Dust to Dust
Surveying and evaluating the plight of the Republican Party is a land office business right now. But it isn’t a complicated matter, either. The dilemma facing the Republican Party (and not Republican voters, who are mostly conservatives) is the dilemma faced by every non-adapted and enfeebled entity in history, whether ideological, national, tribal or animal. Vital conditions change. And when they do, that big, boney sail on your reptilian back will become a fatal liability for your species unless you’ve sired a few agile, energetic members with smaller sails. It’s safe to say that the lumbering Republicans haven’t. Their plodding bloodline is nearing the end.
In the present case the conditions which elevated The Republican Party to majorities in the first place had most to do with the decline in favor of ’60’s liberalism. Republican pols were the ugly, scrawny suitors who got the prom date because the jocks were expelled for drunkeness, not because the target of a girl’s libido had changed from muscles to bi-focals. The girl just hoped that there was something exciting inside the lamentable shell.
Ronald Reagan even boosted the mood of foolish expectation, and a generally colorless and indistinct party gained high ground without instituting a single change in itself, without defining and pursuing a single new idea, or clarifying its central positions on any major policy position that Democrats hadn’t already appropriated or devised on their own. The Contract With America was a dream.
As I write this, a Conservative radio spokesman claims - without comprehending the irony -that the party can save itself by (a) declaiming the Hannity Six on the steps of the Capitol Building, and (b) returning to their “core principles”. Well, if the party pols had core principles they wouldn’t have abandoned them, and then (a) wouldn’t be necessary. Moreover, doing (a) after reclaiming core principles formerly abandoned would be correctly perceived as a masquerade by craven losers eager to retain power. Just as an aside, if twelve million conservative fans of this guy think this will save the Republican Party, things are worse than I think.
An even more serious influence at work is this: It’s Lindsey Graham Disorder. Graham doesn’t just ooze insecurity, he’s composed of ooze and the insecurity follows. Liberalism is cool, and Lindsey isn’t, which is why he shmoozes with liberals. Liberalism is the bridge from reality to fantasy. We live in a fantastic age, where almost every public event and entertainment affair, even politics, ministers to the need for escape, for status and prestige and comfort. The Republican Party hasn’t a chance in this environment, nor does it deserve one.
Archived in: Conservatives, LiberalsMay 16, 2008 at 3:42 pm | Trackback
2 comments
Have to agree. My wife and I are having the ” you have to vote republican, to avoid a socialist/marxist, etc”. However, I like to have at least some agreement with the “lesser of the evils” I’m voting for, and with McLame, I’m down to one common point, the war on terror. BUT, he now seems to be equivocating on that issue too. Maybe I’ll just skip the POTUS line, and vote only down ticket. The scary part is that I read the Libertarian platform, and “it speaks to me!!”
CKGuy:
The Libertarian platform speaks to me, too, but its philosophy (if that’s what it is), is so amorphous it can accomodate paleoconservatives, conservatives, liberals/progressives, Bakunin anarchists and Up With People. Bob Barr is an example.
McCain seemed like a Hobson’s Choice for me, also, until he started acting like a corporatist Mussolini with his global warming diktat. When you lash state policy to the big corporate sector, you get two things: Bad execution of the policy, and The Suits at the corporations clamoring over one another to sell their business independence for government power. That’s one downside of capitalism. The capitalists will roll over for the paltry approval of the state bureaucracies. Now, like you, I don’t think I can click the President lever either.
The looming question isn’t the quality of the President, anyway, it’s the relationship of that President to Congress. McCain doesn’t seem to understand that he’ll be scorned by Donk majorities simply because he’s a Republican, and Obama will be tight-leashed because he’s too callow and ambitious.
I fell for the line that the Republican Party was conservative, when I knew all along it wasn’t. Sticking to principles, again, conservativism isn’t an ideology. This whole thing makes the head hurt.