America as a One-Party State

[unblock]

this articles lays out some of the specific tactics the right has been using to solidify power, and paints a depressing picture of a virtual lock on power, at the expense of democracy itself.

www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V15/2/kuttner-r.html

Today's hard right seeks total dominion. It's packing the courts and rigging the rules. The target is not the Democrats but democracy itself.
Robert Kuttner

America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR's New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century "Era of Good Feeling." But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a nation in which the dominant party rules for a prolonged period, marginalizes a token opposition and is extremely difficult to dislodge because democracy itself is rigged. This would be unprecedented in U.S. history.

In past single-party eras, the majority party earned its preeminence with broad popular support. Today the electorate remains closely divided, and actually prefers more Democratic policy positions than Republican ones. Yet the drift toward an engineered one-party Republican state has aroused little press scrutiny or widespread popular protest.

We are at risk of becoming an autocracy in three key respects. First, Republican parliamentary gimmickry has emasculated legislative opposition in the House of Representatives (the Senate has other problems). House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has both intimidated moderate Republicans and reduced the minority party to window dressing, rather like the token opposition parties in Mexico during the six-decade dominance of the PRI.

Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split. After two decades of bipartisan collusion in the creation of safe House seats, there are now perhaps just 25 truly contestable House seats in any given election year (and that's before the recent Republican super gerrymandering). What once was a slender and precarious majority -- 229 Republicans to 205 Democrats (including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who votes with Democrats) -- now looks like a Republican lock. In the Senate, the dynamics are different but equally daunting for Democrats. As the Florida debacle of 2000 showed, the Republicans are also able to hold down the number of opposition votes, with complicity from Republican courts. Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout. And the latest money-and-politics regime, nominally a reform, may give the right more of a financial advantage than ever.

Third, the federal courts, which have slowed some executive-branch efforts to destroy liberties, will be a complete rubber stamp if the right wins one more presidential election.

Taken together, these several forces could well enable the Republicans to become the permanent party of autocratic government for at least a generation. Am I exaggerating? Take a close look at the particulars.

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[forgethell]

1. Very interesting article

It gives us all a view of what is at stake in November. Especailly about the courts

[RedCloud]

2. Fear not, a new one nation party will win!

A party that will win almost every election:

THE ORGY PARTY!

[PeakOil2008]

3. The Republican Party will pursue this to its own destruction.

If the Republicans succeed in diminishing the Democrats until they are completely marginalized and removed from power, whom else will they have to blame for problems in government? At this point, the Republicans will have nowhere else to look but within their own party for enemies. Without a doubt, they will turn inward upon each other, and the Republican Party itself will eventually fracture into two or more seperate parties.

Of course, that's not to discount the overwhelming severity of the damage this would inflict upon American society and Democracy itself. With the GOP firmly rooted in power, elections would cease to have any meaning, though I'm sure that the GOP would stage them as some sort of symbolic, however empty, gesture of "democracy".

God forbid that we ever fall to this point. But if we do, I cannot possibly see one party rule lasting very long at all. Too many people will be left out of the equation, and in the light of a collapsing economy, massive consumer debt, no jobs, no heathcare and no hope, the seeds of violent, massive revolution will quickly and surely begin to germinate.

[Solon]

4. How long will it take?

Taking the rest of the country down with it, the Republican Party is pursuing a path to destruction. But how long will it last, as long as Mexico's or of the old Soviet Union (They both had "Elections" too.).