Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, Oct 3, 2011
Mike Lofgren, a veteran staff member for Republican lawmakers in the House, has called it quits after 16 years, excoriating the GOP with a farewell jeremiad. I’m not sure I’d call it “principled,” as some enthusiastic opponents of the GOP have, so much as self-preserving. Lofgren’s departure speaks to the triumph of the New Republicans, who, like the Gadarene swine, seem driven by some demonic force toward self-annihilation. Death is the high cost of ideological purity. Lofgren writes,
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.
Considering the wildly intemperate behavior of those who prayed for default, of those who were willing to risk destroying the market economy in order to “save” it, this is hardly an exaggeration. Never have so few been willing to risk so much for so little. Certainly, no one of a Burkean, liberal temperament would feel comfortable in this new, tiny tent party of purists, much less call it home. One kind of conservatism is dead—if it ever existed—and another has succeeded. Burke is out. Rand is in. Don’t be surprised if the “RINOs” (i.e. sane conservatives) choose to step off the train here, at the last safe junction before the tunnel ahead.
I’ll have more to say on this topic at a later date.
Mikhail Gorbachev in an interview with Der Spiegel, published August 18, 2011. (Interview by Matthias Schepp and Christian Neef in Moscow; translated from the German by Christopher Sultan).
