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By David Michael Green (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Shit! No food pellets! The red bar is in tatters, the chicken’s beak is worn down to a nub, but still it pecks, and still no food pellets.

The frustration and anger you see among regressive politicians and their cheerleaders comes from fifty years of operant conditioning all of a sudden gone massively awry. It’s like they fell into some parallel universe or something. Every step forward leaves them two steps backward. Up is down, down is up. White is black, and black is now president. What the hell is going on?

Poor regressives. For half a century they got an entire country full of people to suspend disbelief, and nod their heads in all the right places whenever they were poked with the appropriate stimulus. For half a century, they continued to win elections by fooling people into voting against their own interests. For half a century, they could turn lead into gold. But the alchemy no longer works. Suddenly, precipitously, none of the responses appear anymore when all the old stimuli are trotted out. And it all disappeared so fast. In 2003 they could sell any kind of bullshit imaginable. Three years later, they were handing over control of both houses of Congress to the evil, socialist Democrats.

The great news is that, as bad as it now is, these are still the golden days of the regressive movement. It’s gonna get a lot worse from here. As they continue their antics, they only look more and more foolish, while President Obama looks more and more statesmanlike, less and less like his predecessor, and better and better in the polls.

The logical move for the Republican Party would be to abandon the insanity of the last three decades and returned to the days of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, when people like Ronald Reagan were rightly (very rightly) considered to be the lunatic fringe. But this is impossible today. Indeed, the GOP will be lucky if it is able to even stay where it is ideologically, as opposed to being pulled even further to the hysterical right.

Arlen Specter will provide the archetypical case for the Republican conundrum as he runs for reelection to his Pennsylvania US Senate seat this year and next. As an established, long-standing moderate figure from a swing state, normally someone like Specter should have no problem as an incumbent retaining his seat. In fact, the opposite is now the case. Specter is being challenged from his right in the primary election, and there is no indication that the Republican establishment will come to his aid, while every indication suggests that he’s in deep trouble. One recent poll had him fourteen points down among Republican voters behind his primary challenger. Specter will have to tack to the hard right to have a prayer of obtaining the nomination. But even if that make-over can possibly succeed, he will then be stuck in the general election trying to defend the monster he became during the primary in order to placate his party’s voters, in a state that is trending the other direction.

Watch and see if the few remaining moderate Republicans don’t learn from this experience, and abandon the party. This will leave the GOP in excellent position to succeed everywhere that Jefferson Davis remains a hero, and pretty much nowhere else. Even the governor of Utah, arguably the reddest of red states, has come out in support of gay marriage.

If Republicans want to form themselves into a permanent minority at the national level, I suppose that’s just fine with me. But even that isn’t terribly sustainable. Situations like these tend toward becoming self-reinforcing cycles, in this case far more virtuous than vicious. Over time, a party that cannot compete at the national level will not attract voters or candidates even within its stronghold. And a party that cannot bring home the bacon because it has been relegated to a permanent minority status in Congress will also drive away voters. A party that is unable to change its stripes because of the viciousness and narrow-mindedness of its base is also a party unable to change its electoral fortunes.

When you see the supporters of the GOP saying, as they often do, that they would rather stick to principle than win elections, they’re not kidding. And when you see them describe the likes of George W. Bush as insufficiently conservative, they’re not kidding either.

Rather, they’re on a suicide mission.

All I can say is: “Hey, works for me!”

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), (more...)

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