The Gods Will Have Blood – or – the Autosarcophagarch’s Dilemma

To be fair, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to need to be a massive concern for him when he’s crushing said primary opponent by nearly 50 points in the polls, and will also breeze past the Dem in the general. Reports of Mitch McConnell’s demise are greatly overstated.

I just want to say that the title of this post is awesome.

The first is Silliness–the silliness of the doctrinaire. It is nothing strange to discover this in movements which have passed somewhat suddenly from the phase of midnight high-flown talk into the field of action. We do not distinguish, at first, between the color of the rhetoric with which we have won a people’s assent and the dull substance of the truth of our message. There is nothing insincere in the transition. Words ought to be a little wild–for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. But when the seats of power and authority have been attained, there should be no more poetic license.

We have, therefore, to count the cost down to the penny which our rhetoric has despised. An experimental society has need to be far more efficient than an old-established one, if it is to survive safely. It will need all its economic margin for its own proper purposes, and can afford to give nothing away to soft-headedness or doctrinaire impracticability. When a doctrinaire proceeds to action, he must, so to speak, forget his doctrine. For those who in action remember the letter will probably lose what they are seeking…

“The Gods Will Have Blood” as a translation of “Les Dieux ont soif” has always annoyed me- the original anecdote in Camille Desmoulins’ Le Vieux Cordelier was about a Spaniard asking the Aztecs why they do human sacrifice and receiving the understated reply, “The gods are thirsty.”

The lurid “the gods will have blood” is rather different in tone.

I don’t think McConnell was a revolutionary, or a tea bagger -he was a go along conservative who saw how weak Obama and the dem leadership was in 2009-2010 – because he remembered the Dems from 1980 to 2010. The dem slogan could have been taken from Kerry’s mouth: I was against it before I was for it. You can’t expect a revolution from a bowl of oatmeal – or even, as Dem voters have found out, even slightly liberal policies from Dems forgetting campaign promises.
But the teabaggers have been wholly admirable in their focus. They will eat their own – because they aren’t really their own. I remember the neo-liberal crowd, after Obama was elected, writing faux solemn bits about how the GOP was now done for a generation. Matt Yglesias was particularly egregious in this respect, but there was a lot of “GOP soulsearching” thumbsuckers floating about. Even at the time I thought that was as nonsensical as the Bush administration’s notion that Iraq would be a cakewalk, and for the same reason – a lack of any feeling for history. And sure enough, the Dems produced a stimulus that, as a percentage of the Gdp, was less than Bush’s stimulus in 2001, and then produced Romney care. It was to laugh. Along with the pivot to deficit reduction.
So, I’d re-read what has been going on with McConnell. Rather than the revolution eating their own, the revolution eats those who think the revolution is a stunt that they can use and then discard. Another election year is coming up, and given the polls I’d say so far the GOP has a very very good chance of winning the Senate, and the Dems have no chance of winning the House. From the revolutionaries point of view, the ultra strategy has paid off handsomely. I’ll believe the revolutionaries are eating their own when they turn against Ted Cruz.
It does seem to me that you can chart a certain liberal guilt in the way the Tea Party is depicted by liberal commentators. Because what they are seeing is a minority that, by refusing to compromise, has changed the very stakes of the game. Meanwhile, since Reagan’s era, compromise first has been the big liberal slogan. Endorse de-regulation. Compromise about the Iraq war. Endorse Simpson-Bowles. It used to be bi-partisanship was a friendly word for selling out your promises, and elections were about thundering about the mock threat posed by the opposition party to which you would cave after the election was over. But these revolutionaries hold the politicos to a higher standard. Good for them.

I’m seconding Roger. When you look at Fall ’08, the GOP was in shambles, having failed at so many things, and then had taken the country into catastrophe.

Can you imagine the Democratic Party after similar circumstances?
(IMHO, you’d have to take the Carter administration, add an actual lost war, break the economy worse than it was in 1980, and through in beaucoup corruption).

Adding a me2 to Steve W. and Roger.

John, Kentucky hasn’t sent a Democrat to the US Senate since 1992. And challenging a healthy, well-funded five-term incumbent in a state where he’s reasonably popular is a steep, steep uphill climb.

— Reality check: how many incumbent Senators have been successfully primaried in the last decade? Out of 330+ elections, I count four: Lieberman in CT, Murkowski in AK, Bennett in UT, and Lugar in IN. And of those four, two (Lieberman and Murkowski) bounced back to win the general. So, we’re talking a successful primary rate of *less than one percent*. And all four of those were against Senators who were much more vulnerable than Mitch McConnell.

Doug M.

@ajay, strictly speaking it should be “how many primaries against incumbents” versus “how many total races with incumbents running for re-election”, since races for open seats are a very different dynamic. Being unopposed in the primary certainly counts for our purposes, since we’re trying to determine whether Senators should lie awake nights worrying about a primary challenge.

Doing a very fast skim, it looks like the last 10 years / 5 cycles have seen about 130 races with incumbents. Five of those lost to primary challenges; two (Lieberman, Murkowski) won the general anyway, while three (Bennett, Lugar, Specter) lost their seats.

So, 3/130 or about 2.5%. Higher, but still pretty low.

Doug M.

now, if you want to argue that Senators should be nervous anyway, you could go digging for another dataset: Senators who survived a serious primary challenge but lost their seat in the general, at least partly because of said primary challenge.

Unfortunately, this one is really hard to parse, because how can you tell whether the challenge caused the eventual defeat? For instance, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas had to fend off a strong challenger, and this probably hurt her in the general, but, honestly, she was probably toast anyway. (She lost the general by 21 points.) On t’other hand, Lincoln Chafee’s 2006 loss in Rhode Island probably was thanks to a very fierce primary challenge from a more conservative candidate, which dragged him much further to the right than he wanted to go.

That said, I’d guess that the total number in this group, over the last decade, is fingers-of-one hand.

Doug M.

to coda my coda – I’ve always thought that the one thing that could have saved the Dems from the moderate right fate they’ve embraced would have been if Tom Delay had succeeded with the K street project. You remember when the former House Speaker made a real effort to purge democrats from the ranks of the lobbyists in the 00s? Bush’s patriot act, his tax cuts, his war on Iraq, all were opposed tepidly if at all by the Dems – but they rose as one man to oppose the horrible K Street project. My god, turning off the gravy spigot – it was enough to make one foreswear public service! Unfortunately, Tom Delay did not succeed. With the results we see today.