What Can The Right-Wing Party In The U.S. Learn From The Tribulations And The Disastrous Defeat Yesterday Of The Right-Wing Party In Iceland?

My first trip to Europe started in Iceland. Air Iceland would fly you from JFK to Luxembourg, a banking center nestled between Germany, Belgium and France, for $100. The catch is that you had to stop in Keflavik. I was delighted; it was summer and I was out to discover the world. My girlfriend and I met another couple of adventurous Americans on the plane and the 4 of us decided to rent a car and drive around the island for a week. If I can remember that far back (1969) let me ask you to remember a party you probably didn't go to but surely heard about. It was November, 2005 and the host was notorious war profiteer David H. Brooks who was celebrating his daughter's bat mitzvah at the Rainbow Room. The event cost upwards of $10 million and featured Aerosmith, Nelly, Tom Petty, the Eagles, Kenny G. and 50 Cent. Aerosmith was paid $1 million and there's no way on earth Tom Petty or the Eagles would have played for less; they share the same manager. Brooks was a big macher; he had just donated $25,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee a couple of month earlier. So what's all this got to do with Iceland?

In this morning's NY Times it was reported that Iceland had just elected it's first left-of-center government... ever. The bankster crisis hit that country early and hit it hard, very hard. I was drawn to a quote by Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson (a former truck driver and geologist who heads the Green Party, a partner in the new ruling coalition):

“What are the people of the United States mad about now?” he said in a recent interview. “It is the same poisonous philosophy that we had here, based on a lack of moral awareness and greed, and people who thought nothing of flying Elton John into Iceland for their 50th birthdays and paying him 70 million Icelandic kronur.” [$600,000]

The unrestrained "free market" greed and avarice that swamped Iceland resulted in the toppling of the Republican-like right-wing government and it's replacement with a caretaker government led by Johanna Sigurdardottir, the first openly gay woman to head a national government. Yesterday's election gave her party 22 seats, the Greens 13 seats and the right-wing Independent Party 14 seats (23% of the vote).

23%? For the political party that has dominated Icelandic politics since independence from Denmark? The number sounded familiar and I racked my brain trying to remember... and then I did. Going into the 1934 congressional elections we've written about so many times here at DWT, Republicans found themselves in the minority for the first time in decades. Two years earlier Franklin Roosevelt had swept to power promising massive change from the reactionary, corporate policies the Republicans had used to bankrupt the country and cause the Great Depression. About half the Republicans in the House had been defeated, leaving them with just 117 members from mostly hard-core GOP districts. They had learned nothing from their 1932 drubbing and greeted FDR's first two years with an unrelenting obstructionism and invective, doing their best to persuade the American people that Roosevelt and his congressional allies were a bunch of socialists. The result came in the 1934 midterms-- 23%. That's the portion of seats the GOP held onto after they were smashed down by the voters again. The Republicans lost another 14 seats, for a grand total of 103-- 23.6%.

This morning Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin at Politico have the worst possible news for the Republican Party. It's own base, driven mad by years of hate-filled propaganda, is rebelling against any Republican politicians who move towards the mainstream. The base wants the pre-adolescent, obstructionist behavior radicals and extremists like Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Hannity extol to gain cable ratings points. It works in the ratings game but most Americans hate the extremism and see through the obstructionism.

The far right now utterly dominates the GOP base. That's OK in most of the Deep South-- although even there the GOP is on the defensive, losing red congressional seats in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia last year-- but it is pure poison north of the Mason-Dixon line and in the West, where states that had supported Bush in 2004, like Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, went for Obama in 2008.

Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.

There is little appetite for compromise on what many see as core issues, and the road to the presidential nomination lies-- as always-- through a series of states where the conservative base holds sway, and where the anger appears to be, if anything, particularly intense.

"There is a sense of rebellion brewing," said Katon Dawson, the outgoing South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who cited unexpectedly high attendance at anti-tax “tea parties” last week.

We watched that rebellion on tape 2 weeks ago as Gresham Barrett, a right-wing congressman who had hoped to become South Carolina's next governor, was mercilessly booed at the Greenville teabagger party. And Barrett has dedicated his entire political career to far right extremism-- except when it got in the way of his ability to raise "donations" from the now unpopular banksters. The Republican Party, devoid of respected leadership, and stuck with the flotsam and jetsam of opportunistic hacks like Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Hensarling, McConnell, Kyl, and Cornyn, has no choice but to embrace the paranoid hate, ignorance and bigotry of its base-- and race towards... well losing another dozen or two congressional seats in 2010.