New and Upcoming Releases: McNary, Dillingham, Phillips, Bridges, Freakwater

Those looking for material for a tragic novel could do worse than borrow from the biography of Tim McNary: raised in a cheerless Chicago evangelical home, a bout of homelessness, two band breakups, depression, and the theft of his van and all of his equipment…. At the very least you could get some good country music out of that. And he has—his forthcoming EP Above the Trees resulted from a move to Nashville and catharsis with guitar and pen. His voice has been compared to that of Damien Rice and that's a pretty good analogy in that both are capable of high-level drama and low-level pain. The vocals also evoke Richard Shindell's mix of reedy and guttural tones. My favorite track is "The Other Man," a song about the proverbial third wheel in a doomed triad: You've got another man… and I don't give a damn/I'm the one loving you now. Now if that's not a country song, I don't know what is. In style, though, McNary is more on the acoustic end of things, with flights into theatrical and robust arrangements. The EP releases April 8, but you can sample tracks now at Noisetrade.

All I can tell you about Dillingham is that it's an acoustic rock band based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The lead singer, Tucker MacDonald, sounds as if he might be English. Apparently the entire for-sale output is three tracks available for download. I liked all three. "Chicago" has the sad feel of a man pouring out his sorrows at a 2 am café as an accordion squeezes out the pain. "Night Run" is a different thing altogether—a metronome-like beat, some acoustic guitar playing over it, and vocals on, in-between, and behind the beat. The lyrics aren't really the point; it's more like being washed in sound. "Ships" features very strong vocals from a very fine singer, whoever he might be. Go to your favorite download site, sample these, and see if one makes you want to shell out a buck. It's worth it. Now enough with the mystery. Who are these folks?

I haven't heard the whole thing yet, but I'm hopeful that the new release from Grant-Lee Phillips titled The Narrows will return him to the promise of the early 1990s, when he toured with (and as) Grant Lee Buffalo and caught to praiseful notice of Michael Stipe (R.E.M.). His more recent solo work has been good, but lacks variety. At his best, his high tones are reminiscent of Neil Young with some of the rawness smoothed out, but an overabundance of slow-paced material borders on the laconic. But "Smoke and Sparks" from the new record lives up to its title. The circular strumming of the guitar is robust and his Young-like voice is dotted with colors and mannerisms that are like Springsteen in a country mode. I'm hopeful there will more of this.  

Speaking of Young, an outfit calling itself Bridges is actually Athens, Georgia-based Alex Young and some sidekicks. Their debut EP Bridges has a sort of Dave Matthews vibe to both Young's voice and the way in which songs begin one way and veer off in other directions. Bridges are a bit grittier, though. A favored technique, which we hear on the song "Young," is to open slow and mournful then segue to some crunchy power chords. This song has a bit of rock opera drama to it—as does "Stand Up, Fall Down"–but others spin differently. "No Ordinary Night" is a Van Morrison-like song with its jazzy horns and soulful grooves, yet the punfully named "Saxy" uses the same horns to deliver the power jazz/progressive rock of bands like Jon Hiseman's Colosseum. And then there's the heavy metal-meets-country "Departure (Yours)," whose very title lets us know a happy ending is unlikely. This one is another pay-what-you-wantdownload and its five tracks are well worth a few bucks.

The Louisville-based band Freakwater has been around since 1989 and I still can't figure out what I think about them. They have a nice recording titled Scheherazade (Bloodstone Records) that will either be your cup of tea or send you running for a beer. The first thing you need to know about this band is that they specialize in dissonance. The harmonies between Janet Bean and Catherine Irwin are, depending upon your point of view, raw, twangy mountain at their unfiltered and honest best; or Emmylou Harris on a dead drunk. I sampled "The Asp and theAlbatross," which has fine backing electric instrumentation, and the backwoodsy "Number One with a Bullet," a dark song done as if it were a two-step. Each has its appeal as alt.country living up to its label. There aren't many bands with such unusual vocals, so you can be excused if you think Freakwater is best imbibed in small sips, not big gulps. They're worth a taste test, though.

