… We’ll remain infested with Banana Republicans who dream of leveraging their local/state kleptocracies to establish a nationwide kakistocracy. John B. Judis, in The New Republic:
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison promised that a large republic with a representative government would avoid the “instability, injustice and confusion” that had plagued many nations in Europe. In a representative government, he reasoned, disruptive factions would be unable to gain sufficient power to dissolve the social contract. The people’s representatives would not necessarily be paragons of virtue, but they would be less likely to succumb to “local prejudices and schemes of injustice.” In the 225 intervening years, Madison has been proven correct, with two great exceptions. One was the Civil War. The other was the 16-day government shutdown of October 2013.
The shutdown’s precipitating cause—President Barack Obama’s health care reform—was, of course, not as morally consequential as slavery. And yet, the shutdown presented an existential threat to the country—the prospect of a breakdown in the national government, a diminishment in America’s standing in the world, and a global financial disaster…
The same forces hope to create more crises—this winter, when the budget comes up for another vote and when the debt ceiling needs to be raised, and again and again until the administration or the country buckles. “Unfortunately this time the outcome ended with the Ruling Class in D.C. forcing their will on the American people, but this fight is not over,” the Tea Party Patriots declared soon after the impasse was resolved. “We have vowed and stand by our word to leave no stone unturned until we stop the harms from Obamacare and exempt the American people from this ‘train wreck’ legislation.”…
… The Tea Party was assisted by elite conservative organizations in Washington—the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and Heritage Action, a branch of the Heritage Foundation—which provided intellectual firepower, Washington experience, and many millions of dollars.
During the Obama years, these Washington organizations adopted an outsider posture toward the Republican establishment, driven by backers alarmed by what Michael Grunwald has called Obama’s “new New Deal.” One of FreedomWorks’ major funders is Richard Stephenson; in the last election cycle, he contributed more than $12 million, which equals about 60 percent of its PAC budget. Stephenson is founder and chairman of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which could suffer financially from the ACA. FreedomWorks is fighting against health care reform and supported the shutdown strategy. Americans for Prosperity was founded by the Koch brothers, oil billionaires who have become leading funders of right-wing activism in the Obama era. And the Club for Growth’s board is led by Jackson “Steve” Stephens Jr., who runs a biotech firm and whose uncle founded Stephens, Inc., investment bankers for Walmart.
These backers are far more hard-line than the typical corporate executive. They come from privately owned companies and investor groups and so are invulnerable to shareholder pressure, union retaliation, or public opinion. They want the Republican leadership not merely to block regulations and programs, but to repeal existing ones, an approach that brought their organizations into agreement with the Tea Party…
Long Read: “The Tea Party Is Going Down, <em>But</em>…”Post + Comments (109)