The GOP's Pied Piper Problem

(updated below--twice)

For the last decade and a half, the Republican party has pursued an intentional strategy of insulating its base from reality. The goal has been to create a permanent block of loyal Republican voters who will dutifully internalize whatever the party's leaders tell them.

To accomplish this, the Republican political machine has engaged in a relentless and systematic assault on all of the institutions in our society that have traditionally served as arbiters of truth. They have attacked the press, the judiciary, academia, and even science itself. And they've been remarkably successful; we've now reached a point where much of the Republican base simply refuses to believe anything that doesn't come from a trusted partisan outlet.

Any unpleasant news reports can be dismissed as the product of liberal media bias. Any inconvenient studies can be explained away as the work of godless academic elitists. And any adverse court rulings can be chalked up to liberal judicial activism. In short, if it didn't come from the mouth of Rush Limbaugh or the President himself, it's automatically suspect.

I'm sure the architects of this strategy thought it was ingenious. It would create a loyal and reliable base of voters who were, for all intents and purposes, impervious to reality and who would simply accept whatever the party's leaders told them.

This strategy has an inherent vulnerability, though. Call it the Pied Piper problem. If you train a bunch of people to follow the Leader reflexively, they're likely to follow him right out of town (or right off a cliff).

This is the problem now confronting all sane members of the Republican party. For years now, they've been telling the American people--among other things--that everything in Iraq is going fine, that the liberal media is just refusing to report the good news, and that any criticism of the war or the President's war policy gives aid and comfort to the enemy. The vast majority of the American people have long since tuned this message out, but not the Republican base. President Bush may only have a 28% approval rating, but those 28% represent the true-believers. And those are the voters who are going to decide who the next Republican presidential nominee will be.

That puts Republicans in a terrible bind. If they acknowledge reality, which they'll need to do in order to have any hope of winning independent and moderate voters, they may well be branded as traitors by their base, who still firmly support the Leader and his Glorious War.

If you need proof of this, look no further than Hugh Hewitt. Just today, Hewitt launched a pledge drive to protest the upcoming Senate vote on a non-binding resolution opposing the President's "surge" plan. Hewitt has so thoroughly internalized the Republican party mantra--i.e., that criticism of Bush's war policy only "encourages the enemy"--that he feels compelled to take incredibly heavy-handed measures to stifle dissent within his own party. Hewitt's pledge reads:

If the United States Senate passes a resolution, non-binding or otherwise, that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq that General Petraeus has asked for and that the president has pledged, and if the Senate does so after the testimony of General Petraeus on January 23 that such a resolution will be an encouragement to the enemy, I will not contribute to any Republican senator who voted for the resolution. Further, if any Republican senator who votes for such a resolution is a candidate for re-election in 2008, I will not contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee unless the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Ensign, commits in writing that none of the funds of the NRSC will go to support the re-election of any senator supporting the non-binding resolution.

Reality be damned! Criticism of the Leader's plan = treason. For some reason, Hewitt reminds me of the ED-209 in the first RoboCop movie; you know, that huge robot that blows away the company executive at the beginning of the movie because it can't distinguish between an actual criminal and a guy pretending to hold a gun. Hewitt is a creation of the Republican political machine, but now he's turned on his creators. His simple partisan programming just doesn't allow for Republican dissent on war-related issues. So he's turning his guns on GOP defectors.

This is going to be a huge problem for all of the 2008 GOP presidential hopefuls. All of them will be tempted to distance themselves from Bush and from the war in an effort to sound sane and remain viable as general election candidates. But by doing so, they risk alienating their own base, who are still very much drinking the Kool-Aid.

At this point, Bush is the Pied Piper and he's leading the Republican faithful far away from where the saner voices in the party are comfortable being (and from where the rest of the electorate is). The problem with insulating your base from reality is that there's no easy way to bring them back down to earth. You risk creating an unbridgeable chasm between your base and the rest of the electorate. If the Old Guard in the Republican party can't figure out a way to bring the Pied Piper back to Hamelin, they're going to remain in the political wilderness for a long time to come.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald explains in considerable detail just how creepy and un-American Hewitt's "pledge drive" is. Meanhwile, Redstate strongly endorses The Pledge (Headline: No Compromise. No Retreat. No Surrender. Or Zero Support in 2008.) That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

UPDATE: John Cole's take on the The Pledge is also spot on.