womzilla | The Great Republican Meltdown

Back in 2004, I posted here the observation that the modern Republican Party is a deeply divided coalition of four major power groups, which I called "libertarians", "plutocrats", "jingoists", and "theocrats". (In a later post, I mentioned "racists" as a fifth group, with some reservation; racism is often fomented by the plutocrats to divide the poor against themselves.)

I noted that not only do these groups have little in common, under most circumstances they'd be at each other's throats. Their ideals--and all of them do have ideals, worthless as I think some of those ideals are--are generally contradictory, most involving seizing government control to favor one or another constituency at the expense of others. The only glue holding together the party is shared hatred of liberals.

That glue is dissolving rapidly and noisily. The party's standard-bearer has fallen and can't get up; Chimpy McHitlerburton has so completely failed as a president that his potential successors can't agree among themselves how to pick the standard up and rally the troops. What's amusing is seeing how neatly the top candidates in Iowa fall into the camps:

Huckabee, the Christianist;

Romney, the unabased plutocrat who is groveling for Christianist forgiveness;

Giuiliani, the jingoist, whose idea of foreign policy is "Every day can be September 11th" ;

McCain is a duplicate jingoist whose campaign slogan might as well be "Four More Wars!";

Paul, the libertarian (who best shows how the libertarians and jingoists are at each other's throats);

And at the back, there's Tancredo, the rabid xenophobe.

(Fred Thompson doesn't fit the model, alas. I don't know if there's anything distinctively Republican about celebrity-worship; given that Al Franken is running for the Senate, I have to say there isn't.)

This is a fairly sharp contrast to the Democratic candidates, where the differences among the three top candidates (Clinton, Obama, and Edwards) are differences of nuance and implementation rather than appeal to completely different ideological groups within the party. I could see President Clinton having Edwards and Obama in her cabinet, or vice versa all around; I can't picture Huckabee and Paul even being the same room without clawing at each other's eyes.

It's nice to see one's political observations confirmed so dramatically. Advantage: me!