Reply #25: Interesting post

[pscot]

I think Bush and the teabaggers represent two aspects of Reaganism, which seems to have split. Shrub's agenda was mainly corporate and militaristic. Big government and high debt levels were ok as long as big business got theirs. I don't think he even cared much about the country. Bush wasn't a deep dyed jingo, except in so far as jingoism was an effective tool to manipulate public opinion. The Bush family are internationalists. They may pay lip service to the idea of America, but they don't much care what happens to Americans, other than their business friends. The teabaggers, on the other hand, are an outgrowth of the Reaganite social agenda, which revolves around god, guns, gays and taxes. The two sides have always been fundamentally at odds, and are drifting apart. It's a tectonic shift within the Republican party, and the GOP leadership is in danger of falling between the moving plates. The business wing of the party is not opposed to big government, as long as it lets business be business. They are perfectly content with a kind of corporate socialism such as Mussolini envisioned, that keeps feeding tax dollars into their insatiable maw. Both the Republicans and the DLC wing of the Democrats seem to be working toward that end. The teabaggers haven't tumbled to this yet. They're mad at the bankers, who are sort of a traditional populist whipping boy, but they haven't yet made the connection between corporate domination of the government and their own problems. The Republicans are torn between their corporate sponsors and the outraged populism of their voters. They'd love to fan the rage, but they can't afford to have their supporters breaking the windows down at corporate headquarters. The teabaggers are essentially leaderless right now, but they're ripe to be picked up by some demagogue and fashioned into a blunt instrument. Palin is too dumb to grasp what's happening. Beck is making noises in that direction, but he doesn't have the huevos for the job. If the recovery takes hold this all may die down for a while, but the troubles in the economy aren't over by a long shot and the issues driving the teabaggers aren't going to go away. We do live in interesting times.