There have been posts on amconmag.com about the divisions in the major parties, particularly the GOP. There’s an old saying that you can’t tell the players without a program and it’s a good idea to fully understand what the true divisions are with the Republican Party and the larger Right.

The real division roiling the party right now is between the institutional establishment and Conservative INC. The institutional establishment includes the Republican Party itself along with all the think tanks, media figures, big donors and power brokers in the powers centers of the country (D.C, New York, Hollywood) and in each state (the neocons would be a faction within this group). Conservative INC. of course, is that amalgamation of political organizations, activists, interest groups, lobbyists, and in this day and age online groups with their fat email lists and online magazines along with bloggers who make their living off of “the base”.

It’s not a neat division. There is plenty of overlapping. Fox News for example, went from being Bush II’s palace guard to organzing peasant revolts. Talk radio hosts contracts are held by corporate syndicates but they are the ones closest to “the base” through their programs. Big publishing houses make a killing off the Right market. Corporate donations help to fund many political groups. Each group tries to influence the other and tries to control the other, so it is the ying and yang of the Right in this country.

This division has been in existence since the mid-1980s, since the rise of a Right establishment in Washington once it got into power in 1981. Once upon a time the division was between the Republican Party itself as an institution and the conservative movement but since the NY-23 debacle showed the GOP is no longer in the business of helping GOP moderates win elections anymore, the moderate wing has been reduced to a feather that will soon be shed and the struggle for control of the party is between those who value it as an institution with its own prerogatives and those who wish to use it as an ideologicalal vehicle. And since those who wish this have turned the movement into racket, as all movement generally become, this is why they are referred to as Conservative INC., because like any good business it sells itself as a brand and uses that brand to gain its customers. But beyond its PR and marketing campaign it is at heart an ideology as Austin Bramwell described it. Indeed, Karl Rove’s job, as White House political director during the Bush II reign, was to basically keep these forces in balance and working together, which largely worked until the end of 2006 when defeat smashed the facade of unity brought on by 9-11.

Both Dans, McCarthy and Larison, are right that both sides try enforce rigid discipline and control, one that I think goes beyond producing a “cookie-cutter” approach. Any Ron Paul delegate or alternate who attended the Republican National Convention of 2008 in St. Paul knows full well the free-speech zone was outside the Xcel Energy Center, not inside it. A party obsessed with showing total unity with no dissent that year acted in dirty, unethical and dictatorial ways from preventing either Paul or his delegates from being chosen to the convention or being seen at it (and gave us a good indication of what life inside John McCain’s America would be like). Likewise, the ideolouges have also acted in the manner of ”Enforcers of the Doctrine” whether its Club for Growth financed primary candidates or their assaults upon Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul for not being 100 percent support of the dogma on their big issues of taxes or the war or anything else one of their interest groups believes in.

What the Crist/Rubio, Perry/Hutchinson, Ayotte/Lamontange, Illinois Senate GOP primary contests are about is one candidate who represents what institutional establishment thinks are non-ideological  candidates who can win statewide races and another backed by Conservative INC. who will, as Bramwell put it:“see to it that the flame of pure intention is not quelched.”  Now, in my book Beating the Powers that Be, I had written about and praised the Club for Growth for using the primary process in order to shake-up what had become a stodgy party establishment. That’s what primaries are for. That’s what allows for “fluidity” into our party politics. The problem is not with Club for Growth’s methods, it’s what they are selling.

As many writers have stated at TAC or various other websites and publications have written and stated for the past decade, Conservative INC. has run out of fresh ideas. It has ceased being “conservative” because has become what it should be opposing and that is an ideology instead of a state of mind. When its politicians are now trying to re-package issues like term limits and school vouchers as fresh, new ideas to campaign on; When they prattle on about cutting taxes without offering serious critiques or plans to reducing government; When they mindlessly support the war out of nationalist fervor that most people now oppose, even those within the institutional establishment (Brooks, Frum, Parker, et.al) have said their time is up.  The bottom line is Hoffman still lost and Virginia and New Jersey elected governors aligned to the institutional wing of the party. And even among their own candidates there are heresies they wish not to talk about or hide. Hoffman and Rubio are big unlimited immigration supporters. Perry wanted to tear-up all of central Texas to build a massive highway to Kansas City (Remember the NAFTA Superhighway Slick Rick?) and charge a toll. Rubio is Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, hardly a political outsider.  And besides, if a 9-11 Truther is a conspiracy theorist in 2008, then why is a Birther any different in 2009? Is it because of who is in the White House?

But the institutional establishment has no answers either because they refuse to admit the war that they binded both sides into supporting, led by their own set of ideologues, has failed and their answers for the economy or other pressing issues like health care are either incoherent or solutions that could easily be adopted by the Obama Administration or by Right-wing Democrats. It was they who were the noisy defenders of the Wall St. bailout. These are not exactly positions that a rally a great deal of popular support. If all the activist energy seems to be with Conservative INC. it is largely by default. Indeed, it shows how weak the establishment right now is when its own politicians were willing to support a non-major party candidate in order to enhance their “street cred” with the base and Conservative INC. The upcoming primaries have also made such pragmatists like Crist and Kirk look foolish with their “Romneyesque” positioning to make themselves more rightist in the eyes of the base. 

Sadly however, such energy will be ill used, misspent, and then wallet drained for the upcoming Sarah Palin book. If conservatives want candidates to vote for in the Texas and Florida primaries, they would do well with Bob Smith in Florida and Debra Medina in Texas.  Hopefully the breakthrough of a Rand Paul in Kentucky or Peter Schiff in Connecticut or other candidates can rip away rank n’ file voters from Conservative INC. towards candidates who will best look after their own interests and have strategies that can work and ideas that are new.

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