Your Bulwark Quote of the Day: The Old Porn Is The Best Porn

Exploitation colonialism:  a national economic policy of conquering a country to exploit its population as labor and its natural resources as raw material.

Having spent decades distilling and extracting all the political and monetary value that their rube base had to offer, there is now abroad in Never Trump Land a great yearning to move on to virgin territory and leave behind the toxic husk of the Party of Lincoln for others to worry about.  So your Bulwark quote of the day today is just the title of this podcast:

"James Glassman on Why We Need a Third Party"

Which I was not going to write about, having wasted enough time over the years explaining why every Republican fantasy about a Third Party dating back decades comes down to tossing their dirty diapers over their neighbor's fence and running away  However since I espied no less than three different MSNBC in-house Never Trumpers on three different MSNBC programs touting the super-secret League of Extraordinary Conservative Gentlemen conference call at which this notion was floated, I felt obliged.

This time around Charlie Sykes and his guest, James Glassman, have rummaged around under the Russian hooker pee-stain mattress of the current GOP to retrieve some vintage, dog-eared Conservative/No Labels stroke magazines from the Good Old Days and mooshed it all together into 40 minutes of Third Party Stone Soup slash fiction.

You know the Stone Soup story, right?  It's actually a sweet fable about community and sharing which I will now cruelly abuse for blogging purposes. 

A hungry traveler comes to a village with nothing but an empty cooking pot, which, frankly, is just piss poor staff work!  Finding that the villagers won't share any of their food with him (Piss off moocher!) he goes to a stream, fills the pot with water, drops a stone in it, and puts it over a fire in the town square. One by one, the villagers become curious and ask what's going on. He says he's making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which he would be glad to share with the villagers, although it still needs a little bit of this and that to improve the flavor.  The villagers -- who, I cannot stress enough, already know this guy has no food, but are still taken in by this obvious scam -- all stop by to drop something in the pot.  

The soup turns out great.  Everyone enjoys it.  The traveler now realizes that he's stumbled across the most credulous village in all the land and within a month he's running the place. 

And except for the last bit, this is what Mr. Glassman's Big Plan is, as he presented it at the New Conservative Summit.  An empty Third Party pot, which -- and this is the Big Plan -- some other people will, at some point, wander past and add basic ingredients because Mr. Glassman is "not an expert" in such things.

What's the name of this new party?

They haven't figured that out.  Glassman likes "The Integrity Party" but isn't wedded to it.

What policies does this party support?

Somebody will work on that one of these days.

What values does this party represent?

Glassman likes "America must lead" and "fiscal responsibility" but beyond that he has no fixed ideas.  Basically the Jeb Bush Republican Party, but with "flexibility", which is very important to Glassman.  Also no "litmus tests".  Anti-choice?  Great!  Pro-choice?  Terrific.  And like that. 

So a Centrist party?  Center/right?

Glassman doesn't want to get pinned down on labels like that.  He thinks "Centrist" but really, what do words even mean anymore?

And who would be moved to join this empty soup pot party?  

All sorts of people!

Like a huge chunk of the GOP?

Golly no.  Most of those fuckers are ride-or-die Trump crazies.  Maybe some from the edges.  On that Shatner show, "UnXplained",  he says there are credible reports of creatures called "conservative Democrats" who might rally to this banner...if there was a banner...and if there was anything written on that banner.  Also they hear good things about these "independents".

Sounds like a massive undertaking.  Who would fund it?

There's money "out there".

Glassman repeated the word "duopoly" several times and told a long story about selling lemonade on the beach which in no way applied to what he is proposing.  

Basically, it was every wistful "Wouldn't it be great if we had a Third Party..." op-ed ever written by a Conservatives with a byline and agita over the deplorable shit his party was up to because it relieves them of the need to think that, just maybe, the Left was right about the Right all along.  An early example of this Third Party porn was the whiny "Party No. 3" claptrap David Brooks was splooging all over the New York Times op-ed page 15 years ago:

...

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom...

The key feature of all such Third Party talk is that it, because it is a completely empty vessel defined only by the fact that it's not the icky bad GOP (or the icky bad commie sleeper cell Democrats) it can contain...anything.  Everything!  Every sunny dream about the effects someone would like to see manifested in their imaginary party.  Integrity!  Flexibility!  Newness (because the old parties are old!)  Jetpacks!  Flying cars!  

It's Big Rock Candy Mountain, where...

The brakemen have to tip their hats

And the railway bulls are blind

There's a lake of stew

And of whiskey too 

You can paddle all around it

In a big canoe...

It's Surf City, where...

...there's two swingin' honeys for every guy

And all you gotta do is just wink your eye

As to the mundane business of tactics and strategy and philosophy and infrastructure and office space and payroll and who cleans out the fridge on Fridays...well all of that will be worked out later, by person or persons unknown.  But other than those pesky details, what did you think of my TED Talk?

What Glasserman is really talking about, best possible case, is a regional spoiler party that would serve primarily to torpedo Republican candidates by giving 5-7% of the voters who would otherwise pull the lever for the GOP (but feel icky about it) a place to park their vote that would let them leave the polling place with that warm glow of impotent self-righteousness.   And since every candidate running on this Not The GOP Party ticket would know up front that they were almost certainly about to be slaughtered in a three-way race, they would have to have one helluva strong sense of mission to volunteer for the mission.  

And hopium fantasies of Flexibility, Flying Cars and lakes of stew you can paddle all around in a big canoe ain't enough to get people to sign up electoral suicide missions.  

I'm Not At Politicon!