Rob Weir

Black Panthers Documentary (all too) Relevant for Today

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BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015)

Directed by Stanley Nelson, Jr.

PBS Distribution, 115 minutes, Unrated.

 * * **

If you’ve not yet seen this powerful documentary on the Black Panthers, see it ASAP. If you wonder why you’d want to take a trip—and not always a pleasant one—back in time, Google “Black Lives Matter” and you’ll have your answer.

Director Stanley Nelson, Jr. isn’t always entirely on the level, but his film is remarkably balanced in showing both the attractions and weaknesses of the Black Panthers from a black point of view. This alone is a revelation. As one old enough to recall, it often seemed that whites had one of two views of the Black Panther Party (BPP): romantic or fearful; that is, those who glorified the BPP and thought everything it did was justified, and those who agreed with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that they were terrorists. Nelson shows them as more complex and he—through former Panther William Calhoun—reminds us of their “youthful vigor.” Like many 1960s social activists, youthful Panthers were a sometimes volatile mix of idealism, impatience, insight, and naiveté. It also had what Kathleen Cleaver called the “swagger” of youth. Several commentators remarked upon the seductive coolness of Panthers in their shades, leather jackets, and defiance. To fearful whites they were a raised fist to the face of propriety and comfort—and that was the point! The BPP actually formed first in Alabama, but it was in the streets of 1966 Oakland where it took off. As Calhoun observed, there was no difference between how African Americans were treated in Alabama vis-à-vis Oakland. The BPP was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and those automatic weapons they carried were there because they had, for too long, been gunned down by racist cops for reasons roughly as good as those that led to Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, or Eric Garner’s in 2014.

Nelson mines archival video and crosscuts it with recent interviews, talking heads analysis, and voice-overs. He has some superb footage, like Bobby Seale on a talk show cohosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, old Soul Train episodes, and Ronald Reagan at his tough-cowboy worst. Numerous movement figures discuss their involvement in the organization and why they joined. The only reenactments are those involving FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (Stu Richel) and that’s because Hoover’s role was crucial in defining and declawing the BPP. Hoover was singularly obsessed with preventing the rise of a “Black Messiah” and the sight of Panthers ringing the California legislature carrying automatic weapons firmed his resolve to crush them. (It also led the National Rifle Association to call for strict gun control laws!) Huey Newton was railroaded on a manslaughter charge in 1968; though public pressure forced his release, he was ultimately too volatile to be that messiah. Ditto Eldridge Cleaver, who escaped prosecution by fleeing to Algeria. Bobby Seale had his own legal woes, and Stokely Carmichael was never a good fit. Soon, Hoover’s COINTELPRO spy network exacerbated the rift between Newton and Cleaver, which split the BPP into irreconcilable factions, one that wanted to emphasize revolution and the other community service. First, though, the most-promising messiah, Fred Hampton, had to go, a task accomplished when Chicago police and the FBI executed him in 1969. One of the more potent messages from the documentary is that the BPP, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, contained more victims than rebels. As was the case for most groups on Hoover’s watch list, civil liberties and legal niceties seldom stood in the way of eliminating “subversives.”

Does Nelson romanticize the Panthers? Though he’s no doe-eyed worshipper, the objective answer is yes. He assiduously avoids discussing the fact that many of its leaders were doctrinaire communists, or that the BPP did, on occasion, precipitate violence rather than simply react to it. He argues that the Panthers were not anti-white, but ignores lots of (admittedly heated) rhetoric that took that tone. In a related vein, the BPP’s relationship to the broader New Left is not developed. Perhaps most glaring is his gloss of BPP sexism. Let’s just say that women got a more respectful airing in this film than most got in BPP meetings, and that you’d never guess that Elaine Brown, who chaired the Panthers from 1974-77, was one of the biggest critics of Panther sexism.

