Of crackpots, rightists, and wingers: The "conservative" GOP?

I suppose it's only through force of habit that we still use the phrase, "right-wing Republicans," which, like "unsolved mystery" or "free gift," is a tautological offense against our mother tongue -- a distinctive distinction without a different difference. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone refer to a "left-wing socialist"?

Once upon a time, the "right-wing" portion of "right-wing Republicans" did have a necessary adjectival meaning. It identified right-wing Republicans, as well as right-wing Republicans, in the unmistakable sense that those chaps were indeed but one wing of the party, and they were to the right of the internal others.

That was a time when we occasionally spoke of liberal Republicans, or, with far more frequency, of moderate Republicans. But those species, as you know, are long since virtually extinct; they went the way of the hula hoop and the shiny metallic grille and the single-blade safety razor. They suffered a sustained assault of brutal ideological cleansing; they are, pretty much, no more. There are only the right wingers, which, as competitive slaughter would have it, means they're no "wing" at all. Republicans are just righties, radically rotten to the core.

I hasten to interject here that I'm writing especially of Congressional Republicans, and those scrambling little local pols who aspire to higher Congressional Republicanism. For there remains a substantial element of the electorate out there that still confuses and conflates "Republicanism" with "conservatism" -- in calling themselves conservatives, that is, they also fancy themselves Republicans, but only out of habit, since the former term has nothing to do with the latter.

There are true, faithful conservatives, just as there survives a true, faithful conservatism, and then there are Beltway Republicans, and Beltway Republicanism. One should choose or differentiate, although one mustn't yet choose. The dreadful, vastly mistaken blur remains, repeated endlessly in the media and by the rightist pols themselves and propagated by even their opposition. If one regards oneself as a conservative, then one must be a Republican.

As What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank has written in the somewhat contradictorily titled The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, "In its classic form, the wellspring of conservatism is supposed to be a desire to preserve the connections between the present and the past." That, it is almost needless to repeat, is the elementary desideratum of the true conservative and once the social object of political Republicanism.

"But in America," Frank astutely notes, "conservatism [has become] a destroyer of tradition, not a preserver. Left unconstrained by other forces, the free-market system" -- which, since Reagan, has thundered as elected Republicans' rallying cry, far more than demagogically opportunistic Puritanism -- "is one of the most restless, destructive arrangements ever contrived -- tearing down and building up..., driving up prices and bidding down wages, moving populations willy-nilly about the map, and scheming always to reduce the arts and sciences to sycophancy."

Part of the genuine conservative effort in preserving "connections between the present and the past" is to embrace what's new, if, that is, it possesses practical benefits and provides social stability -- one thinks, for instance, of the Social Security system, which for decades Republican pols of Dirksenian or even Nixonian ilk wouldn't have dreamed of upending. Today, however, even though Social Security has proven to be virtually politically untouchable, one isn't shocked to find Republican pols who don't positively drool at the thought of obliterating the whole shebang and leaving workers to individually "contract" with their aged future.

The right, the wingers, have come to define Republicanism, and have done such violence to conservatism's authentic meaning as to detach, one would think, true conservatives from their still-principal base of operations: the Republican Party. There is, of course, always a lag in such transformations; it does take time for many to wake up -- Hello? Calling Olympia Snowe & Constituents -- and realize there is no longer any traditional ideological earth beneath them, that they have been floating along on ethereal clouds of fundamental deception, degradation, and devolution.

They are marooned amidst the likes of the lunatic Joe Wilson, whose supreme lunacy has now earned him the select right to sign fundraising letters for the National Republican Congressional Committee; they are stuck with the likes of Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, who yesterday scribbled that President Obama's educational policy is but "Rappin’, revolution & radicalism"; they are burdened by the likes of Birthers, Swastika-Scrawlers, and Death-Panelers.

To the extent that the Republican Party has -- because of its own intellectually arrested and emotionally unstable reasons -- failed to renounce the above groupings, those groupings have become not merely the face of the party, but its heart. Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, one of the surviving lucid ones, observed the other day that "Right now the Democrats generally get defined by President Obama, and Republicans, who have no clear leadership, get defined by crackpots -- and then they begin to define the Republican Party in the mind of the general public."

Begin? I think we've surpassed that. We're in at least the middle game. Because other words for "crackpot" are rightist and winger -- the inhuman essence, that is, of modern Republicanism.

I just wish all those real conservatives -- as they awaken, stretch, and find themselves homeless -- had somewhere else to go, because in lieu of a true conservative party, they'll flood the Democrat's and further dilute its already endangered FDR-style progressivism.