The Party of Government

Updated 11/9/2014

Because who ever heard of a non-binding document? How naive do you think I am?

David Brooks writes:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a political party out of government must be about to plunge into a psychotic fugue state. For example, over the past six years, Sarah Palin, Todd Akin, Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Glenn Beck.

I'm sure you'll recall how it was exactly the same with the Partido Acción Nacional in Mexico after their 2012 shellacking, or Sweden's Social Democrats when they were thrown into opposition in 1976. Who can forget how our own Federalists reacted after the Republicans trounced them in the 1800 elections, when Hamilton and Pinckney formed a grassroots organization they called the "Country Party", holding massive rallies all over New York and Massachusetts in which people powdered their hair in protest and sang "The Roast Beef of Old England" to the accompaniment of fife and drum, as militant Federalists fired their flintlocks in the air? It's just the way things are.

But sooner or later, if a party is serious, its fever breaks, it clears its throat with a little cough, moistens its face with a hot towel, and climbs out of bed through the wreckage of its rampage—the broken bottles and crockery, blood and vomit, condoms and shell casings—into the sunshine, blinks, and pretends that nothing untoward happened. "Who, me?" This is what has happened with the Republican Party, which has now resumed its fundamentally unchangeable position as the natural party of government, thank goodness, because after all unlike the Democrats it has a sense of dignity and responsibility, except when it's having one of those—ah—episodes.

So Palin, Bachmann, Beck and Limbaugh have entirely disappeared with their ill-bred companions, the lark sings once again in the glade, and the squire and his lady are back from church. Our new rulers since the election are totally different from those ruffians, people of quality: a real estate magnate, Larry Hogan, is governor-elect of Maryland; a corporate raider and outsourcing expert, Bruce Rauner, could easily afford the $27 million it took him to buy the governor's seat in Illinois. James Lankford, senator-to-be from Oklahoma, used to run a Baptist Camp in the Arbuckle Mountains, and the future senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, is an ex-infantry captain from the Iraq thingy. Thus they represent the three estates of nobility, clergy, and the military.

Meanwhile the Chamber of Commerce chased away the lunatics who wanted for some inexplicable reason to crash the Party. Nobody on the Republican list now believes that Isis terrorists are sneaking across the Arkansas border with the collusion of Mexican drug cartels (except for that same Tom Cotton), nobody believes that the UN's 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference on sustainable development came up with a secret plan to destroy the sovereignty of the United States or that state governments have a constitutional authority to nullify federal law when they feel like it (well, homegirl Joni Ernst does, actually, but that's it; don't ask how many think the president is an Africa-born Muslim atheist though). 

In short, everything is back to normal. All they have to do is pass some sort of legislation. Senator Ted Cruz no longer exists, although strangely enough there is a senator from Texas with exactly the same name who looks and sounds just like him. The mores of the new Senate are more conservative, perhaps, than the old one, less influenced by the liberal tone of the country club, but nobody in the incoming Congress is literally insane, I am sure; they are properly focused on reducing my tax bill so I can create some jobs if I ever have the time. I don't see how anybody could object to that.

And if we're never in opposition again, we'll never go crazy again, stands to reason. So you know how to vote if you know what's good for you. Oops, does that sound like a threat? 

Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, as rendered by Darshanrein at DeviantArt.

Update:

Much more from Driftglass and the Rude One. And a bonus via M. Bouffant on totally post-lunatic New Mature Republican Oklahoma Senator-elect James Lankford:

“I come from a biblical worldview in the way I address issues,” Lankford said. “I look at Nehemiah and how he handled things when he stepped into Jerusalem. It was that the people were in disgrace and the wall was broken down, but the two things that he focused in on was the constructive side of things and the debt. Half of the Book of Nehemiah is just getting the people out of debt, so they could actually take on the other things.”

“We can’t handle national defense right now, we can’t handle a lot of things that we need to and that need to be driven by the states because we have so much debt… We have proved that our nation really is slave to the lender.”

Lankford added that people should pray as much as they complain.

Or even more than they complain! WWND (What Would Nehemiah Do?).

Lankford is also (surprise!) totally wrong in his interpretation of Nehemiah, the Jewish official sent by King Artaxerxes to be governor of Judaea in the mid-5th century B.C.E. As ever, scratch an ancient Hebrew political thinker and you'll find a Big Government do-gooder: Nehemiah began his tenure with a gigantic public works project shoring up the Jerusalem city walls, and then moved on to defend the city's poor against a foreclosure crisis by demanding that the local banksters stop seizing debtors' collateral (Lankford seems to think it's somehow an equivalent of public debt, but it's poor individuals getting sharked, and the hero not bothered about the moral hazard of bailing them out). What really takes up about half the book is the revival of the Succoth feast and the old Deuteronomical system of taxing property owners ten percent of their output to sustain the government (Levites) and the poor. (He also strikes out against lax Sabbath observance and mixed marriages.)