Peggy Noonan has a Wall Street Journal editorial that has some rather interesting statements. Interesting, that is, if you like looking at a person whose illusions are getting harder to sustain every day.
...When you give a party two unwon wars, one a true foreign-policy catastrophe, and a great recession, it will begin to break because its members lose confidence in its leaders. When the top of the party believes in things that the bottom of the party doesn’t want (on immigration, entitlements and trade), things will break further. The bottom will begin to feel the top no longer cares about it. That will end their loyalty. Mr. Trump’s Republican foes are wrong in thinking his followers are just sticking with the party. They’re not, they’ve broken from the party.
Noonan blames it on events of the last 15 years, but truly she herself helped set the party on this road as a speech writer for Ronald Reagan. As Charles P. Pierce put it back in 2013 when Republicans shut down the government,
...We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
Noonan spells out some of the things she sees as the basis of what’s wrong with the GOP:
...Party, which used to fight about great issues of war and peace, of the deeper meaning of foreign and domestic policy—it was a vital thing—is now kept together by one central organizing principle: the brute acquisition of power, and holding on to that power no matter what. The worst members of the party appear to care almost nothing about what that power is used for, how it will be wielded to achieve higher purposes. They’re just making a living. They’re just on a team. It is Madison’s fear of the destructive effects of “faction” taken to the nth degree.
Oh wait — she’s talking about the Democratic Party there. More than a little projection, I think. But Noonan has her faith to support her: it’s God’s way of getting our attention.
A closing thought: God is in charge of history. He asks us to work, to try, to pour ourselves out to make things better. But he is an actor in history also. He chastises and rescues, he intervenes in ways seen and unseen. Or chooses not to.
Twenty sixteen looks to me like a chastisement. He’s trying to get our attention. We have candidates we can’t be proud of. We must choose among the embarrassments. What might we be doing as a nation and a people that would have earned this moment?
emphasis added
If you really want an answer to that question, Ms. Noonan, try looking in a mirror.
Again, Charles P. Pierce has gotten the number of “Clarice” a long time ago. See here, here, and especially, here.
I thought this might be the worst piece of political analysis I would read this week. But I had not reckoned with the cartoon canaries that flit in and out of the ears of Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins. The canaries were unusually active this week. Why are the canaries screaming, Clarice? They are screaming because The Moment has arrived.
What Moment, you might ask.
The Moment when Peggy Noonan realizes she has drifted off into the land of fog and the mist, never to return?
The Moment when Peggy discovers that The Foot of Reagan has been buried forever beneath the sod of Simi Valley?
The Moment when the paramedics break down the door?
No, as it turns out, it's The Moment when you realize that you've been fronting for madmen your entire public life.
I was offended that those curiously quick to write essays about who broke the party were usually those who'd backed the policies that broke it. Lately conservative thinkers and journalists had taken to making clear their disdain for the white working class. I had actually not known they looked down on them. I deeply resented it and it pained me.
Why this woman is still a regular on the Talking Head Shows and has column inches in what remains of major print media is a mystery that does not bear close examination.