Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

The problem with revolutions is that they can’t survive success. Sooner or later, the causes that give birth to insurrection are subordinated to the imperative of holding onto power. The same that can be said of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution can now be said of the historical footnote once known as the “Republican Revolution”: a revolution ascendant is a revolution betrayed.

Initially, the Republican Revolution of 1995-1996 followed the standard trajectory: First was the Reign of Terror, under the Jacobin rule of the House’s “Freshman Congress,” led by Newt Gingrich playing the role of Robespierre. Then Thermidor, when, after a series of missteps beginning with the fatefully ill-conceived shutdown of the Federal Government, Gingrich, like his historical counterpart, was consumed by the revolution that he himself had begun.

But historical analogies are cheap, and if revolutions really were governed by a formula – or if Republican temper tantrums were truly “revolutionary” – the Republican Party would now be in the phase known as “The Directory,” during which a brief, tenuous French democracy preceded the usurpation of power by Napoleon Bonaparte. In fact, no such phase of moderation has restrained the fanatical esprit de corps of the Republican Party. Instead, a figure vaguely reminiscent of the French dictator prematurely seized the executive and began waging a war upon democracy in the name of the Republic, and rather than swinging away from its radical excesses, the party has merely substituted for the original revolutionary program an agenda no less radical but entirely out of sorts with its founding orthodoxy.

Gingrich’s revolutionary manifesto, the Contract With America, was an unimaginative indictment of “Democratic” deficit spending, excessive government bureaucracy and onerous regulations and tax burdens, in other words, the standard Republican fare. Its only real innovation was its introduction of Congressional term limits as a major Republican policy objective, and most of the document’s originality lied in its novel use of uncontroversial values like “personal responsibility,” “accountability” and “opportunity” to spin ideas that were new and exciting when John Locke wrote about them in the seventeenth century. What was new was the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners approach that Republicans in the 104th Congress adopted in their effort to champion the platform. To achieve its objective of a wholesale annihilation of the New Deal welfare state in a single term, the party had to recast itself in the mold of a revolutionary vanguard: zealous, disciplined, chauvinistic. The inveterate intransigence of the Republican Party of 2004 owes much to these beginnings.

As a policy platform, the Contract With America by and large failed. No constitutional amendment to require a balanced Federal budget ever saw the light of day. President Clinton managed to steal the credit for a compromised version of “welfare reform.” The line item veto became law, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court two years later. Tort reform remains an unfulfilled item on the Republican wish list. After two aborted attempts at a Constitutional amendment, the term “Congressional term limits” found itself in the company of “the information superhighway” in the refuse bin of quaint lexicological curiosities from the nineties. Today, the legislative legacy of the Contract is little more than a host of modifications to the parliamentary rules of the House.

But in spite of its legislative failures, the spirit of the revolutionary vanguard remains a pervasive feature of the majority party almost ten years later, only now, the original call to arms has become counter-revolutionary, and its stubborn adherents in Congress are cast as regressive subversives unravelling the movement from within. Having seized the castle, the party has been stripped of a king to dethrone, but like so many post-revolutionary one party states, it clings to the rhetorical cause of the downtrodden masses while doing everything in its power to suppress it.

Party discipline requires fealty to party leaders, and as with all radical movements, the Republican Party has become an inhospitable place for political moderates and brokers of compromise. The Club For Growth, a supply-side, anti-tax lobbying group, runs a hit list of moderate Republicans whom it deems to be out of step with the party line. Earlier this year, the Club attempted, in vain, to purge Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican roster. Conservative Republicans openly call for the ouster of what they term “RINOs”: Republicans In Name Only. Chief among their targets are Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, and Senator John McCain of Arizona.

At the top of the heretical agenda of the RINO caucus is the caution it urges against excessive tax cuts that are not accompanied by decreases in government spending, that is, its preoccupation with balancing the Federal budget. Evidently, flying the banner of yesterday’s Republican Party is grounds for treason today. Last week, Democrats joined Republicans in both chambers of Congress to approve of Bush’s plan to extend middle-class tax cuts without offsetting the loss of government revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes. By their own admission, the Democrats’ about-face on the measure was based on political calculation alone: afraid of being branded tax hikers in an election year, they set aside for a moment their concerns about soaring deficits. In turn, the three Republican moderates in the Senate, including Chafee and Snowe, whose temporary alliance with the Democrats had, until last week, made possible the Congressional majority that was holding out for a more fiscally responsible plan, abandoned course. The tax cuts were extended for five years, corporate welfare survived unscathed, projected deficits increased. Bush Republicans patted themselves on the back for forcing through precisely the kind of deal that Gingrich Republicans ten years ago had sought to make unconstitutional.

The hypocricy does not stop at deficits and balanced budgets. If the Republican Party stood for any principles at all, it would be the President who would be branded a party member “in name only,” not his moderate detractors whose positions accord so closely with the philosophical convictions that the Bush Republicans still claim, ridiculously, to hold sacred. The Bush Administration has thrown caution to the wind in its military and foreign policy, overseen the most dramatic expansion of the Federal government bureaucracy in U.S. history, driven up staggering deficits with no exit strategy, and, in multiple arenas, has ordered the most intrusive government interference in the private lives of its citizens of any American presidency, ever. By comparison, the moderates that the Republican leadership made such convenient use of at the party's showcase convention in New York City are, in fact, the stalwarts of the Republicans' supposed commitment to fiscal conservatism and "small government," the Trotskyists to the Bush Politburo. In the spirit of Josef Stalin's loyal sycophants, Congressional Republicans still speak the language of the revolutionary fanatic, but their fiery exhortations are in the service of what they used to call “business as usual” on Capitol Hill. Priorities look quite a bit different from the vantage point of the seat of power, and as history has demonstrated on more than one occasion, those who continue to pay service to yesterday's cause can easily find their way onto the enemy list of today's Revolutionary Party.

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin, when Stalin assumed control of the Comintern, his first priority was to purge the party of potential rivals. His most influential adversary, Leon Trotsky, exiled from the orbit of power in the Central Committee, watched while Stalin betrayed the cause of the Russian proletariat, along with any semblance of a principle transcending the raw dictates of political power. Reflecting on that experience, he surmised that “in inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.” The party is a different one, but the apparatus is the same, and the present has a stubborn tendency to mimic the past.