After last week's passage of the landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, right-wing extremists egged on by the frenzied hateful and irrational tone of their leaders, vandalized Democratic congressional offices, shouted racial slurs at minority Congressmen and threatened several lawmakers and their families, which caused 10 Democrats to request heightened security details. Rather than join Democrats in repudiating these shameful misdeeds, Republican Party leaders unsurprisingly continued their recent trend of shouting down the voices of their better angels, even blaming the victims for the criminal acts perpetrated against them. Condoning this campaign of intimidation and terrorism is not only morally repugnant, but politically dangerous. Party leaders need to soothe the violent anger in their base before it erupts into the assassination or attempted assassination of a Democratic leader, or health care will merely be the first of many humiliating political defeats for Republicans.
The United States is not Colombia or Iraq. Violence is not an established part of our political culture, and most Americans are shocked and saddened whenever politics turn deadly, tending to rally around the memory of fallen politicians and their ideals. As president, John F. Kennedy saw his approval ratings steadily decline as the country struggled through the civil rights movement and Congress was torn over the appropriate legislative response.
After Kennedy was assassinated, however, Lyndon Johnson a previously unelectable and polarizing former Senate Majority Leader debuted at a near-80 percent approval rating and stayed above 60 percent long enough to score one of the largest electoral blowouts prior to 1964, as well as to pass several liberal policy staples like the Great Society legislation that Republicans still rue to this day. Johnson was able to pass so many liberal proposals without the sort of withering resistance President Barack Obama has faced these last 15 months because he used Kennedy's memory as a political cover, knowing that Republicans and Southern Democrats couldn't bludgeon the memory of the dead president without significant electoral repercussions.
If a right wing terrorist were to attack a major Democratic Party figure like Obama or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi today, the results would be similar. Even if the assassination attempt was unsuccessful, the victim's approval numbers would spike, much as President Reagan's approval ratings peaked after the attempt on his life in 1981. Armed either with higher approval ratings, an iconic martyr or both, Congressional Democrats could pass another round of Great Society-like legislation virtually at will, and Republicans would be limited in the scope of their defensive rhetoric, lest they come across as even more disgustingly crass and ham-handed than they already do.
The conservative ideology can't afford to absorb many huge legislative defeats. As respected conservative thinker David Frum recently pointed out in a widely discussed column, victories like Medicare and the PPACA permanently weaken the conservative position because it is nearly impossible to muster the political will to take away entitlements from the American people once they grow accustomed to having them.
Every time the Democrats pass new entitlement legislation, the nation moves further from the Republican political ideal. They are playing with fire by trying to raise the homicidal rage in their base in order to carry them to large gains in the November midterms. Legislative majorities come and go over time, but entitlement legislation is forever, and if some whacko harms a prominent Democrat because he heard House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, say that passage of health care reform had ushered in "Armageddon," the Republicans will lose something far more valuable than a handful of seats.
Thus, strategically, it is brazenly reckless for Republicans to continue to tacitly encourage violence against Democratic leaders. The radical teabaggers may organize and vote for Republicans with great intensity, but if Republicans become branded as the party of hatred and violence, they will lose America's moderate middle and suffer both electorally and ideologically. Republican leaders are not only risking a national tragedy, they're risking the future of their way of thinking. It's time for them to finally return to sanity and end the violent rhetoric.
