"Where do we go from here? The battles done and we kind of won. So we sound our victory cheer. Where do we go from here?" – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Episode ‘Once more with feeling’.
So where do we go from here? That is the question that Republicans must ask themselves after Tuesday’s midterm election.
Historians may remember the elections of 2010 as the campaign season in which the bunker mentality resurfaced. The Archie Bunker mentality.
To be sure, there were several Tea Party candidates who said and did things that had them hunkered down well before the voting started. There was Carl Paladino’s concern over gays indoctrinating innocent children, Sharron Angle’s "chickens for checkups" left her the object of ridicule and Christine O’Donnell was put in the uncomfortable position of having to explain some youthful brushes with Satanism.
But more tellingly, this election saw a resurgence of the world view of Archie Bunker. There was Mrs. Angle who did a television spot showing scary, dark-skinned people sneaking into the United States. Paladino’s opinions about gays could easily have been heard in Archie Bunker’s living room, and campaigns in Arizona fell under the shadow of SB 1070, a bill that is all about fear of a minority group.
Those who weren’t born when All in the Family hit the airwaves in 1971 can’t imagine how shocking the show was. Topics like feminism, anti-war protests and other political issues were hashed out – often at high decibels.
At the center of it all was Archie Bunker, a middle-aged white guy who’d worked on the same loading dock his entire life. The truths that he had known while growing up were passing him by. And that made him angry.
"People who live in communes are communist!" That was his opinion when Mike and Gloria made plans to visit out-of-town friends.
For all his bluster and bravado, Archie’s views were revealed to be the product of fear and resistance to new information.
Fear and resistance to new information. That could be the calling card of the entire Tea Party movement. People are scared of becoming a minority in a society where they have always been in the majority. They’re watching the buying power of their paychecks dwindle every year. They are scared that people who are different from them will gain equal acceptance. And the fact that an African-American occupies the White House has sent many of them off the deep end.
Republicans have exploited these concerns by raising fears concerning birth, death, morality and taxes. But to do that, they have had to at least pretend to be on the same side as the right-wing radicals of the Tea Party. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell – who already said that making Barak Obama a one-term president his top priority – is barely bothering to conceal his glee at the prospect of ruining an administration that promised hope and change. Over in the House, Darrell Issa is already planning to wallpaper the Oval Office with subpoenas.
It will be interesting to watch Representative John Boehner trying to keep Tea Partiers in line once it is discovered that the Republicans really don’t care about deficit spending or plans to shrink government – unless we are talking about Social Security and Medicare, programs that even have some support among members of the Tea Party.
And you thought life was complicated when the Bush Administration acted as though the TV show 24 was a documentary.