House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary tonight to a Tea Party-backed candidate in one of the biggest upsets in recent memory. The victor, college professor Dave Brat, ran a disorganized campaign and spent only $200,000 to Cantor's $5 million. But GOP voters in Virginia's 7th District apparently saw the incumbent's halting openness to comprehensive immigration reform as a betrayal of conservative values. Despite his rising-star status and national profile as a conservative counterweight to the supposed moderation of Speaker John Boehner, Cantor is out of a job.
This is merely the most recent Republican to be tossed out of office for being insufficiently conservative. Senators Bob Bennet and Dick Lugar, long considered conservative stalwarts, both lost their party's nomination in 2012 because they voted for the TARP bailouts in 2008. Even Speaker Boehner was the target of a coup attempt at the beginning of the 113th Congress. Conservatives are eating their own young. It's not going to end well for the Republican Party, but in the meantime, it's bad news for America, as well.
We've seen this pattern in history before. Across the globe, radical factions render themselves irrelevant by demanding ideological purity from their members and eschewing all forms of compromise, wreaking havoc in their societies along the way. China's Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s is an instructive example.
Proponents of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 were characteristically fanatical in their beliefs and uncompromising in their enmity for anybody who disagreed with them. Millions of government workers, many of whom had fought for the Communist cause during China's revolution and civil war, were branded as "capitalist roaders" and forced from their jobs. At the urging of Lin Biao and others in Mao Zedong’s inner circle, mobs of youths called “Red Guards” roamed the country, burning temples, destroying artwork, and torturing intellectuals, as the new socialist paradise they were hoping to establish required that everything from prior eras be purged. Anybody who opposed them was subject to humiliation, torture, or even summary execution.
Government ceased to function, and in this tense ideological atmosphere, nobody was safe. The radicalism could not be controlled, and soon even the movement's original proponents themselves became targets. By 1971 Lin and other early Cultural Revolution leaders had been branded as traitors and either imprisoned or exiled. At the movement's peak, there were very few experienced administrators left to perform vital government functions. Millions of Chinese people died and untold wealth was lost as the economy entered a prolonged standstill. The Red Guards may have had the most passionate fervor and the purest ideological beliefs, but they didn't now anything about how to make their socialist paradise work in the real world.
By 1976, radical leaders had finally lost all credibility, and after Mao died, moderate forces were able to regain influence and reassert a measure of sanity to China's politics and the economy. But the damage done by the political chaos, in which anybody who knew anything about governing was marginalized or worse, still lingers to this very day.
Back home in America, I don't think we'll ever suffer the level of violent chaos that China went through in the 60's. I also don't think that the Tea Party movement, as loud and angry as it gets, will ever succeed in achieving actual power on the scale that the Red Guards achieved. But we should take warning from this period in Chinese history.
Often, the realities of governing require leaders to subsume their ideology in order to avert crisis. Once a political system starts to punish its leaders for making hard decisions and rewards them for using ideological conformity as a political weapon, the country suffers. Republicans have started down this path, and with Tea Party-elected House Republicans obstructing all manner of needed reforms, America has already started to see the consequences. For the sake of the country, I hope that voters can wake up to the true culprits in the stalled drama of our politics.