Blaming the Wrong People

Trey Smith

The Republican Party has gone from mildly psychotic to full on crazy. Stark raving mad.

Down in Texas, they’ve just rejected a well-known candidate and former Lt. Governor who’s so conservative that Rick Perry endorsed him. Dewhurst, the loser, wanted to require women seeking an abortion to get and view a sonogram. He advocated defunding Planned Parenthood. He championed defining marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman. He supported more hydrofracking, less green energy and less environmental protection. He …oh, you get the idea. He’s pretty much bought into the whole panoply of bait and switch policies designed to keep slack-jawed yokels from realizing they’re getting fleeced by fat cats.

The man who beat him, Ted Cruz, was a relative unknown whose main assets seem to have been that he claimed to be to the right of Dewhurst, that he expressed more rage, and that he had the backing of Sarah Palin.
~ from We're Mad as Hell and We're... Psychotic? by John Atcheson ~

I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. For the most part, progressives are blaming the wrong people for the rise of these right-wing lunatics.

The culprits most often identified by liberals are the Koch Brothers and fundamentalist Christianity. While both the Brothers Koch and conservative churches certainly can be singled out for fanning the flames, the group most responsible for the Tea Party is...the feckless Democratic Party!

I know this sounds illogical, but in our ever evolving Orwellian world, it makes perfect sense. You see, when the liberals cease to be liberal and move to the right side of the spectrum, the opposition party on the right has to go somewhere. By their very nature, conservatives can only go right and, if the majority of the Democratic Party today is staking out the turf occupied by the GOP only a generation ago, the ONLY place left for diehard conservatives to go is out on the fringe.

As I see it, there are only two ways to bring the Republicans back to a degree of sense. The first way simply is to merge the Democrats and Republicans into one political party since the mainstream members agree on for more issues than those few they are in disagreement. While this is a logical strategy, I can assure you it will not be attempted.

Why?

Because it would damage the image of the US as a representative democracy. The way our system works is that there must two main opposing political groups and the elite would never agree to merge the corporate parties together because into that vacuum a party of the people might arise. The last thing in the world our corporate masters want is to grant us even modicum of potential political power, so they must protect the facade of major differences between Democrats and Republicans.

The second way -- one that seemed halfway doable only 20 or 30 years ago -- is for the Democrats to retreat back to the left. If the Democrats would leave the traditional Republican turf, in time, the GOP would reclaim it as their own. At that point, the lunatics on the far right would become nothing more than that -- lunatics waving their arms that most Republicans paid no attention to.

The problem we face today is that both of the options outlined above are nonstarters for the corporate-backed Democrats. Instead of moving back even to the middle of the political spectrum, they appear bound and determined to continue their rightward march. Every rightward foot they gain means that the diehard conservatives must flee ever further into the fringe.

I mean, get real. Where else CAN they go?