Live from the Roasterie: David Brooks says: "I've been helping the Republicans run a con game on America and on conservatives for my entire career, and now that it looks like the game has run out, I'm going to say I'm sorry and change sides":
: The Republicans’ Incompetence Caucus: "The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable...
...[It's] not just the... Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month.... Capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals... [as they] abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism.... Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.
This produced a radical mind-set. Conservatives started talking about the Reagan ‘revolution,’ the Gingrich ‘revolution.’... Everything had to be transformational and disruptive.... Self-expression became more valued than self-restraint and coalition building.... This new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal....
Republicans developed a contempt for Washington and government, but they elected leaders who made the most lavish promises imaginable. Government would be reduced by a quarter! Shutdowns would happen! The nation would be saved by transformational change!... This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship....
Have we ever seen bumbling on this scale, people at once so cynical and so naïve, so willfully ignorant in using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good? These insurgents can’t even acknowledge democracy’s legitimacy... are masters at destruction but incompetent at construction... incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.