If Nelson sugarcoats a bit, he doesn’t shy from BPP weaknesses such as the cults of personality it fostered, the egoism of Newton and Cleaver, and the very idea that Panthers could win an armed struggle against the federal government. For the most part, Nelson serves up a first-rate history lesson. The BPP did not accomplish a revolution, but remember that Nelson called it a “vanguard.” Black Lives Matter, Martin, Garner, and others remind us that history’s final chapter is yet to be written.

Rob Weir

Postscript: The NRA’s response to armed Black Panthers shielded by the Second Amendment spawned an idea for the gun control movement: give every illegal immigrant a firearm!  

          

Goodbye Blue: March Album of the Month

GOODBYE BLUE

Worth the Wait

Wondermore Records/Noisetrade

* * * *

This album is everything I generally dislike: wall-to-wall wholesomeness, family values, and parents singing about their children. Mind, I've nothing against kids—but I nearly always find songs about parenthood embarrassing in their sentimentality. So why do I suddenly adore an entire album of this stuff?

Let's start with the obvious: the talent of the couple featured, the husband-wife team of Charlotte Kendrick and Dan Rowe, she a Pawling, NY native, University of Vermont grad, and Peace Corps vet; and he a multi-instrumentalist, veteran of the Northeast music scene, and a producer of indie label records. Okay—good values. Now let's go deeper. Ms. Kendrick doesn't just have a nice voice—it's one that stops you in your tracks and makes you ask, "Who is that?" Her vocals are often compared to Patty Griffin, but Lori McKenna is a better choice.

Kendrick and Rowe have three kids and the last one is the reason why the album is christened Worth the Wait; it was almost eight years between Kendrick's I Get Stupid and the new record. The album evokes Lori McKenna in the way in which family comes first and music second. Appropriately, it opens with the sunny "Another One on the Way," rendered in soft country folk style and oozing family values, but not in a mawkish or romantic way. One of the album's many joys is that Kendrick and Rowe simply embrace their choices and move on: There’s no question we’ve got ourselves a handful/So little time for us/But we’re never given more than we can handle/We’ve got this babe, another one on the way. There's nothing preachy about them and no sugarcoating what it takes to get by. On "Complicated," Kendrick sings, Nothing's simple as it seems/We both have our dreams/And we know nothing worth having comes easily/But, oh, it's complicated/Oh, it's complicated. Check out also the up-tempo, bluegrassy "By Firelight," which might be destined to become an ode to exhausted moms everywhere—a veritable litany of the ways in which kids and duties can drive a person to the point where, …you’re hiding in your basement/‘Cause you can no longer take it/Watching Youtube on your phone/ You should be folding clothes/Prepping dinner, wiping a nose/But all you need is one small minute alone.

Call this an Americana album that's both sweet and refreshingly honest. There's some folk, some bluegrass, a touch of hoedown, and the vibe of the title track is that of an anticipatory "Circle Game" update. But, like Ms. McKenna, not a peep of complaint from Kendrick—just that voice that makes you ask again, "Who is that?" and shames curmudgeons like me.  Rob Weir

Steve Jobs Biopic a Mid-Range Design

STEVE JOBS (2015)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Universal Pictures, 122 minutes, R (language)

* * *

I'm typing this review of my Mac. I also own an iPhone, an iPad, and an iPod. Nonetheless, I have never have bought into iHype. For me, Mac products are just tools that are reliable and work across various platforms. I don't give a sqwanker's farley how elegant they look atop my desk or in my back pocket–I just want them to be useful hammers. In like fashion, I never thought Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was an infallible genius, so a revisionist film about him doesn't shatter my worldview.

Michael Fassbender was nominated for an Oscar for his titular role in Steve Jobs. He didn't win and shouldn't have—he did a very nice job (world play intended) but it wasn't an earth-moving performance. Nor did this film make the cosmos quake. It's perfectly competent and has some fine moments, but its major achievement is to walk up to the edge of histrionics and pull back just in time.

