Stoopid Stuff

The Preferred Outcome?

James Wolcott says it with his usual eloquence:

My rooting interest is less about Obama himself than about how big a hurt he can put to the Republican Party. I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.

And:

Reading the conservative blogs, many of its commenters have already slid into a state of resignation about the election, comforting themselves with the hope that just as the ruins of the Carter administration gave rise to the glory that was Ronald Reagan, out of the ashes of Obama will rise Sarah Palin in seraphic splendor to preside over the restoration.

I certainly can understand these sentiments. When I look back on the carnage and horror of the last eight years my knee jerks and I want to see all traces of worldview that brought them to us eradicated, ground to dust and shot into solar orbit where they can never again create their characteristic havoc.

But like everything else, if you start to think it through, you begin to realize that while this might an AN answer, it is clearly not THE answer.

America's only hope, if she is to remain even the sad shadow of a democracy that she has become, is to continue a two- or multi-party political system. Single party rule seldom works well, and to the extent that it can work at all requires a dictatorship and no opportunity to change governments.

If you have any doubt that a democracy requires and opposition party, you need look, once again, no further than the last eight years. If the Democrats had been willing to operate as a true "loyal opposition", they might have prevented any number of the ideological excesses of the Bush/Cheney administration. The fact that they stood by, or even in many cases actively enabled, the agenda of the governing party only demonstrates the necessity of an opposition.

Any party entrusted with great power, no matter how pure their original intentions, without an opposing party and some methodologies for that opposing party's voice to be heard, will invariably sink into tyranny. If the Republican party cannot survive it's current state, then it will be necessary for another party, or several, to rise up and do at least well enough in Congressional elections to have some power to control the worst instincts of the party in power, no matter who they are.

Now there is no real reason why this can't be the Republican party. But it has become pretty obvious that it cannot be the Republican party as it is constituted today. A truly conservative political voice is not a bad thing, even in cases that call for a more liberal political solution. But in exchange for power, the Republican party sold it's soul. It has become the party of stupid, of hate, of insular beliefs and worldviews. It has become the party of bigotry and illiteracy, anti-science and anti-populist. It has rejected or driven out people of color, gay people, secular people, people who value any kind of intellectual evaluation over blind ideology. And as such, the Republican party is increasingly irrelevant in twenty-first century American politics.

It appears they are going to take quite a drubbing at the polls in a couple of weeks. And they will withdraw to lick their wounds and plan their strategies, as well they should. They will have two choices. One would be to soften their positions, become more inclusive, consider a less strident tone on abortion, immigration, health care and government participation in the community in general. This would allow them to reach out to people who support their economic and foreign policy agendas but who are put off by some of the more extreme rhetoric. And this is a path fraught with concerns, for they would have to acknowledge that to do so would be to alienate the most extreme far-right components of their political base, in hopes of attracting a much larger group of supporters from nearer the center. That far-right "base" would have their own decisions to make at that point - form a new political party with much less national clout or swallow the insult and continue on as Republicans anyway.

Their other option would be to go into the bunkers - move to the right. Declare that Bush/Cheney and McCain ultimately failed because they were not "conservative" (in it's current, non-dictionary meaning of "extreme right wing ideology") enough. To go to the Gingerichs and Huckabees of the right wing of their party and embrace an even more extreme ideologically driven world view. To essentially become the "White Blue Collar Evangelical" party. To do this cements a base, but will it be possible for this platform to attract a majority in a national election? It seems unlikely to me.

Should the Republican party adopt this second course, and I think it rather likely they will, at least in the near term, they seal their own fate and become a small, irrelevant, angry party with very little in the way of national representation. With fewer people supporting them, and less attention being paid to them, they may simply disintegrate into factions, opening up the opportunity for a new, Center-Right party to come into being.

Of course, it's also possible that the Democrats, sensing an opportunity for long-term dominance, will continue to move to the right, albeit in a much less extreme fashion, in order to cement the support of those who had been Republicans but could not, in good conscience, support the glorified hate group the Republicans had become. Would that, perhaps, open an opportunity for a new, Center-Left party to come into being to challenge what the Democrats have become?

posted by mikey @ 1:03 PM