unemployed wingnut. dat's gotta suck.
THE END OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? (PART I)
There will be plenty of people over the next few weeks and years talking about what McCain did wrong in this election. And there is plenty to think about there.
But what interests me at the moment is the idea that today, November 5, 2008, may not only be a watershed moment for the Democrats, but also one for the Republicans, in that while we may be witnessing the rise of a new movement on the Democrat side, we may also be witnessing the end of one on the Republican side.
Now, it is historically dangerous to extrapolate meta-movements from one election. That’s called bad polling--it’s not a big enough sample size. However, in this case, and using the decline of the hard right, power-hungry, uber-judgmental wing of the Republican party over the past few years, maybe it is possible to posit that the famous Big Tent of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich is no more.
Reagan brought them together -- war-hungry neocons, the extreme whack-jobs of the extreme religious right, and the anti-tax/pro-business radicals -- with a combination of charm and strength of leadership. But for Bush II, it was almost as if the disparate groups were grafted together -- barely. It was a Frankenstein’s monster held together by only the most tenuous of threads, surgery performed with duct tape and baling wire. At any moment the limbs threatened to splinter off and go flying into the horrified crowd gathered with its pitchforks and torches.
Look at the Florida debacle in 2000: Bush only ‘won’ the presidency with the help of a one-vote margin in the Supreme Court based on the flimsiest, most twisted legal logic. He didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote. Hell, we’ll never even know if he won Florida that year, or Ohio in 2004. There was no majority, there was no movement. There was no there, there.
The monster was artificially strengthened for a while after 9/11, which may have given some Republicans the sense that they were in a permanent majority that would last for decades, but again, the separate limbs that made up the coalition were individually too rabid, self-interested, and frankly had too many serious conflicting interests to last.
It’s possible to see the latest debacle -- let’s call her Sarah Palin -- as the moment the Republican Party jumped the shark with the culture wars hate rhetoric, the ‘I’m better than you, and you’re just dirty,’ wing of the wingnutosphere. It’s possible to envision the power of this wing declining in terms of its ability to dictate terms to the rest of the party -- and therefore to the nation.
Of course, these people aren’t going to go away quietly. Witness the sporadic boos and jeers at McCain’s rather poignant and humble concession speech last night. Still, it does bode well for those of us who prefer to just get into other people’s pants, rather than tell people what they’re allowed to do with the equipment they keep in there.
This may be the moment when we see the bifurcation of the Republican Party into two or three new entities. This bodes well in another sense, in that maybe, finally, at long last, the canard that the rich Wall Street fucks and the blue-bloods who are the true elite (i.e. those who attended Yale, and whose fathers were vice-president and president and head of the CIA, and whose grandfathers served in the Senate and founded multi-billion dollar corporations and sold materiel to the Nazis) are actually not on the side of the NASCAR/Wal-Mart/trailer park/guns & god crowd. Maybe those folks will finally start to see that, aw shucks, maybe that guy running Halliburton or AIG ain’t just like me after all.
The ‘fear card’ bugaboo, the tried and true Republican tactic of having very smart people say things they know aren’t true in order to scare the bejebus out of dumb people...well, maybe that isn’t going to work anymore. Maybe Rovian/Atwater tactics have jumped the shark also, in terms of their effectiveness. The outrageous, ugly, whack-job smears echoed throughout the right-wing nut-farms in the blogosphere and picked up dutifully by the corporate media and repeated have been mostly debunked. Or at least they haven’t been bought into on such a grand scale as they were with Kerry and Gore -- and not incidentally, with the run-up to the Iraq war. Maybe the people in the media are getting smarter along with rest of us--or if not getting smarter, at least getting wised up.
Fear. The proof is in the pudding when it comes to fear: the stock market had its biggest election day jump in 24 years. The nature of human beings is we would rather be looking forward, finding ways to improve our situation than cowering in darkness.
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more to come. Thx for reading.--kjb
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