Yep!  There is a bit of that Moby Dick here at this point.

Comments made by Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) last weekunderscore Ross’ suggestion that many Republicans believe what’s at stake is no longer a matter of policy but one of pride.  
“We’re not going to be disrespected … We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is,” Stutzman said.
The Indiana Republican later apologized, saying he had “carelessly misrepresented” the budget debate.

Cue Richard Hofstadter.

A great deal of pseudo-conservative thinking takes the form of trying to devise means of absolute protection against the betrayal of our own officialdom which the pseudo-conservative feels is always imminent.  The Bricker Amendment, indeed, might be taken as one of the primary symptoms of the pseudo-conservatism.  Every dissenting movement brings its demand for Constitutional changes; and the pseudo-conservative revolt, far from being an exception to this principle, seems to specialize in Constitutional revision, at least as a speculative enterprise.  The widespread latent hostility toward American institutions takes the form, among other things, of a flood of proposals to write drastic changes into the body of our fundamental law.  Last summer, in a characteristically astute piece, Richard Rovere pointed out that Constitution amending had become almost a major diversion in the Eighty-third Congress.  About a hundred amendments were introduced and referred to committee.  Several of these called for the repeal of the income tax.  Several embodied formulas of various kinds to limit non-military expenditures to some fixed portion of the national income.  One proposed to bar all federal expenditures on the “general welfare”‘  another to prohibit American troops from serving in any foreign country except on the soil of the potential enemy; another, to redefine treason to embrace not only persons trying to overthrow the government but also those trying to “weaken” it, even by peaceful means.  The last proposal might bring the pseudo-conservative rebels themselves under the ban of treason:  for the sum of these amendments might easily serve to bring the whole structure of American society crashing to the ground.

As Mr. Rovere points out, it is not unusual for a large number of Constitutional amendments to be lying about somewhere in the Congressional hoppers.  What is unusual is the readiness the Senate has shown to give them respectful consideration, and the peculiar populistic arguments some of its leading members have used to justify referring them to the state legislatures.  While the ordinary Congress hardly ever has occasion to consider more than one amendment, the Eighty-third Congress saw six Constitutional amendments brought to the floor of the Senate, all summoning simple majorities, and four winning the to-thirds majority necessary before they can be sent to the House and ultimately to the state legislatures.  It must be added that, with the possible exception of the Bricker Amendment itself, none of the six amendments can be classed with the extreme proposals.  But the pliability of the senators, the eagerness of some of them to pass the buck and defer to “the people of the country,” suggests how strong they feel the pressure to be for some kind of change that will give expression to that vague desire to repudiate the past that underlies the pseudo-conservative revolt.

Cue Peter Vierick

Unless one of two unexpected events occurs, the Republican Party has forfeited its claim to retain in 1956 those decisive votes of non-partisan independents which gave it victory in 1952.  The unexpected events are either a far firmer assertion of presidential leadership over the anti-Eisenhower barn-burner and wild men in the Senate, or else their secession into a radical third party.  If either of these blessings occurs, there will again be good reason for independents to vote for Eisenhower: on moral grounds if he asserts his leadership, on strategic grounds if there is a McCarthy third party.  The latter would save the Republicans in the same unexpected way that the secession of pro-Communists into the Progressive Party saved Truman in 1948.

[If not, everyone should vote for the intellectuals’ hero of the 1950s, Adlai the Odd.]

Why did these two excerpts from this book pop out at me?  Start with radio host — impossibly shrill — Mark Levin.  He has a book, which … well… Utah Senator Mike Lee had to answer for at a town-hall meeting.  (A bit more here.)  It is an oligarch’s dream of a new constitutional, put out in some populist notes.

The other reason… sort of a weird random exchange between liberal magazine blogs (New Republic to Washington Monthly)… about hypothetical — and I’d say hypothetical hypotheticals at that — on what might happen if an Eisenhowerish Republicanism broke free of a third party Tea Party “Wallace” Republicanism.  Which is about as insane as conjuring up an Adlai Stevenson Presidency with the break up of a Joseph McCarthy third party.

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