Your Humble Blogger has devoted several posts recently to political partisan whatnot, as Gentle Readers have probably noticed. Some of those have been a bit more… shrill… than YHB’s usual tone. I have, for instance, implied or outright stated that the Republican nominee for the President of the United States lies a lot, seems to have no idea what he’s talking about a lot of the time, crumbles in a crisis, has no friends, and is a braying jackass of a useless pathetic poopy poopyhead. Also, that his party is full of racists and hasn’t done anything good for this country in two generations. Also, Joe Lieberman.
Now, in the past, YHB has tried to refrain from too much sneering and sniping in this Tohu Bohu. I am unashamedly partisan. My Party is the Democratic Party. I do think that the Republican Party not only is wrong on most (well, nearly all) policy issues, but that the Republican Party has encouraged personal and institutional corruption on a scale well beyond what my Party has seen for decades. I mean to say, I think that the evidence shows that corruption, and that while the corruption (and the incompetence, which is something else) is not entirely independent of the policy positions that make the Republican Party inferior in my opinion, it is not necessarily coincident with it, nor is my Party necessarily immune to it.
I’m saying this badly. Look, I’m a liberal. I have spent some time looking into Conservatism, and I think I get some of the basic aspects of the mindset. I certainly understand that people can be good people and be Conservatives, and that good people can feel strongly about Conservatism and utterly reject the Progressive mindset that feels natural to me. As people are different to one another, and that is what makes the world interesting and fun (the essence, after all, of the liberal mindset), one of those differences that I find so interesting and fun is that some people are Conservatives. Fine. And certainly not all Conservatives are corrupt or incompetent. Most, I assume are not personally corrupt, and disdain personal or institutional corruption. But the national Republican Party and its leaders have betrayed those Conservatives. That seems obvious to me.
Having said that, I can imagine if the situation were in my own Party. Could I vote for a candidate nominated by my Party if he were a poopy poopyhead? Yes, certainly. What if the leadership of my Party were revealed to be corrupt on a Tom Delay level rather than a Charlie Rangel level? That would be terrible, but I don’t think it would keep me from voting for my Party, although I would hope I would work within my Party to do something about it. Certainly if one of two candidates were going to be President, and one clearly had a Conservative mindset and was otherwise a man of middling character and the other was a poopy poopyheaded Liberal, I would vote for the Liberal. Even if it became obvious that my candidate would upon taking office surround himself with, say, a secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents? Well. I sure hope I never find out who I would vote for in that situation. It would be gruesome indeed.
So. I apologize to any Conservatives reading this Tohu Bohu, and I hope there are some somewhere, for the unnecessarily vituperative tone of late. I respect Conservatism. It isn’t my worldview, surely, but I would never want to be in a world without Conservatives. I am sure that most people who vote Republican do so, not because they are big poopy poopyheads, but because they think that their Party more closely adheres to their worldview and will therefore govern with better policies. I think it’s terrible that those people have been so badly betrayed by Our Only President and the leaders of the Republican Party. I think it’s terrible that John McCain is behaving the way he is behaving, and I think it’s terrible that the Republican Party doesn’t have a better face at the moment.
Well, and part of me thinks it’s terrible. Part of me, of course, wants the Republican Party to fail, and to become even more unpopular because of all its failures, so that my Party can gain support and govern. But not all of me. And really, I would rather that the Republican Party was an honest and clean Conservative Party, as I think that we’d still be more popular.
I will still bash the Republican leadership and its nominees. I will still make clear my honest assessment of their characters. I will try, however, to make it clear that those assessments are of the characters of the individuals involved, and are not character flaws of Conservatism, or of other Conservatives. They are not. If John McCain is a braying, boasting jackass of a man, that’s him. And if you feel you have to vote for him anyway, because he is the only candidate of your Party, well, that’s how it is sometimes, and good luck to you.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
If the Republican Party cannot reform itself by removing from power the criminals and sociopaths who are currently setting the party’s agenda and replacing them with leaders who are actually interested in preserving America as a free, democratic republic, then we ought to hope that the Republican Party will fail, like Lehman Brothers has failed, or better yet like Enron, since that business failure also resulted in criminal prosecution for the company’s leaders.
Then the few pieces of the party’s coalition that still have any value can be absorbed by some surviving political organizations that are not both morally and intellectually bankrupt. Not likely to happen, of course, but not out of the realm of possibility.
Of course, an effective political monopoly would be dangerous for the Democrats, because it would open the door to hubris and corruption wider than would simply holding a governing majority, and I wouldn’t expect any new “Era of Good Feelings” that might result from widespread repudiation of the current Republican party by its membership to last more than five years, and it might lead the Democratic party itself to fracture. But even a short window in which the crucial political debate in the U.S. was between the center and the left in place of the debate between the center and the radical right which we have been stuck with throughout my adult life could be immensely beneficial.
On a different note, looking hard at the Republican party’s lack of interest in democracy as such makes me wonder how long that party has been essentially against democracy? Is that a post-Civil Rights Era, post-Nixon, post-Reagan phenomenon? That is, have the Republicans dropped their commitment to democracy basically since universal voting rights became a reality in the U.S.? Or has it generally been a feature of U.S. political history that one of the parties contesting for power in our representative democracy has been uncommitted to democracy as such? Certainly U.S. history is not _taught_ that way, but when I think back to the Gilded Age, I wonder how long it has been since there has not been a political organization that was essentially owned by a group of plutocrats that worked as an instrument to enable those plutocrats, essentially, to own the federal government and use it to promote their interests?