The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive. Democrats do not. Just the opposite, they need a political system that can grow with and respond to change within our society. Progressive government is necessarily active government. And if we can speak of original intent, it was not the intent of the founders of this country to have a static government, a static constitutional order, or — for that matter — a static society.
The question of whether Democrats will abolish the filibuster or expand the courts or create new states, should they win power, is actually a question of whether Democrats will bring dynamism to the American political system. The prospect is daunting. But if they have any desire to reverse the damage of the past four years — if they want to return to something like normalcy — then the path to stability begins with transformation.
What kind of future does the Republican Party have? A lot depends on what happens in the next week--perhaps especially in the senate. There are so many moving parts, and none of us has his or her arms around enough of them to really understand what is happening to us now. I think that the presumption is that while this is an unusual election in many respects, it will go more or less normally--Trump will fuss and fume, but he will lose, and he will leave. Things will return to normal again with Uncle Joe. If the Senate remains Republican, we will go back to the same old gridlock, the same old commitment by the Republicans to say No to everything, especially taxes and regulation
But this "normal", while we have become accustomed to it since the Gingrich/Clinton 90s, is no longer tenable, because stasis is no longer a possibility. We have a Republican Party committed to this untenable stasis and in doing so has lost its mind. Its justification for supporting Trump has become the reductio ad absurdum of the Republican commitment to obstruction and stasis. Better chaos, better the destruction of cherished institutions and traditions, better to support Caligula than to give an inch to the evil, demoniac Democrats.
This kind of crazy sees evil where's there's only a difference of opinion. There's an episode in The Office in which Dwight Schrute is being pranked by Jim about vampires, and Dwight responds: " I don't have a lot of experience with vampires, but I have hunted werewolves. I shot one once, but by the time I got to it, it had turned back into my neighbor's dog." (See also "Dwight Schrute was a Warning".)
It's a good gag, but it's a telling one about a kind of mentality that is ruled by various specters of fear. Even when the evidence is clear that there was no basis for it, this mentality will fabricate ways to justify its delusionally destructive behaviors. It becomes a self-reinforcing system in which people get locked. Dwight was truly crazy because he inhabited this mentality with little support from those around him. But there's another kind of crazy when you accept an insane idea born of paranoia because everyone you know believes it. That's what the majority of sane Americans are faced with after next week--a significant minority, at least a 100 million people, who are captured by a collective, fear-driven delusion.
If Republicans lose both the Senate and the White House, there will be little soul searching among them. There is little reason to think that they will snap out of their collective delusion. Theirs is not unlike the collective insanity of southern Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War. Even the eventual calamity of defeat didn't snap them out of it. The delusional thinking promoted by the Lost Cause fantasy required that southerners continue to see Yankees as werewolves rather than as neighbors with different opinions.
The connection between the mentality of the slave power before the Civil War and the current mentality of the Republican Party is a theme I've developed in several posts, perhaps best here. But it's something a recent book by Heather Cox Richardson lays out in greater detail in How the South Won the Civil War. She explains how paranoid oligarchs from the antebellum south continued their paranoid politics after the war through a one-party system under the auspices of the Democratic Party until the 1960s, how they spread their noxious worldview into the west, and how through the Senate they came to dominate in Washington. It was nuts and evil then, and it's nuts and evil now. And as in the 1850s it's threatening to destroy us now. And it's particularly tragic how normal, decent people get caught up in it and are crazed by it. I don't think the people are evil; I think the mindset that has captured them is.
The only way for sanity to reassert itself is if the Dems win both the White House and the senate. If they do, they must say No to the normalcy of the last thirty years. They must do exactly what the Republicans most fear--abolish the filibuster, expand the court, and add some states. In other words they must use raw power the way the Republicans have done.
I believe most Democrats, especially the moderate, institutional types who get elected senators or presidents, do not want to take such drastic measures, but, as in the 1850s, the sane are being forced into a corner by the insane. Paranoids assume the worst in those who are willing to negotiate. But treating a non-enemy as an enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's the situation we're in now. The Dems have got to use extreme methods to fight the extremism of right-wing collective insanity.
Republicans' paranoia justifies for them their raw use of power, and so of course the Democrats' use of it will only increase their paranoia by "proving" their fears correct. But there's nothing the Dems can do that will alleviate Republican fears, and so they cannot be governed by concerns that their acting boldly will make things worse. As in the 1850s, compromise cannot work with people who are captured by this kind of hysteria. Politics cannot cure the soul-sickness that leads them to embrace Trump, but it can address the underlying economic and structural issues that aggravate it. The churches should be the ones to provide a cure, but they are too sickened themselves to be of much help.
I don't know if there is any solution in the long run except inevitably to break the country up. I've written about this before here. Taylor French's Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation recognizes the pressures building toward such a break up similarly to the way I do, but he makes the case for a path to reconciliation by embracing cultural pluralism. I've been preaching from that text for years, but I don't see it happening.
French is a sane, religious conservative, until recently a life-long Republican, but now a Never Trumper who fairly and sympathetically presents both sides of the cultural divide. But I doubt his sanity and decency will prevail among most people who still identify as Republicans. And the cultural Left is too myopic to go along with such a program. The Never Trumper Republicans have no real constituency except Independents and moderate Democrats. Perhaps some kind of realignment along those lines is possible. I doubt it, but it's worth trying. We'll see.
But in the meanwhile, if Democrats get into power in the White House and senate, they must boldly use their power to make significant positive changes responsive to real problems in a dynamic, pluralistic society, because if they don't, destructive negative changes will be inevitable. Stasis simply is no longer a possibility.