Ugly: The Future of the Republican Party

[seafan]

Ugly: The Future of the Republican Party

by David Michael Green
June 12, 2008

Republicans are going down.

Let me say that again (‘cause it feels so good): Republicans are going down. Hard.

A tsunami this way cometh, and it’s got GOP loaded in its GPS.

Apart from the fact that the Democrats are about to nominate a black candidate in a still racist white country, there could hardly be a more perfect storm of Republican-focused discontent imaginable in 2008. And Obama’s color may actually turn out to be a neutral factor, or even a net gain. African Americans are going to come out in droves to vote for him, possibly even putting certain Jim Crow states, such as North Carolina, into play for the Democrats for the first time since the civil rights movement. Moreover, young people are going to turn out and vote in huge numbers this year, and it won’t be John McCain who is the glimmer in their eyes. And then there are the angry people – which is just about all of the rest of us – who are going to be voting in big numbers as well. They may not necessarily be voting for Obama, but they will be gleefully voting against anything on the ballot stupid enough to have an R after its name (and there will be one helluva lot less of those, by the way, in 2010 than in 2008).

This is the year in which Republicans are going to come to join the rest of us in their levels of affection for George W. Bush. They are the only constituency whom he hasn’t yet taken over a cliff, but that will change on November 4th. Bush won’t be on the ballot. He will be the ballot. Every angry American (hey, only a record-breaking 82 percent of us think the country’s on the wrong track) will be thinking about how much gas costs, about how their expenses are going up, their income is stuck in neutral and their job is headed for India. They’ll be thinking about two wars turned into twin debacles, and the lies associated with them. They’ll be thinking about the dead bodies, the stink of torture, the tortured reputation of their country, and the people who made all of that possible. They’ll be thinking about the mountain of national debt their kids are gonna have to pay back, plus interest, so that the fantastically wealthy in this country could matriculate into becoming obscenely wealthy. They’ll be thinking about environmental destruction. They’ll be thinking about arrogance and incompetence and corruption. They’re gonna want somebody to pay, and – worst of all for the party of Rove and Cheney and Bush – they’re not really afraid anymore.

As if things weren’t bad enough for the GOP we got a glimpse of their coming horror show on the Tuesday night of the last primary. Could there possibly have been a greater contrast between the prime-time performances of Barack Obama and John McCain? There was Obama, every inch the eloquent statesman, the perfect fit for the crises of his time. And there was McCain, more wooden than a cigar store Indian, less authentic than a sit-com laugh track, unable to even read a speech without sounding like a shrill robot with serious software glitches. Oh, Baby. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Bring. It. On.

Forget what the polls are now saying about the closeness of the race. Obama is going to clean McCain’s clock, both in the electoral and popular votes. The guy is finished, and I couldn’t be happier that it is George W. Bush who is taking him down a second time, and destroying forever his life’s aspiration. After what Bush and Rove did to him in 2000, McCain should have left the GOP, dragging his dignity along behind him. That he stayed, and that he then participated in the nightmare for democracy that was the Republican convention of 2004, going to bat for a punk like Bush and dissing Michael Moore over a movie McCain hadn’t even bothered to watch, sealed his fate forever. Mr. Maverick laid down with the nastiest dogs this side of 1930s Berlin, and it is only right and proper that he will be buried choking in fleas.

Another of the wonderful ironies of the Great GOP Implosion of 2008 is that in so many ways, they were victims of their own success. These guys don’t know anything about how to govern, and they couldn’t be less interested. Remember that old expression about New Dealers who came to Washington to do good, and also wound up doing well? Well, these guys came to rape, and also wound up pillaging. Nobody in America outside of Greenwich, Connecticut or Orange County, California has any interest in having that kind of government. We’ve seen it in Zimbabwe, and it isn’t pretty. Which is why it was always amazing that these gluttons could keep winning elections. But that’s where they were so good. Nobody can do marketing miracles like the GOP. Historians will have so much to say about our time, decades and centuries from now, but surely they will be most stunned by the simple fact alone that a thing like George W. Bush could have twice been propelled into the White House, out of 300 million possible choices. That’s the power of quality marketing, Ladies and Gentlemen.

.....

Green goes on to describe four possible directions the gutted GOP may take:

Many Republicans are going to quit the party in the weeks and months following. For those who remain, these will be really dark days. I see four possible futures for the GOP after November 4th, when 1932 comes round again in 2008.

Many of the looniest of the regressive right will insist that their problem was that they simply weren’t conservative enough!

.....

A second possibility, if the hardliners win the day, is that the party splits. No way are the Olympia Snowes or Arnold Schwarzeneggers of this world sticking around to test the theoretical question of how deeply despised one party can become.

.....

