We have a historical opportunity to make the Republican party a one-term-left part of the American political landscape. To say that it has failed the country is a gross understatement. Actually, the Republican party embodies everything that is not just wrong, but actually pathogenic, about the American political system and American policy.
While it will be now irrelevant for a short while, it is already searching for a mutation that will allow it to infect and sicken the American people again. In reality, it has as no more worth saving than smallpox, and it should be made to go the same way.
Sorry, but providing material to satyrists and comedians isn't worth the damage the Republicans' existence does. I want the Jon Stewarts of this world to focus on the excesses of the powerful, rather than simply those of mad sociopaths, and I also want them to work harder to get their laughs :)
This idea of doing away with the Repubs is not widely accepted, even in Democratic circles indcluding Dailykos. I owe it to the readers to elaborate to some extent in this diary.
Don't get me wrong: I am not calling for a one-party system. I believe that a debate between competing points of view is vital to the citizens' continued interest in their politics and their leaders' accountability.
The problem is that we now have 2 parties that just have different positions on a fraction of issues. What we need are 2 competing parties that express two radically competing worldviews. One of these worldviews is enlightened capitalism, represented by the Democratic party. The other is harder to find, but it exists, or at least the idea behind it exists, and it is the environmental ideology, which is to say what the Greens broadly stand for, although not necessarily the Green party as it exists today in America.
The underlying ideology in the case of the republican party is now randism, more broadly known as social darwinism (which btw wormed its way into the core of the Nazi ideology). It is so repugnant to the human soul that it does not dare speak its name, and the more it is revealed to the American public, the more it is reviled by any non-sociopath. Its concealment survives only thanks to unbelievably dishonest presentation of the real terms of the debate by an utterly corrupt media that is just too happy to play incompetent and clueless.
One could say, equally, that the Republican party ideology is largely based on the cult of money, but that is not entirely distinctive, as this corrosive set of beliefs has come to permeate much of the democratic positions as well, although unlike Republicans, at least it is kept in check by the Democrats' intrinsic values that include respect for other people and crucially, their labor.
Each of these two philosophies, capitalism and environmentalism, has at its core two separate but not necessarily mutually destructive values: humanity for one, and nature for the other. With challenges like global warming and gradual resource depletion worldwide, it is in the dialectic interplay between enlightened capitalism and environmentalism that the policies of the next century will have to be crafted.
I should at least mention three important considerations in getting to that point. The first is the need for any structural reforms to the political system to bring about such a change. The second is the influence of the media in delaying and impeding the reach of consciousness by a larger share of the public of where the real debate is. The third is the importance of religious beliefs.
Each of the above requires a diary in itself to deal with. Let me just say that in regard to the first, there is less need of that with a competition between two ideologies as opposed to three like in the case of a third party - although obviously citizens united must be undone by all means necessary. The second takes care of the first, and it is the great challenge between now and well in advance of the next general election, which means we have no time to spare. In regard to the third, I have a different approach. I believe that the battle for social progress has to be won in society so that it is not just won in the realm of legislation, but that is altogether removed from political exploitation and political fighting. We had some powerful signs during this election that this is already happening. Let's take marriage equality, for example. Propositions for marriage equality are a great catalyst for the debate of the role of marriage in one's belief system, including the Christian one. But we should never miss an opportunity to reconcile Christian ethics, for example, with the individual right to pursuing happiness in harmony with others.