Republicans and the Stockholm Syndrome

A friend of mine recently returned to his old stomping grounds, Washington, D.C.. He had worked there as a Nixon White House staffer under Haldeman (before the Watergate event) and had left really because he missed home. (He was only a few years out of college when he was there.) Over the last several years many of the old White House staffers started to have reunions and he went back this year to see them all. Some he knew well but many were on a higher level and he knew them only in passing. It was fun as reunions are and there was a lot of political talk with the success the Republicans had in 2010 and the coming election next year. During one of the formal discussions he raised his hand and spoke from the floor about the Tea Party. It was serendipitous that they had arisen coincident with this debate over how government worked, important, he thought, with the need for organization in the coming election. The dais could not have been more scornful. "We have to teach them how we do business here," one said to the agreement of all.

Unlike my friend, they had never left. They had never returned to the real, working world. They had stayed in some capacity, in office, out of office, living that isolated and self-contained political life that the rest of the country has begun to disdain. And they have been so inured, they do not know it.