Everyone who pays any attention to politics knows that the GOP is on its heels. On every issue from the war to healthcare to the environment to the middle-class economy, the American people have sided firmly with Democrats and progressives. The issues have always favored Democrats, of course. But the prominence of those issues as the basis for voting as well as the strength with which those issues clearly favor Democrats first made itself abundantly clear in 2006.
And the same thing is likely to happen in 2008, with the outside chance of a filibuster-proof Senate to boot.
Republicans, however, look back to the elections of 1992 and 1994 to believe that they can quickly spring back from these electoral and ideological defeats in 2010 or 2012. Perhaps they're right--but I would bet heavily against it.
If Obama wins, Republicans are screwed in more ways than they can possibly imagine. Or then again, perhaps they can--and they're petrified to the core. If so, we should expect them to pull out all the stops to create the ugliest election we've seen in our lifetimes.
Why is this one election such a big deal? Many, including myself, believe that we are in the midst of a realignment year not unlike 1896 or 1932; under this scenario, Democratic victory this year would help bring about 30+ years of Democratic dominance until the next realignment. Yet that would be true regardless of this election's victor, due to changing voting patterns especially among youth.
No, this election in particular, if it goes against the GOP, spells utter disaster for them until and unless they utterly remake themselves as a party. For the election of an African-American candidate is doom to the current incarnation of Republican politics.
The beginning of the end for Republicans, you see, was the effort to privatize social security--combined with the outrageous waste that is the Iraq War.
Ever since FDR ran roughshod over conservatism and the people loved him for it, the GOP has been desperate to dismantle the extraordinarily popular New Deal. This desperation reached a new fervor during the Movement Conservative revolution spawned by Barry Goldwater. The rich-get-richer, self-serving ideology of the corporate conservatives was given the veneer of academic respectability by the villainous influence of Milton Friedman and his "Chicago School" neoliberal economic ideas, which saw all such government "intrusions" into providing needed public services as evil "distortions" in the free market, devoutly to be purged.
But the GOP had a problem: the New Deal was too damn popular to overturn. Even the criminally authoritarian Richard Nixon founded the EPA, while stating that "we're all Keynesians now", referring to Milton Friedman's ideological economic nemesis and New Deal proponent John Maynard Keynes. Proponents of pro-corporate, neoliberal ideology had to ply their disastrous ideas in places without strong democracies or those shocked by coups and other disasters--places like Pinochet's Chile, for example. Western Democracies, it seemed, were too powerful and their people too used to their middle-class "good life" to accept the feudal economic "reforms" the GOP had in mind.
But then the GOP got a gift they have been exploiting ever since: The Civil Rights Movement. In one fell swoop, a country with a deep and shameful history of virulent racism was thrown into a cauldron of liberation, desegregation, school busing, affirmative action that was the perfect tool for the rich overlords to use to divide the angry white American masses long enough to fool them into voting against their own interests.
Indeed, as many political scientists including Thomas Schaller have painstakingly pointed out, the Republican rise to electoral dominance was almost purely a by-product of stoking racial resentments. The liberal attempt to enforce racial (and gender) equality in America's cities led inexorably to a rural and white-flight resentment of "those damn elitist eggheads" and their supposed social engineering projects: these resentments were couched in cultural and religious terms at the expense of economic issues, as Thomas Frank points out. But make no mistake: the red-state/blue-state division so loved and exploited by Republicans starts--and often ends--with race.
And divide they did. Instead of telling Americans that they didn't really need their union jobs or social programs, the GOP simply poured gasoline on the burning embers of our racial resentments and fears. They lied to us by saying that our tax dollars were going to Cadillac-driving welfare moms instead of to fund a military larger than the rest of the world's combined, and that Democrats who promised to improve economic conditions would release black men from jail to rape and murder white women, even as their own candidates worked diligently to rape and murder the constitution. It is a lie they continue even to this day by attempting to unfavorably compare tax dollars spent on overwhelmingly black Katrina victims to those spent on the overwhelmingly white victims of the recent midwest flooding.
What wasn't covered by "wasteful spending" on "lazy people" was covered by supposedly "wasteful spending" on brown peoples of other countries: global initiatives such as the United Nations, and on supposedly wasteful "nation building" in places like Kosovo. It seems almost a quaint bit of history now to recall that George W. Bush ran against Al Gore on a campaign against spending money on the reconstruction of Kosovo.
But then the GOP screwed up big-time. In the heady days after the shock of 9/11 during which they thought they couldn't possibly lose and were aiming for Permanent Republican Majorities, the Republicans forgot that their ideology was based on race-baiting lies and started to believe their own press clippings.
They attacked and attempted to privatize social security--the third rail of politics--and embroiled themselves in a massive, neoliberal nation-building project in Iraq. All of a sudden, they were the ones spending wastefully on brown people overseas--and the veneer was off of their attempt to dismantle every last piece of the New Deal under the guise of attempting to dismantle the Great Society. Meanwhile, the country had moved far enough toward sanity on the issue of race that in the wake of Katrina, rather than be appalled at all the "dirty black people" as the Republicans had hoped, most of the nation instead felt deep empathy for the victims--and despairing wrath at the government that had failed to provide them aid in their hour of need. The American People were angry--and ready for a change.
In come Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton--a black man and a woman vying fiercely for the Presidency and making history in the process. Obama triumphs. And looming on the GOP's horizon is its worst nightmare:the possibility that a majority of Americans might vote for an African-American for President.. And not just vote for one, but get used to one. Americans might become accustomed to the idea of an African-American family living in the White House, and being its public face to the world. That in the process, Americans might actually make leaps and bounds forward on the issue of race and thereby remove the most effective wedge in the Republican toolbox for decades.
And then all Republicans would have left is their deeply unpopular drive to abolish the New Deal. It would, in short, spell utter doom for the Republicans outside of the deep South and certain pockets of the Midwest.
Nor would it be an easy wedge to replicate. The GOP, seeing this coming, attempted to replace their African-American punching bag with a Latino one. While this might be a short-term hate fix in certain areas, it comes at a heavy price: Hispanics constitute today a larger voting bloc than do African-Americans, and it grows every year. Alienating the entire Hispanic population as they have the African-American population would ensure the GOP's status as a permanent minority party. Meanwhile, nobody seriously could or would believe that tax dollars are being "wasted" in significant quantities on gays (though they've tried it repeatedly with AIDS funding) or Muslims or any other group targeted for Republican hate tactics.
And that is why this election terrifies the GOP. In just one election cycle, an entire agenda and electoral strategy spanning over three decades could be dashed on the rocks, with no credible replacement. Milton Friedman's privatization agenda would be dead in the water, without hope of rescue barring military coup. Republicans in this situation are like a desperate, dangerous cornered animal.
And that prospect should terrify all of us and put us on our guard.