There are several indicators that the country has finally caught on to the GOP con. It would be nice to think that the election in the Fall could in a very real way be an overwhelming rejection of everything that the GOP has come to stand for. If we lived in a sane political reality, the margins should be something along the lines of 70/30, not because the Dems are so good, but because GOP is so bad. I know it won't happen, but I would hope that the only people who could vote for any GOP candidate are the hardcore dead-enders who even now approve of George Bush. Maybe not 70/30, but the results in Mississippi earlier this week are a good sign that the GOP might get a historical thrashing.
As I've written elsewhere, I'm in an optimistic mood right now, and after eight (really thirty) years of gloom, I'm going to seize on any scrap of evidence that seems to indicate that the country's backlash to the right is over. I know that many among the so-called Republican moderates still mistakenly accept the propaganda that support of a Democrat means a return to the mentality of the sixties and seventies. That's going to make it hard for them to vote Democratic. But that's rear-view mirror thinking.
Maybe even those moderates for whom the Democratic Party symbolizes hippy-dippy decadence are waking up to the idea that it is time to leave all the nonsense and fake cultural conflicts of the last forty years behind and to move forward. For surely it's time to recalibrate American ideals to fit better in a pluralistic culture seeking to play a dynamic role in a globalizing world. The GOP mindframe (or the Appalachian mind) is simply not suited to do that effectively. It is to the United States what Islamic fundamentalism is to the world. Both are cultural backwaters that must either adapt or be left behind. They have a right to their opinion and traditions, and the rest of us have the right to repudiate what is odious in them. Neither can be taken seriously as a cultural indicator of the future.
Nevertheless, the GOP, insofar as its hardcore is crazed bigots and jingoist militarists and religious crazies, needs to be repudiated. It is my hope that the sane, non-30% who voted for national GOP candidates in the last eight years are low-information types who can no longer filter out the flood of information about how horrible this party's policies have been for our country. And so it's my hope that they will either stay home or vote Democratic if for no other reason than to punish the GOP incumbents who collaborated with the Cheney/Bush agenda. Mississippi gives me reason to think it's possible.
The kind of people I'm thinking of are low-information enough to buy the propaganda that the GOP is the party of small government or that Iran poses the same kind of threat that Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia did. What makes the GOP so dangerous is precisely its fear tactics that justify its arrogation to the executive of quasi-authoritarian power while promoting itself in the popular imagination as advocates for small government. It's laughable that any informed person would fall for these tactics. Many thoughtful Libertarians and principled conservatives see how profoundly dangerous this agenda has been to the health of the Republic.
Bruce Fein, the people at American Conservative Magazine, Libertarian bloggers like John Cole and Andrew Sullivan, Goldwater disciples like John Dean see through it. I may disagree with these conservatives on grounds of political philosophy, but I respect them for seeing clearly what is happening to the country. They are sane people with whom I could sit down and talk things through. I contrast that kind of conservative with those who ignorantly or irrationally voted for Bush in 2004. It still astonishes me that Bush got so many votes--after Abu Ghraib he should have lost in a rout. And I understand why Obama supporters are pessimistic about his chances in the Fall. If Americans could be so foolish in 2004, what's to prevent them from repeating their foolishness by electing John McCain? Is America more like West Virginia or more like Iowa and Missouri?
Some low-information types might be fooled into thinking that because McCain was initially rejected by the crazy wing of the GOP that a vote for him is a vote against the Cheney/Bush/Rove wing of the party. But McCain is like Arlen Specter. He's smart enough to say some sane things from time to time that are contrarian to the GOP groupthink, but when push comes to shove his actions align with the GOP corporate/neocon power faction. Anyone who thinks that McCain is more in league with the Bruce Fein/Barry Goldwater wing of the party and not the Cheney/Bush wing of the party is simply deluding himself. There's a reason he's backtracked on almost every GOP 'maverick' position he has ever taken. There's a reason guys like Rove are embracing him, and why the right-wing crazies on talk radio will eventually embrace him, if they haven't already.
With McCain there's no there there. There was a time when I wanted to respect him, but over and over he has proven himself to be an empty suit driven solely by his ambition. As with most Republicans who have power, nothing that he says can be believed or taken at face value. In fairness, I have come to think the same thing about Hillary Clinton. It's true of anyone, Democrat or Republican, for whom ambition and power have become the primary driving force in their lives. In Hillary's case I wonder if her corruption could be explained as caused by that syndrome by which victims imitate the behaviors of their oppressors, in her case the people who vilified her and her husband in the nineties, that vast right-wing conspiracy whose tactics she had no compunction about using in the last desperate weeks of her campaign.
I see her as someone who has been tragically sickened if not ruined by her "experience" with power. Obama is ambitious, but he has not been ruined by it. I haven't seen the signs yet of his ambition being the driving force that it is for McCain or Clinton. That's why they both think of Obama as naive. He hasn't sold his soul yet the way they have. They believe that it is inevitable that he will. And maybe they're right. If he gets into power, we'll see how well he handles it, but in my judgment he has the best temperament of any politician in my memory to be able to handle its challenges.
With Clinton and McCain you know what you are getting--run-of-the-mill, sold-out pols. If my vote came down to a choice between them, it would not be based on their personal attributes, which I see as similar, but on their party affiliation. The Dems, as bad as they are, simply are not a threat to the well-being of the country the way the GOP is. The worst Obama can be is to be like either of them. But he has the potential to be more than that, and that's why we need to give him the chance.
So what becomes of the GOP if, please God, it is routed in November? Right now it is a coalition of Ron Paul libertarians & principled conservatives, the religious right, the corporate right, and the aggressive authoritarian types that compose the neocon establishment in the media and its think tanks. The first groups are catching on that their interests do not lie with the last two groups, and the last two groups need the voter base that comes with the first groups. We must hope that the GOP fragments so that the electoral power base of the last two groups is destroyed. The neocons and corporate types, though small in numbers, will still have enormous economic and media power and will continue to be enormously dangerous. They have common ground in the development of a crony capitalist, quasi-authoritarian system, and in the last thirty years have done much to establish the infrastructure for the establishment of such a system.
They and their agenda are not going away. The question is whether the American electorate will be conned into collaborating with that agenda or whether it will have the political will during an Obama administration to find a way to dismantle that infrastructure and neutralize the corporate/neocon power and contain to play a role in politics similar to the one it plays in Europe.