The GOP Implosion: Will the Republican Party Survive?

By David Michael Green, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2009.

And, oh god, was it abysmal. Imagine you were standing on the deck of a ship floating in a sea of 300 million drowning shipmates and you refused to throw them a rope, insisting instead that they simply swim harder and faster. "It's for your own good! We must avoid moral hazard! (Except where ship owners are concerned, of course.)"Now imagine ten minutes later they all climb back on board and decide to conduct a ‘referendum' on your future. That was the Jindal approach to a nation in crisis.

Imagine a political party in 2009 staking its claim to popularity with the voters on a demand to return to the gold standard, re-instituting Prohibition, or rejecting the Jay Treaty, and you'd be just about as up-to-date and relevant as the Republicans. Jindal sounded like little more than a sickening GOP jukebox trotting out old Reagan chestnuts that were already horrid forty years ago when they were first uttered by the B-movie actor himself, repeatedly referring, for instance, to the looming danger of government "bureaucrats"running our lives.

You could also see the difference between the parties in the very facts of Obama and Jindal. For all its faults of cowardice in the last decades and out-group Balkanization in the time before that, the Democratic Party has still done some of the hard work of inclusiveness-building in America. And, what is more, they did so at a massive cost to their popularity, as the Republican vultures swept in to pick up the racist vote, after Lyndon Johnson had shown the moral courage to do the right thing. Then they watched as the GOP grabbed the sexist vote, while Democrats tried to enact the Equal Rights Amendment. They were scorned for coddling communists and criminals, while the Kaiser's Party won votes by opportunistically trashing the ACLU. Most recently, the Democrats have lost the homophobic vote to the GOP, while the closeted queers dressed up as the bible-thumping moral arbiters of our culture rail against the very sins they commit when the sheep in their congregations aren't looking.

The Democratic Party -- especially of the last decade -- is a shameful thing, in so many respects, but nevertheless looks a lot better comparatively and longitudinally. Racism, sexism and homophobia have been entrenched in the warp and woof of American culture. Yet, even though they are all still present in healthy doses, a comparison between 2009 and 1964 is highly instructive, and Democrats has been admirable in many cases in making a difference. Morever, whatever else their (many) faults, Democrats (nowadays) mostly get inclusiveness genuinely and intuitively. Really, the biggest story of 2008 was the essential non-story of Hillary and Barack. It was striking the degree to which their obvious differences, compared to every one of the 43 previous occupants of the White House, were mostly incidental to the campaign. Yes, Barack Obama was running for president while being black, but he wasn't the black candidate. Yes, Clinton was a woman running for president, but nobody was asking anymore whether a woman could do the job. Not so long ago, that would not have been the case.

I have a helluva hard time saying nice things about the Democratic Party, but let's give credit where it is due: This party has achieved inclusiveness, and it's real and it's actualized to the point of having nearly transcended into a state of casual indifference. Nobody thinks anymore about the implications of giving non-land-owners the vote. It happened almost two centuries ago, and it's just a part of the fabric of society now. Nobody wrings their hands about women having the franchise. It happened a century ago, and even the most freakish right-wingers (and please pardon the redundancy there) don't discuss the matter anymore. Similarly, in Democratic circles, a cosmopolitanism of race and sex and sexual orientation are fast becoming just simple facts of American life, no longer death-fights for inclusiveness, and now no longer even all that much discussed.

The Republicans couldn't possibly be more different. They know they're supposed to be inclusive, they know there some votes to be gotten there, and they're good enough at marketing to go out and find some nice, clean-cut black kids with good teeth, dress them up in slacks and sweater vests, and stick ‘em up on the stage at their conventions, along with other camera-friendly props. But the truth is they haven't remotely got a clue. You could see it with Sarah Palin. It was like, "Hey, she's Republican, she's a governor, she's got a vagina! Let's run her for vice president!"And then, of course, there were the good ol' boys, in their cigar lounges, also drooling over the "va-va-va-voom!" factor. Yeah, baby. Like George W. Bush, when he was once asked what he and his father talk about when they get together, and replied: "Pussy". This guy was president of the United States and leader of the GOP one month ago. No that's not a typo. Not one century ago. Not one millennium ago. One month ago.

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at www.regressiveantidote.net.

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