Dangerous party animals

Dear God, I wish America had a real two-party system. As it is, the Republicans have been reduced to a regional gaggle of angry white guys. They're opposed to everything but tax cuts and -- now that their profligate former president is gone -- government spending. One of their most prominent governors hinted that Texas ought to secede. I wish we could let them go, confiscating North Dakota's nukes on the way out. And given the Great Disruption that is only beginning, national breakup is not out of the question. But the reality is that what's left of the Republican Party are welfare queen states such as Arizona and Mississippi that need the federal Treasury even as they curse it.

The damage from the Republican crackup goes beyond the latest laff riot on Fox "News" or even the bottleneck in the Senate. I think about Seattle, where Democrats have been in charge for years, often with bumbling results. It would be nice to have a real opposition party that would provide meaningful competition. One-party polities are never healthy. But the Republicans can't be trusted because in power, even those who claim independent thought almost invariably become janizaries of the extreme right and its bankrupt policies.

Think about Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Big Finance). Wouldn't it be nice to have a Prescott Bush-style Republican to take him on (Bush defeated Dodd's father for the senate seat Connecticut in the 1950s)? Such a Republican wouldn't be focused on defunding Amtrak, denying global warming and voting in lockstep with the extreme right. We would have an alternative -- perhaps as much a creature of big money, perhaps not. But competition that would keep everyone more honest.

The American system is based on two mass parties, as opposed to many special interest parties. Thus, Republicans, like today's Democrats, usually had a wide ideological spectrum within the party. Lions of the Progressive movement included Republicans, notably Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette and -- yes -- Herbert Hoover. Liberal Republicans helped provide comfortable margins for passage of New Deal legislation. And when the GOP needed candidates that could attempt to be competitive against FDR in a liberal-leaning nation, it had them in Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie and Tom Dewey (who came close to winning). President Eisenhower had the temperament Walter Isaacson uses to describe the Founders: "values of balance, order, tolerance, scientific calibration and respect for other people’s beliefs." Yet even the conservative leader Robert Taft was no nutcase. He was uncomfortable with government expansion and international commitments, but was never frozen ideologically.

All this changed, of course, beginning with Barry Goldwater's successful takeover of the 1964 convention, securing the nomination for the presidency. But it's hard to believe Barry, or any of the giants of Arizona Republicanism, could be comfortable with the current bag o' nutcases the party has become. I suspect strongly that John McCain and Jon Kyl don't care for it -- but they don't dare cross the ideological thought police or they will get well-funded primary challengers on their right.

The Democrats are still a mass party, with conservatives, liberals, centrists. They are in a commanding position in some ways. But they can't get much done against the robotic opposition of today's GOP, which apparently can only hope for Democratic failure so it can return to power and...do what, exactly? This, after all, is the Party that Wrecked America and only promises more of the same.

Of course, there's reality out there beyond the screaming about Obama acting like a gentleman toward Hugo Chavez and Dick Cheney defending torture and incitement to revolution. It's a reality of a financial takeover of our government involving the elites of both parties. A reality of climate change, peak oil, an overstretched military and a battered, uncompetitive, undereducated, in-debt, screwed-beyond-belief "homeland" (to use the Nazified term we somehow have adopted). In the past, the two-party system always finally rose to the occasion. Oh -- it didn't in the Civil War. Take comfort.

Comments

[Donna]

Prescott Bush did business with Nazis in WW2 and was part of the plutocratic coup plot against FDR prior to that. But yeah, even he seems reasonable compared to Michelle Bachman or Sam Brownback.

[soleri]

The GOP became America's majority party, if relatively briefly, by staging a coup. It involved telling white working-class Americans that Democrats wanted to give all the money to the wrong people - blacks, foreigners, and bohemians. That this was largely a lie didn't matter since it resonated so deeply among the economically and socially anxious.

Now, that coup has boomeranged. The very people brought in at the base have changed the GOP into an almost purely populist party, full of anger and racial resentments. Yes, they still favor tax cuts for their bosses and Ayn Rand for the poor, but that's primarily a function of their own successful transformation into True Believers. At some point, cold hard reality will alter some of their script's details.

The Democrats lost these people because they couldn't find a cure for our chronic racial crisis fast enough. Court-ordered busing failed spectacularly. AFDC became a symbol of social dysfunction and unintended consequences. Even today, it's an artifact of dogma among many white workers that AFDC is still coddling "those people" and taxes are high for mostly that "reason".

The GOP's "establishment" - people like Kyl and McCain - has been effectively neutered by the rise of talk radio and the rage it creates. Apologizing and bowing to Rush Limbaugh exemplifies the pathetic price these emasculated creatures must pay. There's no room for mob-disdaining elistists like William F Buckley. George Will scrapes by on baseball columns and global-warming denialism but he might want to lose the bow tie.

There are no core precepts left in a party dedicated to scorched-earth demonizaton of the other side. There can't be. The rage out there precludes rational analysis. So, this party is on a kamikaze mission to destroy "evil", and failing that, itself. Having decoded the DNA of America's paranoia and rage, there's nothing left but the terra incognita of political nihilism.

[ChrisInDenver]

Mr. Talton, thank you for writing an honest assessment of our nation's devolving political structure. When I think about the direction that our so-called "leaders" are taking the United States, I feel sadness and worry at the same time.
Sadness because the reality is these jerks are more concerned with their own welfare than that of the United States. And worry because my future children will grow up in a nation that continues to regress in many areas.
Mr. Talton, you mentioned Peak Oil at the end of this column. It is time that you dedicate another column solely to this impending economic catastrophe. Two-dollar gasoline has given Americans a false sense of security regarding energy prices, and encouraged them to drive more; if people knew the size and scope of the crash that awaits them, they would certainly be doing their best to avert it.

[Donna]

I agree 100% Chris. NPR earlier today was talking about how there's such an excess supply of oil right now, due to a temporary decrease in demand, that oil companies are running out of places to store it on land. Of course, this will change as soon as the economy shows some signs of rebounding. Already car dealers are reporting greater interest in the gas guzzlers. People will never learn.