Absolute subservient adherence -- that's a pretty apt way to sum up the Republican Party's tactics during the past....I don't know how long. Year? Year-and-a-half? Three years after the beginning of campaign season? Nine-plus years post-9/11? I suspect the groupthink mindset of "absolute subservient adherence" is a behavioral characteristic that has evolved among the GOP for even longer than that, though it has manifested itself in increasingly ugly ways in recent memory -- like whenever Republicans accused liberals of being unpatriotic and un-American whenever they criticized the Bush Administration's foreign policy.

Bartlett's words are also a pretty refreshing bit of criticism considering it came from one the GOP's own. Think for a second about John McCain ever since he ran for President back in 2000. Yes, he was always fairly conservative, but in the past decade, he's lurched further and further to the right on nearly every issue. Back in 1999, McCain said that he wouldn't support repealing Roe v. Wade in either the short-term or the long-term; during the 2008 campaign, he called Roe v. Wade a "flawed decision" that should be overturned. On torture, McCain himself pushed for a ban on cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners back in 2005; then in 2008, he voted against a bill that curtailed the CIA's ability to enforce "enhanced interrogation techniques."

In fact, Think Progress documented a big list of McCain's other policy flip-flops during the past several years -- and nearly all of them have been adopted as the mainstream position of the Republican Right. Even now, McCain is being challenged in his home state in the GOP primary by J.D. Hayworth, an even more conservative Tea Party Republican, and McCain has since tilted ever more rightward in his positions.

I have long maintained that it is far better for a political party -- and far healthier for society as a whole -- that elected officials and their constituents have rational disagreement, and that political parties foster an environment that allows for legitimate criticism, even of their own. Bartlett has reaffirmed what many of us on the progressive blogosphere have been saying for a while: That the GOP no longer accepts any criticism. Basically, agree with everything the party leaders say, or you're an apostate who must be dismissed. While the Republican Party's "no-at-all-cost" strategy might pay political dividends for the Democrats, it's still bad for the country, as Paul Krugman noted last April. Would that others in the GOP could at least show the same level of frank insight that both Bartlett and Frum have recently.

(h/t to Think Progress for the original news item)

Update: The Huffington Post adds more from Bartlett about how the GOP demands lockstep subservience:

[T]he conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. "In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, D.C," Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum's resignation.

tristero over at Hullabaloo responds to that particular item, and makes an important point about the difference between liberals and conservatives with respect to ideological "purity":