Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party ((Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("The upset victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts race to succeed the late Senator Ted Kennedy in early 2010 gave the deceptive impression that the movement might benefit moderate as well as conservative Republicans, since the Tea Partiers' alarm over swelling government and rising deficits historically had been a primary concern of the moderates. Outside of Massachusetts, however, the movement supported few fiscally conservatives who were not also rigid social and cultural conservatives, and none who could be described as moderate. In Utah, the movement knocked off incumbent Senator Robert Bennett, a Republican who had always taken pains to maintain his conservative bona fides, largely because he was perceived as being insufficiently angry and partisan. Tea Party activists also viewed his experience and policy expertise as deficiencies, and charged him with failing to curb the growing deficit. But the movement-affiliated candidates who claimed the mantle of fiscal conservatism had no real plans for reducing government expenditures beyond the standard conservative pursuit of politics-as-warfare: cutting programs that benefited Democratic constituencies while preserving programs that benefited Republican constituencies and avoiding any serious reform of defense spending or middle-class entitlement programs." "Far from benefiting moderates, the Tea Party movement brought far-right ideas that even conservatives had once resisted into the Republican mainstream In precious decades conservative gatekeepers like William F. Buckley Jr., pressured by moderates and mainstream media, had marginalized the paranoid conspiracy-mongers of the John Birch Society and 'kook' books like None Dare Call It Treason. Now tea-tinged conservative entertainers like Glenn Beck peddled the crackpot theories of Birch theoreticians like W. Clean Skousen to a television audience of millions, and books of the sort that once had been viewed as the political equivalent of hardcore pornography soared brazenly up the bestseller lists. While conservative politicians like Reagan had kept the Birch Society at arm's length, now members of the Republican leadership sponsored and spoke at Tea Party rallies at which demonstrators equated Democrats with Nazis and charged that Obama was a foreign-born dictator ravaging the Constitution. GOP politicians were unable to resist the rightward pressures from their base, even if they had wanted to, and echoed the extreme charges of the movement. As Obama complained to a gathering of Congressional Republicans, 'You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, 'This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America'.'" "One of the likest ways America might in fact be destroyed would be if one its two major parties were rendered dysfunctional, and yet this seemed to be the direction in which the GOP was heading as the 2012 elections approached. The version of the Republican Party that greeted the second decade of the twenty-first century was the one that apparently was in the process of shucking off most of its own history and heritage. Its leaders showed little interest in appealing to moderates, repudiating extremism, reaching out to new constituencies, or upholding the party's legacy of civil rights and civil liberties. There seemed little likelihood that the GOP would take the lead in working toward bipartisan solutions to the economic crisis or present itself as an effective governing party. The half century-long struggle of moderates and conservatives within the Republican Party had finally ended in the conservatives' complete domination, bu the fruits of this victory were proving to be bitter." Id. at 387-388. And so its goes. And where will America end up? Nobody knows. For those who are concerned--which all of us should be--, reading Kabaservice's Rule or Ruin may be the first step towards recovery and reversing a fifty-year slide.)
Ira Shapiro, The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012) ("And part of [a U.S. Senator's] the unspoken oath was an obligation to help make the Senate work. As Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving Senate majority leader in history memorably noted: 'In the end, it is not the individuals of the Senate who are important. It is the institution of the Senate. It is the Senate itself as one of the foundations of the Constitution. It is the Senate as one of the rocks of the Republic.' The Senate was an institution that the nation counted on to take collective action. Understanding that brought about a commitment to passionate, but not unlimited, debate; tolerance of opposing views; principled compromise; and senators' willingness to end debate, and vote up or down, even it is sometimes meant losing." "Those qualities characterized the great Senate and its members. . . . The Senate has often been described as a club, but at its best, the Senate actually functioned more like a great team, in which talented individuals stepped up and did great things at crucial moments, sometimes quite unexpectedly." "All of those qualities are missing from today's Senate, and they have been missing for a long time. When senators see the Senate as simply a forum for their own talents and interests, when they see their own views as so important or divinely inspired that compromise becomes unacceptable, or when they regard the Senate as merely an extension of the battle between the political parties, the Senate can become polarized and paralyzed on te path to irrelevance and decline." Id. at xv-xvi.).
