Marco Rubio Bashes Republicans

I'll have more to say later about Marco Rubio's very interesting and very important speech at the Reagan Library from August the 24th.

For now, just one point:

You know, we at the FrumForum take a certain amount of heat for the offense of "bashing fellow Republicans."

My defense: part of the work of upholding a body of ideas is to sift through them to ascertain what remains vital and what has been rendered irrelevant or obsolete by changing circumstances. OK, I would say that. But you know who else agrees? Conservative icon Marco Rubio. His speech was a blunt statement that rejects as useless and dangerous the main domestic policy achievements of every Republican administration of the past 100 years except Ronald Reagan's:

Now America’s leaders during the last century set out to accomplish that, but they reached a conclusion that has placed us on this path, except for the Reagan Administration to be quite frank.

Both Republicans and Democrats established a role for government in America that said, yes, we’ll have a free economy, but we will also have a strong government, who through regulations and taxes will control the free economy and through a series of government programs, will take care of those in our society who are falling behind.

That was a vision crafted in the twentieth century by our leaders and though it was well intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start.

Teddy Roosevelt left office more than 100 years ago, but I think these words rule him out. They probably don't rule out Warren Harding, but even Calvin Coolidge as governor of Massachusetts signed a maximum-hours bill for women and children. For sure, Rubio's words condemn Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Truth be told they condemn Ronald Reagan too, but shhh. They condemn almost every one of the party's presidential nominees since Wendell Wilkie except Barry Goldwater: Tom Dewey, Bob Dole, and John McCain. And of course they condemn almost every important Republican governor, senator and member of Congress of the post-1945 period, Robert Taft very much included.

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off - not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people - but from the Republican Party's own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination. After all, if almost every elected Republican leader of the past 100 years save Reagan fell short of conservative  principle, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the next Republican leader will also fall short of conservative principle. In which case, conservative principle has become a vehicle for guaranteeing eternal conservative disappointment and alienation. Unhealthy, no?