On Saturday, the website Truthout published a must-read “confessional” essay by a former “GOP operative”, who “left the cult”. Mike Lofgren, says the byline, “retired on 17 June after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate budget committees.” According to the Atlantic‘s James Fallows, “Among people who have covered or worked in the national-security field, he is a familiar and highly esteemed figure. He spent 28 years as a Congressional staffer, mainly on budget matters, mainly in the defense-and-security realm, and mainly for Republican legislators.”
Lofgren’s piece is a searing, scathing, no-holds-barred polemical assault on the modern Republican Party:
The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt-ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K Dornan or William E Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today: Steve King, Michele Bachmann (now a leading presidential candidate, as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
He reveals the unbridled and unprecedented cynicism of his former right-wing colleagues:
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media.
And Lofgren hits the nail on the head when he writes:
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological, authoritarian parties of 20th-century Europe.
Read the whole piece — it’s long but worth it. I only wish the mainstream US media, tainted by its “centrist cop-out”, would give it more prominence and notice.
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