Why This Election Matters
In past presidential elections I tended to focus more on the candidates than the parties they represented. In this cycle the very nature of America’s two dominant parties has really caught my attention. I’ve been a Democrat since I was first able to vote even though I was the product of a mixed marriage, a Republican father and a Democratic mother. I realize that both parties have their faults and their checkered pasts but the conduct of the Republican party and its leaders since the inauguration of Barack Obama causes me to question the very legitimacy of the GOP and the efficacy of a system that gives them so much power.
If you were to put a group of representative Republicans together in a group photo it would look like the bar scene from “Star Wars”. The diversity of the Republican big tent is not so much the result of inclusiveness as it is of mathematics. The driving force behind the party and its agents is a fairly small number of individuals with a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth. In a real democracy that would mean they lose very time votes are counted. The reason they don’t is because they have figured how to game the system while preserving the illusion of democracy.
I’m sure the party’s real leaders, visible and invisible, have to hold their noses when they consider the multitude of lesser beings they have enlisted to support their primary cause, preservation and growth of obscene wealth. The Tea Party phenomenon is a classic example of how Republican money spawned a bogus movement that its adherents sincerely believe is a grass roots rebellion against an unfair system. Watching the carefully orchestrated birth of the movement it was easy to see the cynical exploitation of real fears and frustrations of the many by the few. It worked and we now have a congress of the clueless working their hardest to keep our government dysfunctional.
To garner enough votes to keep the wealthy wealthy Republicans have to bring together some very strange bedfellows and persuade them to vote against their own best interests. While this may not be something new, it is now more apparent than ever. Using tools like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, the people with the power of their vast wealth have persuaded paranoid racists, homophobes, religious zealots and gun rights advocates to believe that they all have something in common with each other and with the wealthiest one percent of the electorate. That is probably the subject of many a good laugh over martinis at the country club.
This would work out just fine for the oligarchy were it not for one great deterrent, an educated, well informed middle class. It’s not an accident that the first targets of the class of 2010 were labor unions, those nefarious institutions that want to see teachers fairly compensated for the vital work they do. The Supreme Court did the plutocrats’ bidding with the Citizens United decision and they barely had to disturb Clarence Thomas’s long nap. After the 2008 election, this country was getting precariously close to believing that every vote should count and with equal weight. Money had to be a bigger factor in the electoral equation. Just to play it safe, the unwashed who were not in the Republican tent had to be discouraged, if not barred, from even voting.
When politicians state that this is a make or break election, the are uncharacteristically telling the truth. Unless we give Barack Obama four more years and a congress he can work with, ours will be, in perpetuity, a democracy in name only and our children will inherit a country wherein all but the wealthiest are expendable.