Are the Republicans Really Only an Insurgency and No Longer a Political Party?

In a posting recently, I shared a short paper written by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, normally thinkers located at different points on the political spectrum.  But in the paper the two scholars joined together to advocate a new view of the current political division, which has now become a division of crisis proportions.

For the political system in Washington no longer actually works, not in the normal sense of the word. At best it appears to work only very slowly and not without a certain venomous rancor which poisons the well of democratic process.  Witness the various government shut-down threats and "fiscal cliffs," and the like.  

Mann and Ornstein have declared that while both political parties need reforming, the Republican Party no longer behaves as a responsible political party in the traditional sense.  Instead they are organized and behave as an insurgency.  It will be up to others to trace the path of this political resistance movement through the legacy of the Civil War, the Isolationists of the early 20th Century, the so-called Silent Majority, through the Moral Majority to the tea party movement of now. 

However, it is not hard to see echoes of previous political movements as we watch the antics of a fractured Republican conference in the House.  True, there are a few adults in the room, but they have little power.  It is the grand-standers and the blowhards who rule the roost and command the attention of a venal and rapt media establishment.  

Fortunately, there are beginnings of a remedy coming into view.  The Mann-Ornstein paper is a good start.  Now it is up to us to demand of our press and media a new sense of responsibility to the American people and not to short-term shock-and-awe techniques which belong more to the entertainment pages than to the news section.  

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The original re-post of a few days ago:

Saving the Constitutional System

Re-posted from Patriot in Exigency -- 

At the article linked to below, writers and scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write about the problems now besetting the U.S. government.  Built-in safeguards are breaking down, they say, and paralysis is the result.

The authors offer useful, though not necessarily easy solutions.

Useful Article on Current Problems With the U.S. Federal Government

Thomas Mann (l), Norman Ornstein.  Courtesy You Tube