The Republican strategy for 2012 is simple: stop anything from being done, watch the economy collapse, claim it’s the Democrats’ fault. Then: reap the rewards of frustration, anger and fear.
But it goes deeper than that. By successfully prohibiting classes of action and endorsing classes of action — the abstract notion of, say, “taxes” rather than the concrete notion of this budget and this tax — the abstraction of ideology (believing in an IDEA) has trumped pragmatic, comprise politics (dealing with the immediate and REAL), and the entire Republican Party has painted itself into a corner with thick, toxic paint. There is not time, before the election of 2012, to let the paint dry, so they must win by selling the notion that the corner is the best possible place to be. Continue reading
