Are Republicans trying to undermine this country? This past week, two lefty pundits differed on that issue. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank contended that congressional GOPers are less subversive than separatist, almost “as if they’re operating their own independent republic on Capitol Hill.”
Esquire’s Charles Pierce, however, alleged that today’s Republican party is “a mechanism for the subversion of the federal republic” and claimed that its efforts are fueled by a mixture of avarice (Republicans “want the country to come apart so they can sell off the pieces to the people who run their campaigns”) and racism: “This heresy, which should have died at Gettysburg, is part and parcel of the modern conservative movement, which was born out of the flotsam left behind by the (partial) fall of American apartheid.”
From Pierce’s Wednesday post (bolding added):
A rookie meathead [Tom Cotton] submarines the president's foreign policy. Rick Perry is currently running for president on a platform more suited to a campaign conducted under the Articles of Confederation…At every conservative gathering, from CPAC on down, there at least is one panel touting the benefits of nullification and old-school states rights politics. Yes, a lot of it is about how states rights got whipped over civil rights in the 1960's, but it's not all about race. It's about a deliberate, calculated attempt by one of the only two political parties we allow ourselves to dismantle the federal union. They want the country to come apart so they can sell off the pieces to the people who run their campaigns…
That is not only subversion, but history tells us that it always has been the most fundamental heresy against the constitutional order…This heresy, which should have died at Gettysburg, is part and parcel of the modern conservative movement, which was born out of the flotsam left behind by the (partial) fall of American apartheid. For years, Republican politicians have accepted the money, and the support, and the cheers of nullification subversives from the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens to the Wise Use people and the militia people out west, to the claque of subversives who set up camp at the Bundy Ranch. Without the support of people engaged in polite -- and, occasionally, not very polite -- sedition, the Republican party would be a bunch of rich old white guys pissing themselves in the grill room of a restricted country club.
…I believe they want to carry us back not just to the Gilded Age, but to the golden era in the 1780's when you needed a passport to go from Connecticut to New Jersey…I believe that is what animates ALEC in its campaign to create little hell-states individually across the map and its larger campaign to keep the federal government from doing anything about it. I don't think the modern Republican party believes in anything called "the national interest."
The Republican party is a mechanism for the subversion of the federal republic.
