As Goes California, So Goes Hawaii

Tim Cavanaugh on the GOP, particularly the California GOP:

Aging, compromised, morally bankrupt RINOs are no longer just a subgroup within the party. They are the default setting of the party. This is especially true in California, where Republicans happily vilify Barack Obama and Jerry Brown but somehow can’t get around to opposing high-speed rail, fighting the cap and trade system that came in this year, or in any other serious way distinguishing themselves from the Democrats. Worse still, the GOP actually opposed Brown’s efforts to abolish redevelopment agencies.

The Republicans’ inability to engage the Tea Party or the broader libertarian insurrection has been a problem everywhere, but in California, where the Tea Party never happened, the party of Reagan and Prop 13 has almost no libertarian mojo. Given the California GOP’s crisis of demographics and relevance, that’s a real problem.

One prominent Hawaii GOPper was quoted some time back saying that rich supporters give money, the religious supporters give their labor, and the libertarians sit around and complain. Seems about right: libertarians are not interested in being political: we want to be left alone. We don't want our lives ever more politicized: we want to be left alone. We don't want the politicians making decisions for us: we want to be left alone. The Republicans despise that idea: They don't want to leave us alone.

The party is marginal and becoming more so, but the leadership is deathly afraid of the one proven source of Republican energy and enthusiasm – because that source is considered too marginal. If the California Republicans continue distancing themselves from the libertarian movement, they will continue to suffer, and so will everybody else who has to live in a state where one party has absolute power and the other refuses to compete.

It does sound like Hawaii. Just look at the school system: widely acknowledged by all that it is a mess, controlled lock, stock, and barrel by the Democratic Party for half a century, but it occurs to no one, including the Republicans, to hold the Democrats responsible.

Maybe that is actually a great school system: It teaches one and all that the Democrats must always have all the power, without any accountability.