For those of you who were raised in a cupboard under the stairs at number four Privet Drive and never heard the fable of the Little Red Hen, it's pretty simple.
Once upon a time there was a demon chicken. A Transylvanian Naked Neck hen named Hellspawn who would slip into the houses of naughty children at night and lay the Egg of Moderate Remorse...
Nope. Wrong one.
Here we go.
The Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat and asks her fellow barnyard critters to help her turn it into bread, but they all tell her to go pound sand. So she goes it alone. At every step along the way -- planting, watering, harvesting, milling, etc. -- she asks for help, and they always refuse. Finally, once the bread is baked and ready, she asks who will help her eat it. This time, all the slackers volunteer, but she tells them to fuck off, dumps her shitty husband (who hadn't done a damn thing all this time either), sells the bread and her bread-making LLC to a high-end restaurant chain for a small fortune, and splits for the Bahamas with her lover and her cash.
The end.
(Also if you would like to check out my eerily prescient political version of this story from 13 years ago you can find it here
"Little Red State Fundy".)
So what (you shrewdly ask) does that have to with anything?
Good question.
See, these days, it seem like every Right-leaning think tank and future planning consortium and Very Serious public intellectual and Never Trump book peddler and professional haver-of-opinions has a whole whiteboard full of ideas about what sort of !New!And!Improved! Republican Party should rise up and occupy the political vacuum...
...which will be created once someone else does the hard and thankless work of demolishing the GOP and burying it at the crossroads with a Whip Inflation Now button through its heart.
For example,
Jonathan Chait seems very excited (for reasons which elude me) --
I Have Seen the Future of a Republican Party That Is No Longer Insane
-- about this outfit:
...the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank, held a conference on the future of the Republican Party, called “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump.”
Because all by themselves and with an annual budget of a scant $2M they have come up with a plan for the future of the Republican Party which I am sure sounds edgy and groundbreaking to the big thinkers on the Right...
...but which we on the Left would refer to more colloquially as "The Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton Center-Left wing of the Democratic Party".
And that's the first problem -- the fact that pretty much all of the Niskanen Center's revolutionary think-tanked policies already have a longstanding ideological home inside the Democratic Party. Now if the Niskanen Center wants to spend their time and energy creating a New Republican Party which would exist to endorse 90% of the Democratic Party platform, well that'd be just great.
I wish all 17 members of this bold, new Republican Party all the luck in the world.
Because there is a second problem. The
big problem. The "Trump
is the Party and the Party
is Trump" problem. As Mr. Chait points out:
The pathological character of the Republican Party is the most important problem in American politics. It has taken decades to develop to its current deformed state, and will not be solved quickly. There is no way to imagine the current incarnation of the GOP getting to the place Niskanen envisions any time soon...
That distant point probably lies years, even decades, away. It can only happen after today’s Republican Party is destroyed, rendered incapable of wielding power at the national level, and its governing philosophy discredited completely. The Niskanen Center is the one institution planning for what can follow after the cleansing fire.
Jesus Hanging Chad Christ, Jonathan, everybody and their cousin has a whole sock drawer full of great big wonderful ideas for what to do
after VR Day.
After the Republican Party is
"destroyed". After the
"cleansing fire".
But the Niskanen Center (and every other clutch of Never Trump Big Thinkers who carry themselves as though they are the government-in-waiting) is conspicuously vague about who exactly they suppose will be doing the dirty, grueling work of actually demolishing the GOP and disposing of all the toxic waste they will leave in their wake. And doing it while fighting a thankless, shitty uphill battle every inch of the way against the massive, well-financed, rear-guard action of every Republican elected official, every Conservative media outfit, the Never Trump Republicans. the entire Beltway media and anyone else who has a vested interest in not opening the ball on the decades-deep roots of the problem and allocating blame accordingly.
In other words, who exactly is supposed to grow the wheat and bake the bread which the Niskanen Center plans to slice up and serve as up toast points at their future fundraisers?
During my years years working in technology and public policy in the public and private sectors, I saw this sort of thing happen all the time. I refer to it as the "11 quarterbacks and no wide receivers" syndrome. It happens when C-class executives identify an imminent and potentially catastrophic mission-critical problem than is either too politically risky for them to tackle, or that none of them has the imagination or tenacity cope with.
Usually the imminent and potentially catastrophic mission-critical problem was the result of
not fucking listening to people who knew better and were sounding the alarm back when it was a relatively minor problem that could have been dealt with fairly easily.
Inevitably, the people who ignored the situation until it became and imminent and potentially catastrophic mission-critical problem would end up redefining it as an "IT issue" (Translation: A "smart guy" problem) and dumping it on my desk.
Well the imminent and potentially catastrophic mission-critical problem with the GOP is not a portfolio of policies and principles that it might be theoretically possible to untangle and debate rationally. Nor is it a vampire army where, if you slay the Vampire King, all of his minions fall to dust. As I have written a thousand times, the Republican Party as it exists out here in the real world is composed of tens of millions of infinitely reprogrammable meatbags whose "principles" can be flipped on and off like a light switch by anyone with a big enough megaphone who knows the right code words.
A base which can be told one thing on Monday and swear by it, told the exact opposite on Tuesday and swear by that too, all while also swearing they never believed otherwise.
A base which would fling itself
en masse into a live volcano if Sean Hannity told them it was safe to do so. A base which, with their dying breath, would then blame brown people and Libtards because the lava burns.
This did not happen by accident.
This was the end-product of a calculated, massively well-funded, multi-generation Republican project to create a party base that was just
exactly this rage-drunk, paranoid, racist, ignorant and malleable. Not a vampire army, but a zombie horde, programmed to believe that anyone to the Left of Jerome Corsi is a godless, America-hating monster, that the entire mainstream media is vast commie conspiracy arrayed against them, and that any whiff of compromise on any issue is treason.
A zombie horde programmed to go wherever Fox News and Hate Radio points them. A zombie horde which will keep coming and coming and coming for you no matter how many facts you hit them with until actuarial inevitability catches up with them and, one by one, they slouch off their unquiet graves.
Well this is not
Paths of Glory, the GOP is not the Anthill and we on the Left are not going to be cannon fodder in some
REMF Libertarian think tank's utopian fantasies.
You want to shape the world to come?
Great.
Then get off your asses and into the trenches with the
only people who have already been fighting this Long War for decades.
Us damn, dirty Liberals.
Fighting with little or no help from anyone. Fighting against ridiculous odds. Fighting as pariahs whose opinions no one wanted to hear. Fighting in the face of the unified derision of the entire media establishment.
Because this time when we win -- and we will -- as the victors,
we will dictate the contours of the postwar world.
And we have no intention of playing the piccolo in someone else's parade.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
