It won't be enough to reelect President Obama. The Republicans have taken to heart the lesson President Clinton taught them during his eight years in office: never cooperate with a Democratic President, lest he receive credit for the fruits of that cooperation. Clinton was a master at taking Republican issues, like welfare reform and free trade, and running with them. It became clear when Barack Obama took office that the Republicans would try to stop him getting anything done, even where they agreed with him, in order to paint him as inadequate come 2012. Senator McConnell openly admitted his first priority, even in the middle of two wars, with the economy in free fall and millions of Americans losing their jobs, was to stop the President getting reelected. There's no reason to suppose the Republicans will be any more cooperative with a second Obama administration than they have been with the first, given that the next round of elections are only two years away. The imbroglio over the debt ceiling last year was particularly alarming; it showed clearly and unambiguously how much Republicans value their private political interests over those of the public they pretend to serve. We need to make sure that everyone thinking of voting Republican this year understands this; the very survival of our representative democracy is at stake.
When government becomes dysfunctional, people lose faith in it. Without its services we could not live as we do. Millions of us would literally die without the institutions, technologies, and conventions governments maintain. We would have no food on our shelves without highways and railroads to transport it; there would be no water in our taps nor resources to heat our homes without the public infrastructure our governments keep running. We would not be safe if there were no police and firefighters; without teachers, successive generations would lack the skills they need to build a prosperous society. With no armed forces to defend us, we might be living in Waziristan or the Gaza Strip, where death strikes indiscriminately from the skies every day.
Where there is no effective government, people demand it. They don't quibble about laws, constitutions, or rights, any more than a starving man scruples to eat whatever food he can find, however unpleasant. Government is as essential to human society as oxygen; it is the central heartbeat that makes possible the life and prosperity of all. In its absence, people start to dream of a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Mussolini, the strong leader who can get things done.
In America we have never known anything but representative democracy. Our eighteenth century Constitution and those of our states served us well enough through the challenges of the last two centuries. If they do not serve us as well in the face of today's challenges: climate change, income inequality, economic turmoil, deteriorating infrastructure, resource depletion, institutional entropy, then the political order of our future may be very different from the one we have known. We only need look at our Republican foes to get some idea of what it might be like: ignorant, racist, xenophobic, puritanical, militarist; sustained by, and run for, a small self-centered elite with little regard for the rest of us.
We already have a military-industrial complex comparable to those of our World War II enemies and a homeland security establishment worthy of the worst of them. We do not yet have a national mass movement with a charismatic leader, something like the Italian Fascist party or the German Nazi party; that we see nothing like them on the horizon we should be very thankful. We have time to fix our politics; but how long? Will the American people put up with two more years of gridlock? Four more years? A decade?
The example of Germany in 1930, when the Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, could get nothing done except by presidential decree through the Article 48 constitutional loophole, is too often cited; a more recent cautionary tale might be that of Russia in the 1990's, when corruption and paralysis plunged the country into poverty and misery under the "liberalism" and "democracy" of Boris Yeltsin. It would be the KGB, personified by Vladimir Putin, that came to fill the power vacuum left by the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party. Never imagine that it can't happen here.
We need to get rid of our obstructionists by voting them out of Congress and our state legislatures this November. We need to overturn Citizens United and get money out of politics. We need something like Canada's system, where the head of government is the leader of the party or coalition that commands a majority in parliament. But above all we need to restore the American people's confidence in their political institutions before it's too late.
I do not think we can afford two more years of John Boehner in the Speaker's chair. It must be Nancy Pelosi, or we might as well have stayed home and let Romney win.