The fourth, and I think most likely, scenario is that the GOP traverses the same path as did its brethren in the UK’s Conservative Party. These nasty blokes followed Maggie Thatcher and her hapless semi-acolyte, John Major, first to popularity and then off the cliff into a decade of ridicule and bitter loathing from the British public. The Tories have essentially been completely floundering since 1997 (really, since 1990), dabbling in different policy gambits here and there, dumping leader after losing leader, right up to the present time.
The party hasn’t really come together in all that time, nor is David Cameron, its present leader, any sort of amazing politician. I doubt that the British voting public can even identify much about what the Conservative Party stands for to this day. Except for one thing. Whatever they are, they are not the current Labour Party government. And that party, and that government, have become increasingly unpopular. Meanwhile, there sit the Conservatives, just hanging on the sidelines, winning public support simply by default. They’re the party that isn’t the Labour Party. And, according to the polls, they’re vastly more popular now than Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, which is essentially a hangover from the legacy of Tony Blair who got too smarmy and too Iraq-obsessed for most British voters, much like John Major inherited all the negativity and none of the charismatic excitement (for some people, at least) of Thatcher.
The America version of that scenario would look like this: Obama wins, he becomes a Tony Blair-type figure who combines (too) smooth rhetoric with a lack of real policy substance, along with perhaps a monumental screw-up the equivalent of Blair hitching his wagon to an imbecile like George W. Bush and his imperial adventure sold on lies. Or perhaps Obama’s great, but his Democratic successor isn’t, and ultimately there is a scandal or two. I don’t think Obama will be a nothing-burger, and I don’t think he would do something as stupid as Blair did. I do worry, though, that he might not be bold enough to address the multiple crises he will inherit.
In any case, two decades from now, the public could be in the same place the British were after eighteen years of Tory insanity. Or that American voters were after twenty years of Democratic rule ending with an unpopular Harry Truman presiding over an unpopular war in Korea. Meaning that Republicans, if they could hang on that long, could resurrect themselves at that point as simply the party that isn’t the Democratic Party.
This is all very speculative, of course. But the point is to envision where the GOP might go from here, and what are the probabilities of any of these four scenarios.
My guess is that you can’t bury these guys forever, and that, anyhow, the new Republican Party that emerges after their near-death experience in 2008 will be much more moderate than the crazed one of the Reagan-through-W era (and how could it not be?).
All of that would be a major improvement on the horror story we’ve all lived through these last decades, though of course, even better would be to slay the beast once and for all.
Meanwhile, whatever happens, progressives are about to live through the Woodstock of schadenfreude.
Enjoy the ride. Boy, have we ever earned it.
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