(I put this together just before Sandy hit the East Coast. Just able to submit it last night.)
To defend the indefensible—politically speaking... Of all available partisans, who better suits this paradoxical objective than the inimitable Newt Gingrich? It has no doubt found its way into his itinerary lately, as evidenced by the former Speaker’s recent excursions into the election year headlines. Of course, those who, like Gingrich, were asked to spin for one of the two major parties this weekend—an important one by all accounts, being the next to last before the general election—they had to know that DEFENSE was top of mind for their parties and, in particular, for the two presidential campaigns. They had to know that Romney and Obama both were counting on their toadies and standard-bearers 1) to advance only popular and uncontroversial campaign rhetoric; 2) to avoid offending independent voters; and 3) to avoid both gaffes and the mention of gaffes. Which makes Newt’s parlous defense of Tea Party Senate candidate Richard Mourdock not a little surprising...
“If you listen to what Mourdock actually said, he said what virtually every Catholic and every fundamentalist in the country believes, life begins at conception.”
Thus spoke the Newt last Sunday in an interview with George Stephanopoulos. His was a cagey defense to be sure; one as ambiguous as it was conspicuously guarded. It came after a week of hand-wringing and waffling by the Romney Campaign over whether Romney himself still backed candidate Mourdock (whom, prior to latter man’s recent discursus on rape, abortion and theodicy, Mitt Romney had whole-heartedly endorsed) and, if so, whether Mitt too questioned the rape exception to the Republican platform position on abortion. And it does seem to have put Mitt on the spot... as it has the Republican Party which does maintain as part of its platform, not only the reversal of Roe v. Wade, but a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.
Whither would a President Romney, whither would the Republican Party—returned to the Whitehouse—drive legislation banning abortion should the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade prove successful? Voices from the Republican peanut gallery would seem to suggest: all the way!...
The gender-gap—as it has since 1973—still forms like quicksand under the feet of the partisan politician who is willing to go there—to take as his own, to embrace without qualification, this aspect of the Republican agenda. How it is Mitt Romney is willing to test this ground—in however halting a manner—how it is, moreover, that Team Romney should brook even tacit support for one Richard Mourdock at such a precarious moment in the election year... this is the mystery wrapped in the enigma that is the Romney Presidential Campaign.
If you listen to what Mourdock actually said...
Many did, Newt. Many were shocked by such an egregious breach of the conventional wisdom as regards any future federal abortion ban. (Exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother... surely these must be stipulated... Right?) Many others listened and were outraged, not necessarily by the content of Mourdock’s statements, but by their altogether regrettable timing. (These are the strategically minded partisans who, given the tumult brought by the likes of a Mourdock or an equally controversial Todd Akin, will shake their heads and say to themselves, “What kind of idiot says such a thing so close to an election?!”) A few listened and heard their own radical theory reflected. (These are pro-life lifers who, only too often, are willing to kill or die over the issue of abortion. Doubtless, they are obliged to thank candidate Mourdock both for his courage and his precipitate candor.) Then there were the pro-choice activists... It is these folks who, hearing a Mourdock, an Akin, or a prized ass like Tea Party golem Joe Walsh—who may indeed be Andrew Breitbart’s little brother—must think, ”With enemies like these, who needs allies?!”
It is the pro-choice activist who sees in her most dire opponent, not a penchant for activism, but a talent for political casuistry. It is this activist who tends to find help, less in the stated support of elected officials, than in the honesty of the guileless pro-life crusader. For it is the latter, it is the honest pro-life crusader, who most belies the pro-life positions of ‘moderates’ like Mitt Romney.
Let it be said, neither Newt Gingrich nor Mitt Romney is a stranger to the art of spinning truth to suit a certain insidious manner of pragmatism. Neither is unaccustomed to pronouncing and employing the less than noble lies of the expedient Machiavellian prince. (Than the two of them there may, at this time, be no more flagrant and proficient liars in all of American politics—with the exception of Bill Clinton, of course, whose lies most of us either excuse or accept.) And yet, as much the republican may find himself wanting to pillory the likes of a Mourdock or Akin, as much as he may now lament either man’s apparent imprudence, there is an extent to which Romney and Gingrich both also leave themselves open to rebuke for not, as it were, burning the bridges that still link their party to an extreme and unwelcome ideology. It is Newt and it is Mitt, after all, who flirt with disaster by not cutting either man off at the knees, by not avoiding the positions of either as though they were political HIV—which they are, in fact. (How else but in the context of an infection of the immune system should a body—in this case, the Republican Party—produce the altogether toxic linkage of the issues of rape and zygotic personhood?) Newt and Mitt are complicit in the infection of their party with a manner of virus that may soon spell its untimely end—and it is their complicity that is the matter at hand, not the theories of Mourdock and Akin.
...he said what virtually every Catholic and every fundamentalist in the country believes, life begins at conception.
