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It was suggested in the forum by a person named Santorum

That the people would vote for ‘im if on the Bible he would run.

Another sought to bring rich people’s cash, and having which,

This man called Gingrich had once thought he’d all but won.

And at this time the call for “revolution” went up all

Among supporters of Ron Paul who were so sure they had struck gold.

And all the time was omnipresent the suspicion that Mitt Romney

Only could keep folks from needing their misery and poverty consoled.

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The new austerity measures the E.U. is imposing on Greece have caused quite a backlash. As this article in the Financial Times notes, a lot of the Greek anger is directed at Germany. Of course, because the Greeks are in Greece, all they can do is riot against their own government, not the German one. As is usually my opinion of rioting, this seems idiotic. I don’t see what good destroying Greek property will do to convince the Germans that these austerity measures are a bad idea.

Roman Gerodimos at CNN sums up the larger political picture in Greece:

The role of the state and of the public sector is usually at the heart of political debates between left and right. Yet, for the first time in recent memory, the political battle lines in Greece are not drawn between left and right, but between the modernizers and the populists existing in most political parties across the spectrum.

I don’t know the details of Greek politics, but that first sentence is wildly inaccurate for most of the world as far as I know. Indeed–and this is usually more true in Europe than in the U.S.–things usually make much more sense if you read “nationalist” for “right-wing”. And nationalists, as we know, are concerned only with the role of the state as it relates to the people and the culture of a nation. Maybe Greece is different, but in my experience, most debates over “the role of the state” are not really over the role of the state. They are proxy debates between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

There’s more than that at play here though, because the nationalists in Greece are mad at Germany for imposing austerity measures, and the German nationalists are mad at the Greeks for squandering their money. And in the meantime, the cosmopolitan E.U. officials from both countries seem to have come to a truly terrible solution, so the lack of faith in them is understandable. But not only are the nationalist groups in both countries mad at the E.U., they are also mad at the nationalists in the other country. This is often the way with nationalists.

(And, of course, the terrible economic situation is largely the result of mismanagement by materialist business interests.)

As I look at it, in the above sentence from the CNN article, the modernizers are “cosmopolitans” and the populists are “nationalists”. Thus, the true nature of the conflict has not really changed, it has only become more obvious.

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I don’t watch cable news, except when I see a particularly interesting clip from it on the internet that I feel merits writing about. But this Politico article by Keach Hagey indicates that apparently there has been something of a shift in the coverage style of the Fox News channel, a shift that might not be apparent in one clip, but in the general tone of its coverage.

It seems, according the article, that Fox has shifted “to the left”. Of course, as we know, the left-right dichotomy is pretty simplistic, but we know what they mean. As the Politico article describes:

Last week, [Bill] O’Reilly invited onto his show a gay-rights activist to weigh in on Roland Martin’s controversial tweets during the Super Bowl. O’Reilly and Martin may be old foes, but the spectacle of watching O’Reilly, who once compared gay marriage to interspecies marriage, attacking a CNN anchor for being insufficiently sensitive to the feelings of gay people was quite a switch from the tone of two years ago.

Obviously, there’s a bit of opportunism here–it’s a chance to tarnish someone from another network, and that is opportunity that is hard to pass up. But still-quite remarkable. As the article shows, Fox has shifted away from the Tea Party crowd of “two years ago”.

The article goes on to quote a “Cliff Kincaid, president of America’s Survival”, who says things like “‘what happened is they buckled under pressure from George Soros and his operatives to get rid of Glenn Beck.'” in order to explain this development.

This is quite amusing. The Soros conspiracy never fails to provide a handy explanation for things in the minds of some.  The general assessment of the situation is something much more mundane: that Fox has made this shift for the sake of broadening its appeal.

I have a somewhat different take on this situation. The obvious point is that, two years ago, the Republicans were basically powerless. They could do nothing except be furious at the Democratic Congress and Executive. And this they did. And it won them the House of Representatives.

Now, because of that victory, they have some share in how the country is run. So, things can’t be quite so apocalyptic as they were when Democrats had all the majorities. Obviously, that would make the Republicans in the House look stupid. Fox has to paint things as somewhat less dire now, for their sake. The Politico article ends by mentioning a Tea Partier who “feels like she hears more apologies for the status quo on Fox these days.”

Maybe this is just a crazy conspiracy theory, as far-out as Cliff Kincaid’s idea. But it does fit the facts. And recall Megan McArdle’s observation, known as “Jane’s Law”,  that “the devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.” Now that the Republicans have gained back a share of power, they must become more “sane”.

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Paul Krugman offers his assessment of what’s going on with the Republican party:

[T]he long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

To put Krugman’s idea in my preferred terminology, the Nationalist wing and the Materialist wing have finally reached the breaking point, at which their many contradictory ideas no longer can be made to hold together.

Over at thingy’s blog the other day there was an interesting discussion around the question “what if robots engaged in political discourse“?  Well, if I may use the analogy of “the Republican party as robot”, Krugman is saying, effectively, that the party has gone the way of G0-T0, and is “unable to follow both of its prime directives” and, like G0-T0, this causes it to “break”.

At the moment, this has produced a field of candidates consisting of three rather ridiculous figures and one extremely dull one. I don’t say that the Republicans won’t win the Presidency this year, but even if they do, it will probably be Romney, who most of the nationalist wing hates anyway.

I wonder, though, what this means for the party longer term. Win or lose, I expect to see some big changes in the Republican party. I would venture to guess–and this is only idle speculation, not firm prediction–that they may become more like the pre-1960s Democrats. That is, remain fairly conservative on social issues, but become decidedly more liberal on economic issues.