Like the Stalinists and the Jacobins, today’s tea party zealots have purified their movement — not by executing but by driving away those Republicans who don’t share their enthusiasm for wrecking their country if they can’t compel the majority to embrace their notions. Today, there are fewer but "better" Republicans — if "better" means adhering to the tea party view that a United States not adhering to tea party values deserves to be brought to a clangorous halt.
If anything illustrates just how far today’s Republicans have drifted from their traditional moorings, it’s the dismay with which their longtime business allies have greeted their decisions to close the government and threaten default. Such pillars of the Republican coalition as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation have called for an end to the shutdown and an increase in the debt limit. Bruce Josten, the chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, told The Washington Post last week that his organization is considering backing primary challenges to tea party incumbents.
Today’s tea party-ized Republicans speak less for Wall Street or Main Street than they do for the seething resentments of white Southern backwaters and their geographically widespread but ideologically uniform ilk. Their theory of government, to the extent that they have one, derives from John Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification — that states in general and white minorities in particular should have the right to overturn federal law and impede majority rule.
Moderate Utah Republicans, please take note.
Time to take corrective action, while you still can, to avoid landing the Grand Old Party (GOP) in the dustbin of history.
On a local level, passage of the now-pending Count My Vote Initiative, and eliminating the current Utah right-wing extremist caucus/nomination system stranglehold would be a great start, or so it seems to us.
