Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

There is a very real chance that we are witnessing the destruction of the Republican Party. Fueled by astonishing amounts of corruption, , incompetence and imperial overreach, the political machine which has strangled American government for nearly a decade, enforced a vulgar capitalism not seen since the Gilded Age, and purged all remaining elements of traditional liberalism from the mainstream political landscape, may very well be falling apart before our very eyes. That’s hard for a lot of folks who've been paying attention for the last five years to process. We've watched as this band of cutthroats, fueled by sadism and rampaging greed, unencumbered by shame, conscience, respect for truth, or basic human decency, utterly destroy their nominal Democratic opposition and impose an unprecedented one party rule. Their allies have been the inherent ignorance, insecurity and fear of the American people and a Democratic party utterly without mandate, direction, or decent leadership. They've exploited fear and spread around corporate cash so effectively that, until very recently, they seemed totally invincible, on the verge of permanently recreating the American political landscape: slashing and burning all the old growth forest and turning it into an asphalt hell of mega-churches, army recruiters and big box retailers.

But the past few months have shown that all that concentrated power has fed a deadly sense of invincibility. Having unaccountable control for years on end tends to make one sloppy, and the chickens are starting to come to roost. Currently, a perfect shitstorm of political horrors has engulfed the Republican party: an increasingly unpopular Iraqi quagmire, stunning federal incompetence dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, two indictments of the House Majority Leader, a supreme court nomination that reeks of cronyism and has seriously alienated conservative activists, SEC investigations of the Senate Majority Leader, rising gas prices, and major corruption scandals among the state Republican power structures in Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois. Not to mention the promise of coming indictments in the Plame investigation that could likely reach Karl Rove and the office of the Vice President. All in all, it's shaping up for an historic comeuppance for the Republican party in next year's congressional elections; a shift in the electorate that could rival the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 in impact.

But maybe not. The Republicans have been in this situation before. Many people, myself included, were certain that George Bush was headed for an asskicking last year. We underestimated the depth and fanaticism of Bush's "Christian" base as well as John Kerry's utter lameness. No matter that the war in Iraq had already revealed itself to be a monumental cock-up and that the debates highlighted Bush's pettiness and blinkered ignorance; people just don't pay that much attention, and a campaign with the lack of scruples and media influence of the Bush machine, not to mention the corpses of 3,000 Sept. 11th victims to rape, is usually going to win.

Still, the 2004 election was probably a case of good timing for the Bush volk more than anything: they managed to avoid any real reckoning on their myriad criminalities and fuck-ups: Delay's corruption machine hadn't been outed yet, the Plame grand jury was still in the middle of investigations, and Iraq hadn't become self-evidently lost (at least not to the majority of Americans). You've got to believe that, if Bush were up for re-election THIS November instead of last, Ted Kennedy's enlarged liver could probably beat him like a rented donkey.

Thinking about the situation NEXT November, it's hard to imaging the Republicans being in better shape than now. In fact, it's likely that they'll be stewing in an even bigger crock of shit than they are currently. Karl Rove could be facing prosecution, Tom Delay might be in jail, or at least on trial at that point, the myriad state-wide Republican scandals will have doubtlessly led to indictments and/or convictions, and the Iraq occupation will continue to ruin American and Iraqi lives by the thousands. Not to mention all the people who got hypothermia in the North-east due to prohibitively high heating oil prices, and the people skipping lunch to pay for $5 a gallon gas. There are already stories about the difficulty that the RNC has had in recruiting prime candidates for competitive races in '06.

So let's bow to the reality around us, defy our innate pessimism and assume that the '06 elections are the beginning of the end of Republican domination: the Republicans lose seats in the House, maybe even lose control of the Senate, the Democrats start investigating the several kajillion Bush administration crimes of the past term and a half, and the 2008 election becomes the Democratic candidate's to lose. Frankly, I think that such a scenario is the only hope for the nation: if the Republicans can weather the current political shitfit and STILL scrape out a win, then the public is apathetic and hateful enough and/or the Democrats are vapid and incompetent enough that even the trappings of representative democracy in this country are done with.

Anyway, if that happens, if the next five years sees the demise of the Republican Death and Greed Cult, a lot of people, including myself, will find themselves dehydrated from all the spontaneous ejaculating we'll be doing. In the ecstasy, there will be a real danger of thinking that the battle has been won. In reality, the fight will have only begun.

One of the most pernicious effects of Republican hegemony has been to identify the imperial, corporate capitalist state exclusively with the Republican Party. Since the Democrats have been pathetically powerless for years now, they have become the all-purpose dream depository of those who are repulsed by the current regime. It's been easy to forget given the madness of the Republican powers that be, but it needs to be stressed: the Democratic Party is essentially the same as the Republican Party. They represent the interests of corporate capitalism, the continuation of the drug war, are largely supportive of an imperial foreign policy. In fact, their very purpose in being is to provide an illusion of contrast, emphasizing cultural issues and the finer points of running a mixed economy (tax cuts! social spending!). In effect, the very existence of the Democratic party helps to retard social change, especially in our current situation: once the Republicans are out, many of your leftier types are going to be happy just to have those fuckers gone, and will probably tolerate all manner of slack-ass centrism from the national Democrats.

Even if the Republicans finally get the Gas Face they so richly deserve, it’s going to be our job to ensure that the Democrats get their feet held to the fire and actually present an alternative mode of governing and society than that offered by the Grand Old Pud-wackers.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home