Why is the electorate anti-Republican?

An e-mail I’ve sent to Powerline:

In the entry, “The global test 2.0,” you write:

“This election is becoming a referendum on the Republican party, and that’s very good news for Barack Obama.”

Does it ever occur to you to ask WHY so many voters are hostile to the Republican party and why the election is a referendum on Republicans?

It’s because of the disastrous leadership of Bush. That same leadership that Powerline has been reflexively defending and praising to the skies for the last five years.

If establishment Republicans like you had been holding Bush’s feet to the fire during those years, instead of being his automatic defenders, that would have forced Bush to change course—as it did, most notably, with the Miers nomination, the one time that conservatives and Republicans had really had it with him and stood up against him. If the model for Republican/conservative behavior during these years had been the conservative uprising against Miers, instead of the perpetual conservative suck-up-to-the-great-Bush syndrome, if the Republicans had played the role of loyal opposition to Bush instead sycophants to Bush, Bush would have had to govern differently, and the country and the Republican party would be in far better shape than they are.

Were loyal Republicans to acknowledge that their automatic and relentless support for Bush has been a major factor in our current fix and in the likely election of Obama, that would be a sign that Republicans are learning from their past errors and moving toward a more principled and efficicious conservative politics. Sadly, so far, there is nothing to give grounds for such hope.

* * *

See the recent post by VFR reader Evariste where he urges that the Congressional Republicans take on the role of loyal opposition to the president—whether the president is a Democrat OR a Republican.

- end of initial entry -

Evariste writes:

I don’t read them, but I do read your periodic letters to them. So do they ever reply, or is it purely a “Letters to the Editor” one-way communication when you write them? I’m guessing they never reply on their site because if they did you’d link to their reply and continue the conversation.

LA replies:

On a couple of fairly recent occasions they’ve replied (in e-mail, not at their site). But when I send something like this I’m not expecting a reply.

I frequently go their site, because they are intelligent, informative, and civilized, and also because they so typify the condition of modern conservatism. I am endlessly fascinated by their combination of a reasonable degree of intelligence with their sycophancy to Republican and neoconservative leaders.

Evariste replies:

I sometimes joke that they’re “Bush’s elite Republican Guard” (like Saddam’s). I could never get into Power Line because the tone of the writing never caught me. Every time I read them before, they seemed really boring.

LA replies:

True, they’re not showy. :-)

But everything they say is reasoned and cogent—within the limits of their total loyalty to the Republican party and the neoconservative ideology.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 29, 2008 02:01 AM | Send