Party DownLike the Democrats during the 1970s, today's GOP is hidebound and out of touch.
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells---snip
The truth is, for all its apparent strength, the modern Republican Party has worked itself into a position of profound and growing decay. Worried Republicans are right to look to the past to help sort out their future. But the right date isn't 1994 or 1904. It's the late 1970s--and the party to look at isn't the Republicans, but the Democrats. Like the Democrats of that period, the current version of the Republican Party is supremely powerful but ideologically incoherent, run largely by and for special interests and increasingly alienated from the broader voting public. Today's GOP is headed for a profound crackup. The only questions are when, exactly, the decline will start--and how long it will last.
---snip
American political parties, like great empires, often seem strongest at the moment before they fall. Just as the principles and ideas that have built the new order triumph, their relevance and practicality begin to fade as new conditions emerge. Yet true believers will cling ever-tighter to the old ways of thought, and those who cling tightest are granted the greatest moral authority. Meanwhile, the constituencies that the ascendant party once rallied to its cause become powers unto themselves: parochial, imperious, demanding, and hard to discipline. Soon party leaders begin to confuse the agenda of their constituencies with the interests of the nation, and the act of governance becomes less a crafting of solutions than a division of the spoils.
This is the state of the GOP today, but it also describes the condition of the Democrats two-and-a-half decades ago. It can be hard to remember these days just how powerful and dominant the Democratic Party was in 1976. Like the Republicans in 2000, they had just elected as president a moderate, evangelical Southern governor, defeating the successor to a morally flawed president by promising to restore integrity to the Oval Office. Like the GOP today, the Democrats found themselves in control of all three branches of the federal government--the Democrats had near-veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress--as well as the majority of state legislatures. Organized labor, its power not yet decimated, was squarely in the Democratic camp, while the corporate lobbying sector offered significant support for the simple reason that Democrats ran everything. Just as the GOP in 2000 tended to look at the Clinton administration as an unfortunate detour on the road to a permanent Republican majority, so Democrats in 1976 looked back on the Nixon years as a temporary aberration from the natural order in Washington, one Democrats had and always would dominate. It wasn't just that the party was powerful; the Democrats, returning to the capital in the winter of 1977, thought their principles put them on the right side of history, and the country had come back around to seeing things their way.
---snip
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.wallace-wells.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
