If you wanted to watch history being made last week, then you could have gone anywhere other than the Republican Convention. For all the sound and fury in Florida, nothing that happened there is going to signify anything. Mitt Romney is not going to be the next president of the United States; not because Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive, not because Obamacare was upheld, and not because the former Massachusetts governor is a charisma-free zone. Mitt Romney is not going to be the next president of the United States because you can’t win an election if your only support comes from angry and uneducated white men.
But there was, in fact, something worth watching in Tampa. What happens in the United States doesn’t just matter because it’s the most powerful democracy in the world; it’s the canary in the mine. What happens there happens here, but a bit later, and with better spelling. From the New Right to the Third Way, what gets made in America doesn’t stay in America. So, what’s getting made in America?
Almost eight years after Republican strategist Karl Rove coined the term ‘reality-based community’ his party have completely abandoned it. Speaker after speaker attacked Barack Obama based on something he’d never said. The healthcare law they now decry as socialism was devised by rightwing thinktanks, and implementing it in Massachusetts was the biggest achievement of their presidential candidate. Their elected representatives seem to believe that a woman can prevent herself becoming pregnant in the event of rape, but they don’t believe that man can change the climate. Just under half of the attendees don’t believe that Obama was born in the United States, and almost a fifth think that he’s a covert Muslim. And the madness isn’t just confirmed to the fringes and the audience members: Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice-presidential pick, has a budget plan based on fictional figures, and gave a speech last Wednesday that excoriated Obama for a factory closure that happened under George Bush, and a ratings downgrade that was caused by Congressional Republicans.
Never happen here? Look around you: it’s happening right now. Barack Obama described the Republicans as only having two ideas for growth: tax cuts for the ultra-rich and deregulation of Wall Street. The Conservatives, thanks to Britannia Unchained, have three: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of the City, and for everyone else to stop checking Facebook at the office. Look at Romney – a fundamentally decent and moderate politician, now so in hoc to his base that he has abandoned every political principle he’s had, in some cases twice over – and then think of another conservative moderate who destroyed his detoxification strategy to hand a tax cut to his party’s idiot wing. Look at the Tea Party – a Republican ginger group made up of swivel-eyed loons, far-right wingnuts, and people who think Ayn Rand is a novelist – now look at the United Kingdom Independence party. Remind you of anything?
Most of all, I see a Conservative leadership. that has become increasingly detached from its increasingly embittered activist base, and a grassroots that speaks of its party elders with open contempt. Like the Republicans – who have created a ‘Ronald Reagan’ significantly to the right of the real Reagan – they are in love with an illusion. They forget the Margaret Thatcher who U-turned and U-turned frequently, or the Thatcher who signed the Single European Act into law. They instead remember an almost entirely fictional politician. We’re seeing what happens at the end of that process in the United States. It will happen here, too.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Superb article.