In the heady, sweaty days of the Ronald Reagan presidency, I had a difficult time not referring to his TV acolytes as Fascists and Paleozoic Idiots. These were the times of The Moral Majority, with Jerry Falwell's bloated, buttery face spread across every other Nightline broadcast and Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly with her croquembouche bouffant wavering in front of Ted Koppel's "What, Me Worry" gaze.
It was also hard not to like Reagan, the friendly, well-meaning uncle who, even if he didn't have a firm grasp of the New Reality, at least his heart was in the right place. He was an idiot, of course, or alternatively an evil, vile genius bent on total world domination and a domestic hegemony of the radical fundamentalist right.
Some of that turned out to be preposterous and some correct. With the advent of the Clinton years the far right at least seemed to have moderated and softened their rhetoric. It then came to the left to embrace hubris as a daily dietary supplement while the conservatives plotted to regain the White House and win the House for the first time in a generation.
When George W. Bush came on the scene, my first response is that he was a rerun of Reagan without the charm. I got over my suspicion of his Christian zeal and came to see him as a decent man who, like RR, nevertheless had an unfortunate knack of attracting some radical elements that were best left forgotten.
Falwell has made a lugubrious comeback, although he can't seem to break through the James Dobson juggernaut, and Schlafly is again working the conservative faithful in her version of an old-timey revival. By the way, shouldn't Schlafly be dead by now? I seem to remember her in the eighties as being around ninety-three years old. I can still picture her vacantly smiling visage, like a Stepford model-T on the used housewife lot.
We are witnessing some new conservative voices now among the lame holdovers from Saint Ronald's era, but some of the rhetoric is just as stupid and worrisome.
Ryan Sager reports from CPAC that the arrogance is back in the GOP and it's accounting for some fairly bizarre behavior:
No, the arrogance that will prove problematic, ultimately, was that directed at the libertarian-leaning conservatives by the social conservatives. The message in that regard was clear: We Christians can do this alone, y'all who ain't down with J.C. best be running along.
That was the message when Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute, who was on a panel to defend President Bush's proposed immigration reforms (supported by no less a conservative institution than The Wall Street Journal), was loudly booed by the anti-immigrant crowd. That was the message when a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans was booed and then asked by a student, "You people [homosexuals, that is] already have the right to live together, you got the sex, what else do you people want?"
And speaking of Phyllis Schlafly, she rears her plastered head and starts making very un-conservative remarks:
"The idea of giving any job to any willing worker is absolutely unacceptable," Schlafly said. American workers won't and shouldn't work for the wages Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants are willing to accept, she said, and companies should be forced to pay them more.
All of this met with wild applause from the audience. And so there we have the most conservative of conservatives fully buying into economic protectionism -- not to mention the minimum wage, which a past generation rightly saw as a destructive and outrageous intrusion into the free labor market.
Meanwhile the odious Rick Santorum puts in an appearance as the nightmare of anyone who has had sex in any variety other than the missionary position. The big downside of the last election is the ascendancy of Santorum. His personal assaults on people who want to live their lives outside of Tricky Ricky's dictates have infused a Republican victory with the stench of bigotry and hatred. Santorum is poison for the GOP. I am constantly surprised that the party doesn't seem to realize this.
Back in my juvenilia I said and wrote about the scary moralism that had pervaded the conservative movement. Classical liberalism - that of personal liberty and responsibility - had been forced out of the GOP and the religious zealots had taken over. I was wrong about much of that and began to see a Republican party that was trying to make itself more inclusive and less dogmatic. It became the Democrat's shame that less and less people were looking to them for identification while Mr. Reagan's party was growing.
But now it concerns me that in the heady, sweaty days of George W. Bush we are witnessing a resurgence of a similar type of conservative hate, only this time combined with a big-government, evangelical taint whose so far only lasting feature are some tax cuts. I don't blame Bush for this, but I blame those around him who should know better and should take control before the GOP once again becomes the party of parody.
Conservatives believe that they have won the nation for a generation. But they are mistaken. If the Democrats can nominate a pro-defense, small-government social semi-liberal they could wrest government away by 2008. The extremists in the GOP have not yet taken over, but if they are allowed to press their advantage, Americans are likely to turn their backs on the Republican party yet again. Those in the party who think that now is the time to make marriage a governmental function or to institutionalize religious extremism are forcing the GOP down the road to ignominy.
When I think of the GOP today, I picture a suburban house party where the adults have thrown the kids in the basement game room and left them to their own devices. Somebody forgot to lock the liquor cabinet and the kids are getting out of hand. But the music upstairs is so loud and the adults are so drunk with their new found power, they have no idea or interest in what's going on right under their noses.
If Hillary Clinton is elected to the presidency in 2008, conservatives will have only themselves to blame. Before that happens - and nothing says that it has to happen - the party leadership had better watch what the future of the party is engaged in while they're busy having a blast running the country.
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