I have always thought that the grassroots conservative/Tea Party movement was as great a threat to the DC establishment Republicans as it was to the Democrats.  It’s beginning to look like I might have been right.  This from uber wingnut Dan Riehl:

Why The GOP Hates The Grassroots And Conservative Movement

Herein lies the dirty little secret of why the GOP is slow to actually empower the grassroots and conservative movement. It’s also why, in some measure, we can no longer rely on the so called Beltway conservative establishment. Just like Republicans, they’ve come to rely on corporate money, allowing them to drive a large part of their agenda.

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The grassroots and conservative movement are genuine free marketers and capitalists. The beltway establish, GOP and otherwise, is corporatist. This is also one reason why you have so called Reagan Democrats. There are other factors, too. But as long as Republicans so often side with corporations over the working man and small businesses to some extent, Right-leaning more people-powered movements will distrust them. And it is all about the money for the GOP in the end.

He was responding to this by Timothy P. Carney in the Washington Examiner:

Republicans on energy: More pro-business than pro-market

Ethanol subsidies, oil drilling incentives, government insurance and loan guarantees for nuclear energy, natural gas subsidies: These proposals tend to have as many or more Republican advocates as Democratic advocates. Even worse, self-described free-market conservatives often rally for energy subsidies and claim it’s not a deviation from their principles.

Today, at the liberal environmentalist website Grist, blogger Dave Roberts takes to task Newt Gingrich.[Newt Gingrich isn’t pro-market, he’s pro-business] Roberts, with whom I often spar on the Interwebs, has a great (and depressing) argument and analysis of Gingrich’s defense of current energy subsidies and proposal for even more energy subsidies. This is the heart of the argument:

Gingrich and his acolyte defend these subsidies. Why? Says Gingrich, “a low-cost energy regime is essential to our country.”… Fossil-fuel subsidies don’t reduce costs, they shift costs. The burden is moved from energy companies to the public. The result is what we have today: energy that looks cheap because most of its costs are hidden from view.

Amen. Later on, Roberts sounds like me:

[Gingrich] is pro-business, or more precisely, pro-some-businesses, which is very different — the opposite, even — of pro-market. If you want to make sense of his various words and actions, no ideological or economic principle will help. It’s pure instrumentalism: the exercise of political influence in service of protecting energy incumbents.

Are they finally starting to recognize that what we have is not free market capitalism but plutocratic monopoly capitalism?  But do they recognize that it was the deregulation and gutting the antitrust laws by St. Ronnie Reagan that started this descent into plutocracy? Probably not yet.