Steve Jobs is not a conventional biopic, rather it centers on three big moments in Jobs' career, two flops and a prodigal son return act. We first encounter Jobs as an obsessed bully moments before the 1984 launch of Macintosh. He hurls threats and insults at everyone as if these will magically get a crashed OS to say "Hello" when he introduces the first Macintosh to an audience waiting for him to deliver on the change-the-world promise of Apple's now legendary 1984 Super Bowl ad. All that changed was that Jobs didn't get to trash the profitable Apple II or get his way in a showdown with CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). Instead, he got fired.

We meet Jobs again in 1988, as he prepares to debut NeXT, an almost perfect cube that had everything you'd want in a computer, except that it cost a sultan's fortune and didn't yet have a working OS. He did, however, predict Apple would have to buy NeXT for that very operating system, hence we see him for a third time in 1998 as readies the unveiling of the iMac G3, the machine that really did revolutionize personal computing. It was the moment in which Steve Jobs became Apple and Apple became Steve Jobs.  

Most of the rest of Jobs' life—the script is culled from Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography—emerges in snippets and flashbacks: the hippie-meets-libertarian days in which he, Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) built the first Mac; his troubled relationships with Chrissann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and  with their daughter, Lisa; the unconvincing denials that it bothered him that he was adopted; and the various ways in which he systematically alienated those closest to him. Jobs emerges as a flesh-and-blood analog to Mr. Data—more machine than human being. The story's tragic heroine is Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), the long-suffering advertising executive who remains faithful to Jobs, even as he is self-destructing.

If you want a saintly Steve Jobs, steer clear of this film. He comes off mainly as egoistical, oblivious, deceitful, abusive, and paternally inept. From what I glean from Isaacson, these things are largely true–Jobs was always a bit of snake oil salesman who was neither programmer nor designer, just a great pitchman for ideas implemented by others. And he really was a jerk much of the time. If, on the other hand, you're fine with needed revisionism, the film has its virtues. There are superb moments that capture the cult-like behavior of the wired, hipster crowd—the ones who do buy into iHype. Plus, there are several superior performances, especially that of Ms. Winslet, who walks the fine line between vulnerable and fierce. Seth Rogan finally gets a meaty part and proves himself worthy of it. Jeff Daniels is also solid as a CEO who knows when to charm, when to stand firm, and when to cut his losses.

Some of the biographical details are Hollywoodized. Hoffman did not carry the implied torch for Jobs; others, not Jobs, forced Sculley out of Apple; Jobs' biological father was a Syrian Ph.D. student, not a restaurateur; and Jobs' wife and other three children don't even get a mention. Moreover, the film's episodic structure compresses too much vileness into too short a time frame, which serves to make Jobs more unlikable than is fair and doesn't make plausible the reevaluation of his life we are supposed to think is on the horizon. 

I guess not everything Mac can he hyped, though. This film hasn't generated the passion of a new product launch, and has earned back just a little over half of its $30 million budget. The lack of buzz is also oddly appropriate. The film is worth watching, but think of it as more mid-range Dell than iMac G3. –Rob Weir

Hochschild's Book on Spain Appeals on All Levels

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Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Adam Hochschild

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 464 pages, 2016

This review first appeared on www.nepca.wordpress.com 

Humankind is often blind to irony, but history is not. I was just pages from finishing Adam Hochschild's searing look at the Spanish Civil War when I came upon his comment that there was but a single living survivor of the Lincoln Brigade–those 2,800 Americans who went to Spain to try to preserve the Spanish Republic. It was no small feat to be a survivor—better than a third of those idealistic black and white young men (and a handful of women) died in the conflict, a higher casualty rate than any other group. The very morning (March 6) I read Hochschild's line, the Boston Globe ran the obituary of that last survivor, 100-year-old Delmer Berg.

