Looks like the Stupid Party is preparing to make Obama a hero this fall. The hilarious part of it is they will not just make Obama look like Lincoln they will end up giving the store away at the end. It is a familiar story. The Stupid Party looks around and sees that their base is wandering off in disgust. They think the way to get them back is to pick a pointless fight with the other guys over the budget. They will make a bunch of noises intended to get “their side” ready for battle. It’s all a big show intended to fool the people back home.

A handful of Congressmen, who really want to reign in the blob, will be front and center making their case. The press will play it cool for a while hoping for a shutdown. Then they will pile on the hapless Stupid Party like convicts on a new inmate. After a week of beatings, Boehner will cave and give the White House a blank check. Conservative Inc. will chatter on about about the need to get more Stupid Party members in Congress and win back the White House for the SP’s. Rinse. Repeat.

I’ve been reading a lot of European history of late. One thing that always strikes me is how the nobles were able to set themselves up in power and maintain that power. They were clearly better educated and certainly in the top tier of intelligence for their respective populations. There were some blockheads springing from the royal loins, but they self-policed. If the next in line was an idiot, he would often “fell ill” in his youth and never made it to adulthood. If that did not work, then death by misadventure was an option.

Democracies are supposed to work the same way, just without the inherited positions. and cool pageantry. Even the children of pols have to stand for election. That’s the self-policing. The retarded Kennedy can be placed in a safe Congressional seat, but he is not going to be running for president. The smart ones are groomed for bigger things. Plenty slip through the net and make it to the senate or a prominent position in the Executive, but the legislature tends to be the main collection point for those who rose too high.

What explains the Stupid Party?

I have not had time to think this through, but my sense is the parties have changed since the 1980’s. The “new” economy born out of the Louvre Accords allowed the ruling class of America to sever itself from the middle class entirely. From the 1930’s through the 1980’s, the Democrat party was the home of cultural elites and the working and middle class voters. The GOP was the home of the business and financial classes along with upper middle and some middle class voters.Both parties were dominated by whites.

Today, the Democrats are the authoritarian party. They are the aristocrats. They jealously guard the interests and prerogatives of the state and the elites. There’s a reason we have gone through three major financial crisis and no one has gone to jail. There’s a reason why Wall Street gives 2-to-1 to Democrats. As has always been true of authoritarians, they gain popular support by promising the lower classes free stuff from the middle class. It is the classic top plus the bottom against the middle approach to politcs.

On the other side, the GOP has become the home of the white middle classes. They still have plenty of upper class businessmen who run the Chamber of Commerce, but those are folks decidedly not in the elite. The body shop owner is now solidly Republican, but so are most of his employees. Government, Gays, Guns and God is what unites the working class whites with the middle class whites. The GOP is now the plebeians, except they lack anyone with the skill and courage of a Gaius Licinius.

The Stupid Party not only has an IQ deficit, they also have another problem. They don’t get it. They look at the fight as just one group of loyal Americans against another group of loyal Americans. They think they can have honest dealings with the other side. In reality, the other side wants them dead. We are in a cold civil war and the establishment elites are playing to win. They are not interested in compromise. The result is the Stupid Party shows up to every fight hoping to appeal to the other side’s sense of fair play.