October 3, 2013 by David K. Sutton
Moderates Wake Up, Tea Party Republicans Are Not Conservatives, They Are Radical Anarchists
I really wish moderate conservatives could be honest with themselves and with the rest of us. I wish they could look past their ideology to see the people they support with their votes or their silence are not fellow conservatives. I’m talking about Tea Party Republicans who control the GOP and who are responsible for the government shutdown. These dissidents are no conservatives. They are radicals. I used to call them right-wing radicals but they are beyond left and right. In fact, some of them could be considered anarchists, at least when it comes to formal governing. They might still believe in an order of hierarchy along other avenues, like patriarchy, but when it comes to government, especially the federal government, they are partisan firebrand agitators worshiping at the altar of demagoguery and malcontent, while speaking the language of cynicism.
The Republican Hardliners Aren’t Conservatives, They’re Radicals – Norm Ornstein – The Atlantic — Conservatives believe in limited government — but also that the government we need to have — the services from national security to homeland security to interstate transportation — should be efficiently and competently provided, and that when government intervenes, it should do so with as much deference to the marketplace as possible.
The current drivers of the GOP are much more hostile to government. Thus, the assault on all federal employees via cuts in pay and benefits; the all-out attack to delegitimize the Internal Revenue Service and its employees by Darrell Issa and his cronies, designed to make it harder for them to carry out their basic functions; the enthusiasm for the sequester; and the lack of concern about the societal impact of mindless cuts to basic research, food safety, and homeland security.
How do you call yourself a conservative if you take the country hostage by shutting down government until your demands are met? And these radical Republicans have the gall to say it is President Obama and Democrats who are responsible for the government shutdown. What’s their reasoning? They say President Obama and Democrats are unwilling to negotiate. Well, that’s a great talking point, and maybe that might work for those who aren’t paying attention, but it is not the president or Democrats demanding concessions in order to pass a continuing resolution to keep government open. It is only Republicans who have a list of demands. To an unseasoned observer, it would seem reasonable that both sides should negotiate, but we are talking about a Republican demand to “negotiate” the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, or they will keep the government shutdown. Does that sound like a negotiation to you? And besides, since when do people who support a law need to negotiate that law’s continued existence. Remember, it’s a fucking law! It’s not a “bill” as Republicans like to refer to it.
Republicans see this as their last ditch effort to end a law they don’t like, and they are using government shutdown as their tactic to get the president and Democrats to negotiate entirely on Republican-controlled terms. Sorry, this is not how a representative democracy is supposed to work. While there’s nothing stopping Republicans from doing this, that doesn’t make it right, and it certainly doesn’t make it conservative. Since when do conservatives use excessive and extremist tactics to undo established law? Does that sound conservative to you?
[A] lot of it is an emotional, zealous reaction to America today — an ardent willingness to break crockery and demolish existing institutions to achieve the goal of eviscerating government as we know it, the good with the bad. As Dreher put it, “When I think of the Republican Party, I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness.”