We owe Mr. Hochschild a debt for making sure that we don't forget the causes and motives that animated individuals such as Mr. Berg, one the many for whom the Spanish conflict the "the defining experience of their lives." (1%) Hochschild is too learned to add his voice to the legions that romanticize the Lincolns. Berg, like the book's Aristotelian tragic hero Bob Merriman, was a devoted communist. Hochschild does a superb job of explaining why individuals like Merriman, the dashing UCal economics professor who commanded the Lincoln Brigade, were drawn to the communist Popular Front. Call it a combination of realism and idealism. In the midst of the Great Depression it wasn't hard to imagine that capitalism had failed or that Soviet-style communism–less than two decades old–might be a better form of society. Berg and Merriman heroically cast their lot with comrades in the Spanish Republic, but their erstwhile patrons in Moscow proved unworthy of their affection. Although Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was the only nation to sell weapons to the Spanish Republic, it sent them junk, exacted a high toll, and–like the proverbial fair-weather friend–was never there when most needed. Moreover, his agents in Spain were often more concerned with ferreting out Trotskyites than Nationalists. Nor did they shy from using foreign volunteers as cannon fodder; Bob Merriman died on precisely such a fool's errand. In 1949, six authors wrote the epitaph of communism and called it The God that Failed; tellingly, five of them were reporters during the Spanish Civil War.

Hochschild's unique twist to the story is to devote much of his attention to the reporters who covered the war, including such luminaries as Jay Allen, Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, George Steer, George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn, Frances Davis, Virginia Cowles, and future communist apostates Louis Fischer, André Gide, and Arthur Koestler. There are juicy tidbits, such as the way Cowles and Gellhorn used prevailing sexism to their advantage, how some editors kowtowed to pressure from the Catholic Church to whitewash Franco's crimes, how a handful such as Herbert Knickerbocker became propagandists for the Nationalists, and details suggesting that Hemingway was precisely the pompous, arrogant egoists his detractors claimed. Mostly, though, Hochschild views the journalists in a positive light. If you want to get a grasp on Franco's barbarism, read Jay Allen's dispatches on the massacre of Badajoz; if you want to understand Picasso's Guernica, read George Steer's account of its destruction.

There is a lot of heroism in Hochschild's account, but also villains galore. If communism was a failed god, one wonders what that makes Pope Pius XI, who worshiped at a fascist altar. If there is a hell, Texaco chief Torkild Rieber is suffering from its fires—he provided practically free oil for Hitler's Luftwaffe, which honed its skills in Spain. Indeed, one could imagine a host of American policymakers sweltering from the glow of Rieber's flames—the isolationists and non-interventionists who placed anti-communist zealotry and/or insistence upon neutrality above world security. (Franklin Roosevelt bears some blame as well.) Moreover, as unworthy as communism proved to be, fascism was far worse. Scale is the only thing that prevents Franco from rising to the top tier of 20^th century monsters. 

 

Hochschild is a gifted writer whose time as a writer-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst made me yearn for this book before it was anywhere near completion. His writing is refreshing because he rekindles a skill sadly lacking in a lot of historical writing: the ability to tell a good story. A tale well told informs readers far more than reams of leaden prose, arcane analyses, and esoterica. Nor does Hochschild hide behind academia's often-faux objectivity. Although he acknowledges that communism was a false god, he admits he might have embraced that faith back then. He ultimately agrees with journalist Herbert Matthews, whose reporting on Spain was urgent and openly pro-Republic partisan. Matthews (and Hochschild) viewed the Spanish Civil War as a moral test for those who reflexively dismiss questions of whether there are times in which proactive interventionism is necessary. Hochschild has written a backdoor "what if?" history. Western democracies dithered, but Hitler and Mussolini did not; they supplied Franco with pilots, soldiers, and state-of-the-art military materiel. What if, Hochschild speculates, they had been stopped in the Basque country hillsides? All counterfactual history is suspect, Hochschild's included, but one must ponder whether it's better to worship false gods or submit to real demons.--Rob Weir

