Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Contributing Editor
Tom Lowe

I'm so bored with politics today

My father was a lifelong Republican. He learned his political values in the Progressive Era of the reformist Governor of California Hiram Johnson, and reflected that shade of Republicanism throughout his life. His letters to his college roommate, who was a member of the California Assembly, a New Deal Democrat, reflect the McCloud Lumber Company-owned, Northern California town’s establishment’s view of the New Deal programs—mildly critical but not hostile.
“Socially Liberal, but Fiscally Conservative” pretty much sums it up, the only area where he concerned himself with politics was relating to education policy, as he was a career school administrator.
    What he bequeathed to me was an image of “the party of Lincoln,” Republicans as members of the establishment, building their community. I grew up in a small town in the Central Valley of California. It was comfortable in its identity as an agricultural community with moderate politics, with the distinction of being the second largest Portuguese-speaking community in North America. It was Republican, like most of the state in the early 1960s. Most people agreed with Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America is business,” and the churches concerned themselves with the spiritual aspects of their community. The rise of Goldwater and Reagan disturbed my father, as had that of Richard Nixon, but he passed away in 1972 so he never saw the disgrace of the “Grand Old Party.”

All that is preface to my perception of the Republican Party in the 21st Century, which can be summed up as “who are you?” The party of Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, even Everett Dirkson, which didn’t always like the changes occurring in modern society but worked to shape them, seems as far in the past as the Federalist Papers. The recent election cycle has made the dysfunction plain. Its current condition has been well stated by Paul Krugman: “The truth is that the modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment. Yet there are some wannabe intellectuals who delude themselves into believing that they have aligned themselves with the party of objective (as opposed to Objectivist) analysis.”
    Conventional wisdom’s assumption that the Republicans will learn from their mistakes and “move left,” back toward the center, seems to me to be unwarranted optimism. There is no leadership to take them there. The retirement of Olympia Snowe, replaced by an “Independent,” who is expected to vote with the Democrats on most issues, has removed one of the last voices of moderation within the party. The party establishment spent most of last year hanging on by their fingertips, barely put Romney in place as their candidate, nearly lost control of their House of Representative members time and again, and mainly failed in elections in the “Battleground States.”

The real question is whether we still need the GOP. The presumption that the Republicans are the necessary opposition party is a habit of thought. The reality, as Gore Vidal observed, is that we now have a single corporate party with two right wings. The Democrats will absorb the non-crazy element of the party, the residuum will wander off, muttering, clutching their guns and bibles to apprentice themselves to Donald Trump’s revolution, or some other illusion like seceding from “Urban” America. In a decade or so they will be as insignificant as the Whigs, Abolitionists, and Know Nothings were post Civil War.
    Not that the Democrats have any claim to still be the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt after Bill Clinton and the Obama years.

In the century in which we live, the Democratic Party has received the support of the electorate only when the party, with absolute clarity, has been the champion of progressive and liberal policies and principles of government. The party has failed consistently when through political trading and chicanery it has fallen into the control of those interests, personal and financial, which think in terms of dollars instead of in terms of human values. [–FDR, writing before accepting the Democratic nomination in 1940]

So the Democrats should make a comfortable home for Republican turncoats.
    The 2012 success, after a Grand Bargain, based on the Simpson-Bowles “Catfood Commission” is struck, may prove a pyrrhic victory. At least Chris Hedges thinks so:

The presidential election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. Liberals have assured us that after the election they will build a movement to hold the president accountable, although they didn’t hold him accountable during his first term. They have played their appointed roles in the bankrupt political theater that passes for electoral politics, and now they will exit the stage. They will carp and whine in the wings until they are trotted out again to assume their role in the next political propaganda campaign of disempowerment and fear. They will, in the meantime, become the butt of ridicule and derision by the very politicians they supported. [–“Once Again—Death of the Liberal Class”]

What a healthy polity really needs is a critical opposition to the status quo. The quadrennial talk of third parties seems more of the same, with the names changed to protect the guilty. If it’s the same game, played by the same rules, how does that not fit Einstein’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”?
    Having just read Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise, I’m well aware of the hazards of political prediction absent good data. So I’m not going to speculate about how or where a critical opposition might arise. But I’ll observe that the current structures are so ossified that something politically on the order of Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan event seems to be needed to alter the pattern. Unless you are naïve enough to look with Marx to:

our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution.

    The time for a paradigm shift has been ripe for most of the past five decades. As communication becomes more decentralized by the internet, social media, and community-based organizing, the possibility arises that we have seen the last domination of centralized political campaign structures in the 2012 Presidential election. Forty years ago Tip O’Neill pointed out that “All politics is local.” Could it be that we are at the point where “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” [–W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919]
    Let the fun begin.
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Copyright © 2012 by Tom Lowe