Rabbit Valley Road

Damon Linker:

Reaganite conservatism axiomatically disdains government, and that creates a perverse incentive for conservative politicians to run government badly (or at least not to run it well), since the failure of government confirms conservative prejudices and (in theory) provides the movement with additional evidence in favor of its ideology. We just saw a particularly vivid example of this pathologically self-destructive dynamic at work in Bobby Jindal’s otherwise inexplicable attempt to turn the Bush administration’s utter ineptitude after Hurricane Katrina into a GOP talking point.

But as the CPAC farce this weekend has definitively demonstrated, the problem isn’t limited to Jindal. It runs to the core of the ideology that every Republican is now expected to endorse and espouse under threat of excommunication. That’s why the party’s embrace of the insufferable Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is such a perfect expression of what the anti-government impulse that led to Reagan’s victory in 1980 has become after 28 years in power. Having badly bungled a war, shown gross incompetence in responding to a natural disaster, and presided over the near-total collapse of the nation’s (and the world’s) financial system, the leadership of the Republican Party thinks it’s a good idea to follow the advice (or rather, to pretend to follow the advice) of some guy who (to put it delicately) has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. I’m not sure I’d go so far as David Brooks in describing this ideology as “nihilism,” but whatever it is, it has no business getting within a stone’s throw of the White House any time soon.