Kathe Kollwitz's Moving Work on Display at Smith College

MOTHERS’ ARMS: KÄTHE KOLLWITZ’S WOMEN AND WAR

Käthe Kollwitz

Smith Museum of Art, through May 29, 2016

The Mothers 

Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy of Lysistrata is so often performed that you may have seen it. Its humor—drawing upon the social values of Antiquity—derives from Lysistrata’s unique strategy for ending warfare: rally women to deny sex to men until the fighting stops. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) tried a different tactic: shame. The Smith College Museum of Art features a selection of her paintings, drawings, lithographs, graphics, and sculptures, nearly all of which touch upon themes of social justice—poverty, class oppression, and the ravages of war, as seen through the eyes women, especially mothers.

The Peasants War

Kollwitz was born into the bourgeois comfort of a religious Prussian family, but she quickly left it behind and embraced her grandmother’s socialism. A sense of loss permeates much of her work, perhaps induced by her brother’s early death, and enhanced by marrying and having two sons while still in her twenties. Socialism certainly influenced early efforts that gained notice: her 1898 series titled The Weavers, which commemorated an 1842 Silesian strike; and her homage to the 16^th century Peasants War, completed in 1908. In each case, Kollwitz was drawn to both the plight of the poor and to the deep loss felt by mothers whose young children suffered and whose older ones became combatants and casualties.

World War I deepened her anguish and left her heartbroken; her son Peter perished in the conflict. Although she was recognized as a leading voice in German art and co-founded the Women’s Art Association, the chaos and deprivations of the Weimar Republic led her deeper into the pacifist fold. If you will, they made her into an artistic Lysistrata committed to the idea that war was futile as an agent of social change and a form of male aggression that repressed women and children.

Many of Kollwitz’s works have a Pieta-like quality, with ordinary women supplanting the Madonna and offering final succor to dying husbands, sons, neighbors, and each other. The latter is not to be overlooked—log before second wave feminists spoke of communities of women, Kollwitz depicted them in mutual embraces that evoked a sense of building a mass-bodied shell against the external realm of pain. Sometimes they bear their children like offerings that will not go into the basket, as in her 1924 poster The Survivors: Fight War, not Wars; sometimes the women huddle back to back but with eyes gazing outward as in the powerful woodcut The Mothers (1923).

Of Kollwitz’s works, her woodcuts and sculptures made the most impression upon me—there is an ineffable sadness in their solidity and the somber tones of rock and black or sepia ink. The woodcuts in particular invoke the heavy outlining of Georges Rouault and the profound emotions of German expressionists such as Max Beckman, yet with a perspective that it is identifiably female. Still other evocations include Tahitian statuary and the Depression era portraits of Dorothea Lange.

The Sacrifice 

Kollwitz merged her art with her social conscious and became known as an outspoken opponent of militarism. This, of course, failed to endear her to the Nazi regime that came to power in the 1930s. Her art was removed from museum walls--though luckily not destroyed as “degenerate art”—and she was forced to resign as head of the Women’s Art Association. In a profound irony, she died on April 22, 1945, just 16 days before World War II ended. It is, though, fitting that her art lives on long whereas that failed painter, Adolph Hitler, endures only in infamy.

Of course, another distressing irony lies in the fact that somehow Kollwitz’s pieces at Smith—some of whom are now more than a hundred years old—feel so profoundly relevant for our own time of military conflict. Change a few costumes and it could be Syria. Or Afghanistan. Or Ferguson, Missouri. See this exhibit. And weep for humankind.

Rob Weir  

What the Republican Party Has Rot

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No, I don't mean "wrought."  I want to discuss the smelly variety of the word. Those who have observed the Republican Party over the past few decades should not be surprised by Donald Trump's rise to the top of the garbage heap. GOP policymakers are alarmed, but the pile has been building for a long time. Call the party's current dilemma a compost heap begun by Kevin Phillips, with spades turned by Nixon, Lee Atwater, Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, the Tea Party, Anton Scalia, and Dick Cheney. It's called the "politics of division" and it works like a Madonna or Lady Gaga concert–once you obliterate the bar of acceptability, the pressure is always on to take a bolder step in the next act. Sooner or later, though, the only step left is off the precipice.