Mourdock said a bit more than that, Newt. And, whether and to what extent one is willing to fathom this man as the Tea Party’s answer to St. Thomas Aquinas, his recent foray into an occasionalist cosmology has shined a light on the presiding Republican ethos which most habitual republicans remain loathe to accept. Habitual republicans, I say... And by this, I mean those social and fiscal conservatives (southern evangelical or otherwise) who do vote republican year after year, come what may—which is to say, regardless of the extent to which the prevailing Republican platform reflects, in any way, their natural conception of conservatism—not to mention their common sense. (I might liken this class of voters to Nixon’s ‘silent majority’, were not such a correlation too gross a simplification.) It is the loyalty of this class of voters that is most jeopardized by the understanding that the GOP has been taken so far to the right that it is no longer a ‘conservative’ organization. Set aside for a moment the usual concern of the republican strategist with courting the independent vote; set aside, too, the hubristic notion that a handful of special interests and ultra-wealthy partisan benefactors should be able to buy the party sufficient sway among unaffiliated voters that it need no longer mind an electoral base. The prospect of losing what I call ‘habitual republicans’ is one which has to worry anyone with a scintilla of political street-sense and a vested interest in the party’s survival. For taciturn though these voters may be—and though they are, politically speaking, very much creatures of habit—they are known to be intolerant of radical politics (right or left), as they are known to spurn activist politicians and, moreover, politics lacking in a rational focus. They are neither the fools one encounters at Tea Parties, nor the inconscient lemmings that their detractors often make them out to be. And they are hardly incapable of grasping where their party is going, ideologically speaking... It is going straight into the ocean.
I trust the reader will forgive the gratuitous reference to Sandy only moments before she is scheduled to reach the Jersey shore. More than Mitt, more than Obama—more than even the Newt!—she now wields ultimate power over the course of the general election. Indeed, she may (or she may not) in her ire—in her hysteria, that is—lay waste to the island of Manhattan. (And there is an eerie, climacteric feel to her appearance now, on Wall Street, four years after the autumn of 2008. Most of us retain vivid memories of that storm: the collapse of the shadow banking system; the hue and cry over TARP and its implementation; the election of Obama, moreover, a man who as president—contrary to, not only the agitprop of his many partisan detractors, but his own 2008 Campaign rhetoric—has proved to be as great a boon to Wall Street as any president since Calvin Coolidge.) Indeed, she is a terrorist... if not yet as homicidal, ten times the terrorist that bin Laden proved himself to be. (Unlike bin Laden, she can’t be physically eliminated; unlike the jihadist, she proceeds by a will that cannot be metaphysically broken.) Indeed, there is a sense in which Sandy is destiny... at least if you’re a republican.
Of course, what she is for the party (Sandy, that is) she is only on a ‘meta’—a metaphorical and meta-historical—level. For the party, she is not simply the existential threat she represents to, let us say, Chris Christie, the presently beleaguered (centrist) republican Governor of New Jersey, a man who, to his credit, has called out the “crazies” in his party for the political detriment they represent. For the party, she is peripeteia; she is something like fate (or the ghost of one’s father). She is the oblivion of unreason into which the GOP’s right wing has been driving the party since 1989. Sandy physically embodies the hubris of the all-American right-wing partisan who would:
• a) try to convince himself that he can sell an angry and mistrustful electorate his vision of America, despite an ideological position established on the less than complimentary principles of 1) plutonomic market capitalism; 2) neoconservative interventionism; 3) Randian individualism and 4) theocratic statism
• b) try to convince his peers both that effectively marketed propaganda can fool at least some of one’s people all of the time and that the Big Lie can get by the American electorate as long as there are grounds for it in a major party platform
• and c) try to convince his God (which he would seem to conflate with the ironically named ‘Free Market’) that the extension of personal and property rights to not only corporations but the American zygote is the elusive ‘missing link’ to the United States Constitution, that which—in contradistinction to Darwin’s—is not our track back to the hypothesized will of our founders but our path forward to something like ‘Honor’.
We do well to understand that Sandy, if she is but a metaphor (and not the storm and the wasteland that is about to create), she does betray a truth—a guarded one, in fact: the truth behind the Republican Party. (Reader, imagine that!) The truth is that the Republican Party, in the wake of a momentous election—a potential disaster itself—will be looking to remake itself, to rebuild as much of Jersey and Manhattan will finally have to. Doing so, of course—rebuilding—it is a process which, first and foremost, will involve repairing the considerable damage done to the party’s reputation with women. It is a reputation that has been savaged for decades (at least as long as Rush Limbaugh has had a mic in front of his face) and one which, I would assert, can no longer be repaired simply by—in a Freudian sense—’undoing’ the gaffes: by hitting the hot-button issues, by saying the right things. The gaffes, over the past few years, they have clearly been outrageous. Consider if you will...
