A reader points to Matthew Yglesias's handwringing — which, while overwrought in my opinion, should not be underestimated, either. You never know. At any rate, a full read of his Vox piece is advisable; or if you haven't the time, Yglesias's concluding paragraph summarizes his worry:
The much more significant question facing the [Democratic] party isn't about the White House — it's about all the other offices in the land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.
It could be that I'm one of the blind. It could also be that there's little reason for Yglesias's worry, even though I'm an inveterate worrier. The chief reason comes from none other than RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who, in yet another instance of capricious Republican truth-telling, recently said "I do think we’re cooked as a party for quite a while … if we don’t win in 2016. I do think it’s going to be hard to dig out of something like that."
Rot, stench, the fish's head and all that. The GOP is decaying from the top down. Just look at its "top" spokesmen — Donald Trump and Ben Carson, an utterly unhinged demagogue and an inexplicable cipher. On the party's less popular establishment side there's Jeb Bush, inept brother of the country's most inept president ever. Such is the deep bench that might "seize the White House"?
Paradoxically, there is further safety for Democrats in Republicans controlling Congress throughout a Clinton or Biden presidency. Nothing will be accomplished, of course, yet it will become increasingly clear to a demographically changing electorate that nothing is being accomplished only because of you-know-who. In the 1920s the sociologist William Ogburn wrote of "cultural lags" — society's slow and troubled adjustments to technological innovations — however a similar lags exist in politics. It's been a long time coming, but starting with the presidency, the electorate can now see that a Republican would be disastrous. Give the Republican Congress a bit more time to work its magic, and the electorate will see the same on the House and Senate levels — especially as the Fox News and Limbaugh audiences die off. From there, Republican states will begin dropping. Rot, stench, the fish's head and all that.
Underlying all the rot? Likely, an open break in the GOP — a split into two parties, with ultraconservatives battling insane tea-party conservatives, while centrist Democrats reap the benefit.
Naturally, all the GOP's metamorphoses (if I'm correct in my predictions) won't play out overnight. They'll take years, perhaps well into the 2020s. But even Reince Priebus is compelled to admit what's so plainly written on his office wall: If his party loses the top spot in 2016, from there on, it's pretty much endless rot.
That's certainly one scenario, that the electorate will blame a bunch of politicians rather than blame one. It's still easier to get rid of one. Yglesias speaks against complacency and he is right to do so as anyone who watched the Republicans get rewarded for shutting down the government. Or so it appeared.
But that isn't the primary reason I partially agreed with him or why I sent him one of my little missives on what boat he missed. The Democratic party does have a big problem and that problem is reflected in the loss of control of state governments. Romney accused them of being the party of the 47 percent. What they need to be come is the party of about the sixty to seventy percent. They are not socialist enough. Right now their base of support has a lot of divided loyalties and goals. These will not be cured by empty claims to serve the interests of all these factions when they clearly do not. Any party that caves into demands by organized labor to dispense with the Cadillac health tax is throwing the people ACA was designed to help under the bus. Ditto for all the other social benefits that accrue to only factions within the Democratic party deserves to lose and will. If they don't embrace universality they will be easily broken apart.
Policywise I don't think Bernie Sanders knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to things like banking or trade policy. But his larger more distant vision of what social justice looks like has great appeal to me. With globalization essentially unavoidable and unstoppable the alternative to a reborn socialism is a murderous social Darwinism.
Posted by: Peter G | October 19, 2015 at 01:20 PM
I thought they were near hitting bottom in 2009 when Obama took office and they were wandering around like braindead zombies with their heads cut off. But the moment they got everyone on the "oppose everything that Kenyan soshalist does" page, their electoral fortunes turned around.
I don't see why they'd do anything different when they lose to Hillary. They still haven't taken any real amount of blame from the voters for being reckless obstructionists in Congress, and in fact have won big in midterms by encouraging reactionary anger at the party attempting to govern. Maybe Hillary, a more natural and relentless pugilist than Obama, will draw out that contrast more effectively to the benefit of her party. We can hope.
But I'm pretty much convinced that the only way the GOP will decisively lose a non-presidential election is for them to take total control of the federal government and run the country into the ground again. That was how Dems won in 2006 after all. I'm not sure the country's long-term health can survive another drunken bender of GOP overreach and stupidity, though.
Posted by: Turgidson | October 19, 2015 at 02:30 PM
You've probably nailed it. The biggest reasons Republicans have grabbed so much local power are: 1) ALEC, The Club for Growth, The Chambers of Commerce and similar well-funded groups have coordinated the efforts of oligarchs in buying local legislation. 2) The backlash election of 2010 coincided with the census and allowed the Republicans to put Democrats at a disadvantage through redistricting. There won't be another census until 2020, but the demographic tide is turning, as you've taken into account.
The worry I have is that the economy might suffer a downturn. The Republicans fought tooth and nail to limit stimulus spending, and the effects might wear off at a bad time for us. They might even force the Dems to crank up a war.
Posted by: Bob | October 19, 2015 at 02:35 PM
All good points, Turgidson. Conservatives will always have the advantages of money and group-think. Let's hope they've gotten so uncharacteristically splintered they won't be able to pull together to cause as much mischief.
Posted by: Bob | October 19, 2015 at 03:19 PM
Just to cheer up the comments section:
US appeals court upholds gun laws after Newtown massacre
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) -- Gun control laws passed in New York and Connecticut to ban possession of semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School were mostly upheld Monday by a federal appeals court.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan found core parts of the laws did not violate the Second Amendment because there was a substantial relationship between bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines and the "important - indeed, compelling - state interest in controlling crime." ...
Posted by: Bob | October 19, 2015 at 03:27 PM
Yep, of all the madness that has washed over our politics in the last couple decades, the thing that might be most insufferable to me is the GOP's largely successful gambit of blaming Obama for every conceivable economic ill (effectively pretending the world began in January 2009) while also preventing him from getting any further stimulus spending through Congress, and then blaming him for not doing enough to create jobs. And the innumerate both-sides-do-it media lets them get away with all of it to this day, with lollygaggers like Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier parroting their talking points and passing it off as wise, detached "centrist" analysis, and then going off about the "debt crisis" which is only crisis to Fournier and the few dozen Village dipshits he converses with.
I need a drink.
Posted by: Turgidson | October 19, 2015 at 04:09 PM
Salud!
Posted by: Bob | October 19, 2015 at 04:23 PM
Here's my take. After Pres. Obama and the Democratic Party failed to respond to the Summer of Rage in 2009, when tea partyists descended on congressional town halls to spew their spittle about Obamacare, Republicans took over state governments nationwide the tea party wave the next year. My home state of North Carolina elected its first Republican Assembly and Senate since the 1870s, for example.
The Republican majorities in those states were elected in the Census year of 2010, just in time to gerrymander their congressional districts to make it hard, even impossible, for Democrats to win.
Thanks, Obama!
Now, the president and the Democrats should focus on time and money on the statewide elections so that wherever possible legislatures are flipped from red to blue before 2020 so that new Democratic majorities can un-gerrymander them. That is the only hope that Dems might take back Congress in our lifetimes.
Posted by: Jon Ponder | October 19, 2015 at 06:56 PM