Political parties must walk a fine line between principles and inclusiveness—a party must have policies, but it must also appeal to broad enough constituencies to compete nationwide. Hot-button issues can temporarily boost enthusiasm, but unless they go mainstream they do long-term damage. This is where today's Republican Party finds itself. It has long ridden angry white men, evangelicals, and bourgeois suburbanites, but the elephant is now on its last legs, no matter how hard the mahouts beat it. If I might torture the metaphor a tad more, there's not enough hay left to feed the elephant–dumb white dudes, zealots, and greedy suburbanites are no longer a majority. America is a multicultural society whether anyone likes it or not.

Explain, pray, how Republicans can attract women when it supports privacy rights on guns, but not for reproductive rights. How do they intend to attract Latino voters and support curtailing immigration? African Americans? If the GOP gets 10% of their votes it's a surprise; 15% triggers an automatic electoral fraud investigation. How many college-age folks–call them future voters–are attracted to the GOP's obsession with school testing and free-market solutions to the college debt crisis? They want no part of evangelical calls to repeal gay marriage or dismantle Roe v. Wade, and they

are positively apoplectic over the GOP's stance on global warming. It drives angst-ridden privatizers crazy, but a whole lot of Americans like Social Security and other federal programs. As Mitt Romney discovered in 2012, it's hard to catch up when you write off 47% of the electorate. Moreover, Obamacare is all that stands between millions of voters—that word again–and a Darwinian survival of the fittest. (Even many GOP governors grudgingly accept this.)

Many Republican leaders are concerned by the reactionary turn the party has taken. Listen to its fire-eaters, and it sounds like Republicans are devoted to restoring the rural, Middle American values of 1956. Good luck with that–81% of Americans dwell in urban areas. I could go on, but it boils down to the fact that the GOP has become the party of an overly narrow base. Single-issue voters can tilt local and state elections, but the only way the politics of division work on the national level is through fear or disgust. These too have lost their power. One of the things Rove, Cheney, Scalia, et. al. left in their wake is cynicism. Cynical people are not pleasant, but they don't scare easily. Fear of terrorism has run its course and most Americans simply want the USA to mind its own business. Plus cynics tend to put things together pretty well–like maybe there's a connection between shrinking job opportunities and reflexive support for free trade, business deregulation, and reckless investing. (Blaming unemployment on immigrants doesn't work so well with white-collar workers.)

The problem is simple: the GOP's divide-and-conquer strategies have mutated into the politics of greed—not the 1% the left trumpets; more like the 38%, which means you have to fool quite a few of the remainder. Donald Trump is the ultimate expression of the politics of greed, but the GOP has no internal answer at this point. Ted Cruz? He's even less electable and nastier, albeit a bit less crude.  And here's the ultimate GOP nightmare—regulars switch to Cruz, Trump sues that under Article I Section 2 of the Constitution that Cruz is a Birther hypocrite who is ineligible to be president, gets a district court to agree, and a 4-4 Supreme Court fails to overturn that ruling. Then what?

Things have gotten so bad that old warhorses like John Sununu, Bill Kristol, and Ben Ginsberg are talking about forming a splinter party. That's probably words over a bad hairpiece, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that the mainstream GOP will jettison its dissident elements and reinvent itself. This is precisely what the Democrats had to do when it became clear that it could not be both the party of Dixiecrats and civil rights. That was a painful amputation that opened the door for the Reagan-GWH Bush era of 1981-1993, but Democrats have held the White House for 16 of the past 24 years and will have to be incredibly inept (even by Democratic standards) to lose it this fall. It's premature to speak of the death of the Republican Party, but it's not too soon to smell the gangrene.