It is possible that the party could eak out an existence in this form over the coming awful times ahead, reconstituting itself back in its old, pre-Reagan form. The problem it will have, even if it can pull this off, is that it will carry lots of baggage. Obama is going to be a popular president, at least initially, and the anger for the GOP is not going anywhere fast. Moreover, he’s smart enough to keep reminding people of the bad old days, and the Republicans are stupid enough to do the same, so the GOP is going to be drowning in roosting chickens for quite some time.

.....

The fourth, and I think most likely, scenario is that the GOP traverses the same path as did its brethren in the UK’s Conservative Party. These nasty blokes followed Maggie Thatcher and her hapless semi-acolyte, John Major, first to popularity and then off the cliff into a decade of ridicule and bitter loathing from the British public. The Tories have essentially been completely floundering since 1997 (really, since 1990), dabbling in different policy gambits here and there, dumping leader after losing leader, right up to the present time.

.....

There's nothing like bright light to expose cockroaches:

This party is today nothing whatsoever other than a vehicle for corporate predation. It pretends to give a shit about abortion or affirmative action to get votes. It pretends to be pious to sucker preacher-programmed Jesus Freaks into voting for it. It pretends to care about national security because a good fright always comes in handy on election day (and also because there’s loads of fat, no-bid contracts to be had from the corpulent military-industrial complex). In fact, though, it doesn’t care about any of those things.

Indeed, in truth it is a misnomer to even consider the GOP to be American in any real sense of the normal meaning of that term. Ironically, the party of xenophobia and so-called national security has long been little more than a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporations whose locations and tentacles are completely global, and whose only real interest is in importing wealth to shareholders and management, while exporting risk elsewhere. If that means evaporating American jobs by the hundreds of thousands and sending them off to Mexico, China or India – while getting a tax break for doing so – so be it. Those folks in Beijing sure know how to crack the heads of union organizers hard, and how to keep wages soft. Not only that, but a little economic insecurity can have a very salubrious effect on those uppity American human resources – er, employees – as well. In a very real sense, the only allegiance to America that the owners of the GOP ever manifest is when the country takes on a two-dimensional, green form. Yeah, exactly. It’s all about the Benjamins.

.....

With rare exception, any given Republican politician is simply practicing the world’s oldest profession under separate cover. Which means they’re no more attached to their professed ideology than a hooker is likely to fall in love with the fifteenth sweaty john of the night. They just want to win.

.....

But the point is to envision where the GOP might go from here, and what are the probabilities of any of these four scenarios.

My guess is that you can’t bury these guys forever, and that, anyhow, the new Republican Party that emerges after their near-death experience in 2008 will be much more moderate than the crazed one of the Reagan-through-W era (and how could it not be?).

All of that would be a major improvement on the horror story we’ve all lived through these last decades, though of course, even better would be to slay the beast once and for all.

Meanwhile, whatever happens, progressives are about to live through the Woodstock of schadenfreude.

Enjoy the ride. Boy, have we ever earned it.

Thank you, David Michael Green.

[supernova]

1. Lovely read! Thank you for that

link.

:applause: :applause:

I would be very happy to see the Repubs reduced to about 5 people on Capital Hill, if that, for a generation or more.

I am sick to death of hearing from them.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

4. I just want the party to be small enough to drown in a bathtub

:toast: illegal codesmilie_remote(':toast:'):rofl: illegal codesmilie_remote(':rofl:')

[lpbk2713]

2. A light at the end of a long dark tunnel.

I knew if I could make it through the last
eight years something good would happen.

[kentuck]

3. "more wooden than a cigar store Indian"...

:-)

[Mrs. Overall]

5. Good Article!

[Mr. Blonde]

6. The fact is

the Bush administration was not conservative. He grew the federal government faster than anyone before him. He spent very freely all the while cutting taxes, which isn't what people want when they say they want taxes cut. Hand in hand with that they want the government to spend less too. Sometimes people are too idealistic and think that having less money will lead to the government spending less. Which hasn't been the Bush way.

I could see the Libertarian party growing from a huge exodus from the Republican party. As long as it is seen as the "We will leave you alone party" which in my experience is what most people want (disclaimer, I am from Oklahoma where even the dirt is red). They are fine with not having a lot of things done by the government, if they are free to do pretty much what they want. There is nothing wrong with this viewpoint. It is why the country came about in the first place.

Personally, I would much rather see Democrats up against Libertarians in elections than up against Republicans.

[LeftishBrit]

7. I actually hope it's not the fourth!

'The Tories have essentially been completely floundering since 1997 (really, since 1990), dabbling in different policy gambits here and there, dumping leader after losing leader, right up to the present time.'

Because what the author isn't adding is:

(1) Labour have adopted many of the RW Thatcherite policies as their own!

(2) The Tories appear to be making a comeback right at the moment.


Interesting article however; and hope the Republicans are in a real mess!