I wrote a long comment "No Opposition Arguments Sucks" in response to clammyc's essential diary "All of your arguments suck", which is about Republicans having lost their credibility to complain about Democratic appointments and performance. I want to present in my own diary my response for further discussion, without hijacking clammyc's diary.
Because an even bigger problem with Republicans than their obstructionism is their disappearance, from an adversarial political system that requires credible opponents to prevent runaway power from looking "not as bad as that hellhole across the aisle". That duopoly sticks us with endless excuses to govern badly, which fueled Republicans' steamroller to the bottom.
So here's just why Americans can't afford to merely lose Republican opposition, though they have lost their power to credibly oppose Democrats. And what we can - and must - build to replace them, while they scramble to value less than zero instead of recreating themselves credibly.
Join me for the next step beyond gloating over Republican extinction...
Arguments against Republican credibility don't suck. They are all correct. Republicans who failed to apply a legit standard to Republicans, letting them create the vast wasteland of catastrophes that is America's world today, have zero credibility in conflicting with anyone according to that "standard".
But what really sucks is that we are therefore left with no opposition party. Sure, one reason I prefer Democrats to Republicans is that Democrats are indeed usually more divided against each other, rather than a lockstep juggernaut government inflicting its power on me and the world. But today's Democrats are unusually unified, which is not only good for the people's business, but also good for all the incompetence, corruption and misguided work that Democrats also do.
Perhaps the greatest damage Republicans have done is to deprive America of an opposition that can check and balance the Democratic trifecta power monopoly.
Which specifically undercuts some otherwise good arguments. Just because Halliburton, Carlyle, Chevron (and Cerberus Capital, getting bailed out of its 80% Chrysler ownership, and others) are paragons of interest conflicts, that doesn't mean that Bill Clinton's huge donations from foreign governments aren't a conflict with Hillary Clinton's interests as a freehanded Secretary of State. Just because Gonzales got away with torture doesn't mean Holder should get away with even much lesser corruption. Just because Bush rigged intel to invade Iraq doesn't mean Obama should get to do it with a new guy (or keep an old guy who did it for Bush). Just because Abramoff was the rock on which Bush built his church, doesn't mean Obama should get one, too.
Now, I'm not saying that the Clintons will necessarily have interest conflicts, or that Holder served them corruptly, or that Obama is trying to get riggable intel chiefs or is in any way corrupt. I'm not. What I'm saying is that our system relies on adversarial public questions to find out whether those possibilities are true, before we allow them the vast power of a Federal government controlled by a single party with the largest majorities in several generations, amidst the hugest shock demanding government intervention everywhere, among the highest presidential approval rating excepting an active violent attack on our physical territory.
We don't have that adversarial opposition to fill our adversarial system, because Republicans have destroyed their standing to oppose with anything but the most cynical politics.
So yes, let's force Republicans to shut the fuck up. The sooner they either somehow reform on a platform of credibility (unlikely) or get out of the way for a new opposition party, the better - at nearly the most fundamental level of our political system.
But even more important is to forge a new political system closer to the way ours was supposed to work: of, by and for the people. Force interaction with Obama and the Congress. Many more and much larger grassroots campaigns presenting petitions pointing at alternate solutions. Primary campaigns as a matter of course, not exception, to undermine incumbentism. The center of media coverage of politics distributed all around the Web, fully interactive with public discussions in setting the agenda, values and priorities. More lawsuits by small-donation foundations that convict and remedy insider corruption, rewrite rules to keep it clean.
It's not enough to just shut down the enemy when its arguments suck the life out of democracy. Success in that campaign makes it essential to raise up new adversaries whose vested interests represent viable alternatives, even if people cleave to one or the other out of their own interests. Remapping the adversity from arbitrary private political clubs into actual conflicting agendas balanced between large groups of stakeholders in their own actual self interest is what America was founded on (and the point of President Washington's famous warning about devolving into political parties). Republican collapse has presented us with an epochal opportunity, as usual shrouded in an epochal crisis. If we blow it, we will simply follow them down. And, unobstructed except by the hollow Republican Party, we will follow them much faster. And probably without hope of escape.
Let's do it differently from them. Let's embrace adversity and make us all stronger for it. Right away, rather than merely gloat at the exhaustion of our necessary enemy.