies who regard any talk of global anything as part of an imaginary scheme for world domination.

Without delving into an argument I’ve been having for decades, this is an example of how the very globalization wrought in the name of American values can wreak changes that frighten people who hold those same values. We have changed the world, and now we will either change with it or be changed by it.

The wacky right doesn’t get this. Republicans don’t get it either. Nor do they understand just how fundamentally they have changed the country’s course away from their ideology. And it will only get worse, because Obama ‘gets it’ in a way that no previous president has. These discussions about internationalism will grow more common in the next three years. On top of global currency, add a global energy grid and even global government. As we approach 2012, the Last Stand of the Culture Warriors will raise the stakes amid an atmosphere of Mayan calendar nonsense and End-Times paranoia. For a preview of Republican strategy, watch Glenn Beck.