Forty-six years ago in the long-lost country of South Vietnam, a giant American army sure of its ability to defeat a rag-tag group of black-pajama-clad insurgents was bitterly surprised to be defending itself on every front from an enemy known to history as the Viet Cong. Out of nowhere and all across American-occupied South Vietnam, guerrilla forces rose up to seize control of key points across the country in the hopes of sparking a populist rebellion that would oust the American-backed regime in Saigon.
In the short run, of course, it failed miserably as the overwhelmingly powerful American army rolled into action in Saigon, Khe Sanh and the city of Huế to the crush the Viet Cong who had suddenly decided to stand and fight. As far as battles go, it was a slaughter — one almost tailor-made to expose the guerrillas to America’s withering firepower and one that the Viet Cong were doomed to lose. Indeed, in a few short months it was all over — except for some extended mopping-up operations — and the war, such as it was, returned to normal.
Though the military campaign was a dismal failure that did not achieve its purely
military objectives, the famous Tet Offensive’s higher and more important political objective was nonetheless fulfilled. This was not to take territory, so to speak, but to demonstrate to Americans back in the United States that winning the war at an acceptable cost was out of the question and that the Vietnamese communists were prepared to accept a frightful slaughter to achieve their goals. Tet, in other words, changed U.S. perception of the war from being one that was still probably winnable to one that was, as Walter Cronkite famously observed on television, a lost cause in which America had tried her best.
Way down in Dixie
Analogies are imperfect things and it is always dangerous to use them, but something like a mini-Tet and its aftermath are currently playing out in Republican politics. As GOP-watchers should be aware, a number of remarkable fights played out in Republican circles this past primary season, with one powerful GOP incumbent — House Majority Leader Eric Cantor — tossed out by Tea Party unknown David Brat.
Like the Viet Cong suicide squads storming the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Cantor’s loss was by all accounts shocking and seemed to presage an unstoppable wave of Tea Party insurgents taking out GOP incumbents. Excited Tea Party types trumpeted their victory and money and enthusiasm began to flow toward favored primary challengers in states across the nation.
Then, eyes blazing with ideological fervor, the Tea Party turned its attention to Mississippi, where the elderly Republican Sen. Thad Cochran seemed sure to lose to his emboldened and invigorated challenger, Chris McDaniel.
The primary was a fiasco for the GOP, with neither side gaining the needed majority to clinch the party’s nomination. Not only did it divide the party, but as strange allegations surfaced that painted McDaniel’s camp as misguidedly creepy at best and unprincipled at worst, it widened the insurgent-establishment divide in the state’s politics — and this divide only deepened in the subsequent runoff. In that election, angry pro-Cochran conservatives did something unthinkable for a white candidate in Mississippi: reach out across the state’s massive racial divide to black Democrats in order to form an electoral alliance against a common enemy.
The alliance worked and in Mississippi the insurgent challenger was beaten back and humiliated, reduced to using the courts and ugly and utterly cynicalracial insinuations to try to win an election that he and his supporters couldn’t win outright.
While this farce played itself out in Mississippi, the Cochran victory restored the establishment’s faith in itself and took the wind out of the sails of the 2014 Tea Party surge. This, in turn, allowed time for other establishment candidates to rally and beat down presumptive Tea Party insurgents in other places. In Texas, Kansas, Tennessee and elsewhere, Tea Party candidates were beaten back and now it seems the Tea Party Tet, which arrived amid so much fanfare with the ouster of Cantor, has been defeated — out-gunned, out-financed and out-voted by the Republican establishment.
We had to destroy the village in order to save it
Or so it seems. Hidden in the mass of fallen, black-pajama Tea Party insurgents who ran this time around there were one or two who did survive to try again another day. Brat will go on to fight the Democratic nominee in November, but so, too, will one incumbent Tea Party candidate from Michigan by the name of Justin Amash. For those who follow such things, the name Amash might ring a bell, as his Quixotic campaign in the U.S. House to defund the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program made him the hero of both the Libertarian Right and the Progressive Left. However, it also made him powerful enemies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and establishment apparatchik Pete Hoekstra, who backed a candidate that fought a bare-knuckled, dirty campaign against Amash that did all but call him a Democrat and a traitor.
Despite all the firepower directed at him, though, Amash won. Rather than graciously acknowledging his opponent and adhering to St. Ronald Reagan’s famous Eleventh Commandment that thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican, Amash laid into his just run-off challenger and called out his powerful backers. He referred to Hoekstra as a “disgrace” and said he was happy to see the out-of-power Republican politico be given another loss before fading into obscurity and irrelevance.
When commenting on his actual opponent in the race, Amash said he was owed an apology for the “disgusting, despicable smear campaign” he had just defeated. Looking directly into the cameras and speaking to his challenger, Amash said that he ran for office specifically “to stop people like you.” Anger, it seems, had gotten the better of young Amash, and for a moment, the public was treated to view of how the two factions of the Republican Party really view each other — not as friends, but as deadly enemies who actually hate and fear one another.
What’s more, given the right wing grassroots’ rage over this electoral debacle in 2014, these defeats could actually set the stage for a long battle of political attrition as the Tea Party girds up for an unrelenting guerrilla campaign against the GOP establishment in the years ahead. Like the Viet Cong’s failure at Tet, then, the Tea Party’s 2014 defeat at the hands of the Republican old guard today may have lost on the ground only to have achieved the higher, objectively more important goal of winning over the party’s activist base. Such a development wouldn’t be unprecedented — after all, this was how the current conservative establishment took over in the first place. But this would mean that instead of the Republican civil war war ending, it might now just really be getting started.
Let that be your last battlefield
To outsiders, watching the Tea Party and the GOP establishment go at it hammer and tongs is rather like watching that old Star Trek episode in which Kirk and the gang encounter two aliens of the same species who are indistinguishable from one another except that one has a skin color pattern that mirrors the other’s. Meant as an obvious critique of the pettiness of small differences, the episode ends with the Enterprise returning the two hate-filled aliens to their home world, only for them to discover that their cities have been reduced to radioactive ash by their all-consuming conflict.
Those on the left might be cheered by this image of Republican infighting, but they shouldn’t sit too comfortably in the knowledge that the Republican civil war seems to show no sign of abating. Unlike the crew of the Enterprise who could shake their heads in disbelief at the irrationality playing out in front of them, we cannot beam ourselves away and head to the nearest star system at warp speed. Unfortunately, we are stuck not just on the same planet as the Republicans, but in the same country, and as the fighting continues in the other camp, those standing along the sidelines are getting caught in the crossfire.