On the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s a consequence of this crime—how does that make it better?
--Congressional candidate John Koster (Wash.)
Some girls, they rape so easy.
--State Rep. Roger Rivard of Wisconsin
I’ve always adopted the idea that, the position that the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.
--Paul Ryan (in response a question on the ‘rape exception’)
It is to be acknowledged, of course, that this statement tops them all:
If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
This gaffe—Todd Akin’s—if, indeed, it should be called a ‘gaffe’, a (legitimate) slip—of all the others we have heard, it would seem to be the coup de grâce. It is that which can in no way be convincingly spun. And to chase the thought that it indicates is to enter a graveyard-spiral of absurdity more acute even than that into which the mind of Mourdock propels one. It implies that any ‘rape’ that was really a rape should never result in conception. Hence the unsuitability of the rape exception to the Republican platform position. Hence too, apparently, the need re-visit all charges filed against those few thousand ‘rapists’ a year that ‘forcibly’ impregnate their ‘victims’.
It bears repeating: the party’s misogynistic reputation—and the electoral gender gap that, for the most part, results from it—cannot be undone. It cannot be compensated for by the undoing gesture, even a gesture of undoing as bold and as advisable as, let us say, Mitt Romney coming out in support of the Lilly Ledbetter Act—a gesture which he may yet find himself sufficiently desperate to attempt! And it would seem that, in the approaches of Romney and Gingrich to the Republican ‘rape crisis’—to ‘Rape-gate’, if you will—there is, to some extent, an acknowledgement of this fact. Both men—Romney more than Gingrich—affirm their support of the traditional exceptions to the platform position—at the same time they fall short of actually repudiating the statements of Mourdock and Akin. What one tends to get from either with regard to the issue of abortion is a classic ‘non-denial denial’ of the fact that, on it, the ideological core of the Republican Party is actually leaning Akin/Mourdock, that the party will eventually adopt as part of its platform an abortion ban without exceptions. (Indeed, in Newt’s case, what one tends to get here is something more on the order of a ‘non-endorsement endorsement’.) What is the non-denial denial, after all, if not the first step in the tacit (or pseudo-) acknowledgement?—the second being the ambiguous pause, the third and final the equivocal restatement. Both men—Romney and Gingrich—have executed all three steps on the abortion issue... numerous times, moreover... as they have on the subject of the so-called Republican’s ‘War on Women’. (On Fox News, especially—where, for the most part, there is the expectation of a partisan answer to everything—their many, subtle pseudo-acknowledgements are particularly telling.) The more they deny, the more they confirm—on these topics, anyway. And what they confirm is this...
The Republican Party remains, on the whole, the last political refuge of the Angry, White Male. It is the Angry, White Male that leads the party, that funds the party, that determines its message. If the party has gone to untoward extremes—whether ideological (objectivism, Social Darwinism, Christian Identity and so forth), social (xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia), or economic (the party’s 35 year old love affair with plutonomy)—if it has become, indeed, misogynistic, it is because the AWM would have it thus. Of course, the AWM is not the only republican; what I’ve called here the ‘habitual republican’ is not simply a mirror of the AWM. There are non-white republicans; there are female republicans; there are republicans that lack altogether the ‘anger’ of the AWM. The party remains something of Atwater’s ‘big tent’. Ownership of the party, however... control of the platform, that remains in the hands of the Angry, White Male. Money is not only speech in America, it is one’s ultimate authority. And, if the United States can no longer be called an authentic ‘democracy’, then in no wise ought the Republican Party be deemed one. It is Angry, White money that drives the Republican machine, and there is a reason for this.
If the Angry, White Male once reigned supreme over American politics, his reign is today being challenged by circumstances which his tenure and the depth of his capital reserves may no longer effectively mitigate. Geopolitics—the rise of the BRICs in world, the failure of ‘expansionary austerity’ in Europe... economics—the weakness of the American consumer market and the limitations of trickle-down economics... the evolution of the American demographic, moreover... The Angry, White American Male no longer holds the place in the world that he did in 1987. He is no longer the face of the American electorate—nor is his America the bastion of global free market capitalism. If the Administration of George W. Bush was the fifth act revival of the AWM, the Tea Party movement is perhaps his last stand. It is Angry, White money that drives the Republican machine, and there is a reason for this: the party and money (a lot of it) is all the AWM has left. Granted, he can go a long way politically with what is left—the money, the GOP—but he cannot let go of either.
The ugliness of the Republican ‘War on Women’, I would suggest, has yet to manifest itself. It will do so—it will make itself known—once the party’s present owner, the Angry, White Male begins to feel the threat of actual usurpation. Change—and what I have styled here a post-Sandy ‘rebuild’—is possible, but it is unlikely to come about without considerable drama.
The party has four more years to let such a drama play out.