For all its cloistered solipsism, the political culture of Washington, D.C. does produce the occasional insight relevant to American culture at large. ‘Failing upwards’ is perhaps the shrewdest observation about the rewards of incompetence to find application beyond the Potomac, encompassing everything from Michael Brown’s appointment to the directorship of FEMA to Nick Clegg’s sleepwalk into England’s deputy premiership to Michael Scott’s tenure as the district regional manager of the Dunder Miflin Paper Company on The Office. There are people who get away with getting on despite themselves; it’s only until the masquerade is uncovered that their peculiar endurance can be assessed after the fact. Failing upwards typically happens to individuals but it can also happen to institutions and political movements.
The recent nomination of Rand Paul to the Kentucky GOP Senate race is the best indication so far that the Republican Party has taken political opposition as an opportunity to burnish the medals of its own defeat, succumbing to an insurgent populism that mistakes Michigan militia-style entryism for a genuine political comeback. Is this failing upwards or succeeding downwards? As David Frum has written, the Crackpot Son Also Rises element to the GOP's electoral strategy could have been easily avoided thanks to the stunningly anticlimactic first year of the Obama administration:
Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It’s as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.
Rand Paul has confessed to agreeing with his father on pretty much everything. That means implicitly endorsing Ron Paul’s newsletters and various web “forums” that have for years promoted all manner of conspiracy theories, from the anti-Semitic to the 9/11 denialist. In an interview nearly a year ago with Alex Jones, himself a prominent 9/11 denailist, Paul fils not only acknowledged how closely his politics mirrors his parent’s but did so in the course of also affirming the need to hide his true beliefs for the sake of electoral expediency: "I'd say we’d be very very similar. We might present the message sometimes differently.. I think in some ways the message has to be broadened and made more appealing to the entire Republican electorate because you have to win a primary."
Conservatives who suspect Barack Obama of being a Frankenstein creation of Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky would be hard pressed to find a more bald-faced admission of concealed radical motive than in the above statement. If the door for such sinister infiltration had not been left open widely enough, then Paul is happy to pry open a window or two.
The party of Reagan has thus certified a crank who opposes American military supremacy, the wars against Islamic fascism, the detention of jihadists on U.S. soil, the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve, forty years of monetary policy not based on the gold standard, the government’s attempt to extirpate institutional racism, the historical outcome of the Civil War and a moral, internationalist foreign policy that includes shows of solidarity with dissidents of totalitarianism.
Rand Paul has conceded that the increased popularity of his politics reflects a ‘sort of left-right paradigm,’ a uniting isolationism for the post-partisan age. In its bid to ‘take back our government,’ the Republican Party has in effect auctioned it off to the hive mind of Gore Vidal and Lew Rockwell.
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