[Mb-civic] The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

Published on Wednesday, November 2, 2005 by
CommonDreams.org
The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party: Part Two
by David W. Orr
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1102-26.htm
 

(This article is a sequel to David Orr's first
submission: The Imminent Demise of the Republican
Party: Part One.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0112-36.htm)

In truth the moderate Republican Party of Dwight
Eisenhower died several decades ago, to be reborn in
the 1990's as the extreme right-wing and highly
disciplined party of Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, George
Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, and Grover Norquist.
Those and a few others orchestrated the nightmare that
James Madison described in /Federalist/ #10-in which
executive, legislative, and judicial power was
concentrated in the hands of a single faction. But it
is worse than Madison feared because the power of that
faction includes control over a mostly compliant and
increasingly centralized media, a vast military
establishment, and the intelligence agencies.

The nightmare, however, is nearing its end and the
reasons are daily coming clearer. But the Democratic
Party, lacking grit, direction, and ideas, will have
played little role in the end of the radical
Republican Party, nor can it be assumed that Democrats
will be the beneficiary. The self-induced coming
collapse of the Republican Party will most likely
leave a power vacuum in American politics and perhaps
a time of national drift and decline.

The Republican Party has always been the party of
business and it was once the party of law, fiscal
conservatism, probity, and small government as well.
But things have changed and it bears no resemblance to
the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Robert Taft,
Dwight Eisenhower, and even Richard Nixon. After
Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the
Impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Party was effectively
taken over by radicals determined to win at all cost.
They forged an alliance between Southern racists, the
extreme Christian right, big business,
neo-conservatives, and a group of right-wing
financiers willing to invest billions over several
decades to build ideologically driven think tanks and
a nation-wide media echo chamber to mislead the public
and return the country to the world of the Robber
Barons of the 19^th century. They played the public
for fools, covering their tracks with patriotic and
religious rhetoric and devising ruinous policies too
complex to be widely understood. But, driven by an
extremist ideology and directed by ruthless
leadership, radical Republicans will fall victim to
overreach and its own particular kind of blindness.
The recent legal difficulties of Lewis Libby, Tom
Delay, Bill Frist, and Jack Abramoff are only the tip
of the iceberg. Other revelations are coming about the
fabrication of the reasons for the mistaken war in
Iraq. Still others will show a pattern of corruption
and fraud at a scale for which we have no national
precedent. Perhaps it is only a sign of hubris, but
more likely it is growing evidence that the national
Republican Party, having marginalized its wiser
leaders and tossed good judgment overboard became a
criminal enterprise given to deception and mendacity
in order to cover grand theft at a national scale, all
on behalf of something called their "base." But its
mounting legal difficulties and decline in recent
polls are evidence of deeper causes that will soon
bring the entire enterprise to ruin.

Events surrounding hurricane Katrina are symptomatic
of the kinds of forces that will terminate the
Republican Party. Its leadership chose to ignore
scientific warnings about the links between climate
change and the use of fossil fuels that is amplifying
the number and severity of storms to say nothing of
the warnings about inadequate levies in New Orleans.
As a result they have no plans to avert the worst of
climate driven planetary disruption coming in the
years ahead which, beyond some unknown point, will be
catastrophic for everyone.

The war in Iraq is symptomatic of deeper flaws and
self-delusion as well. Reliable witnesses report that
the reasons given for the war were conjured, which is
to say that they were a lie. We know as well that the
level of understanding about the Middle East was
astonishingly low and preparation for the post-war
reconstruction of Iraq utterly incompetent. This
debacle was decidedly not primarily a failure of the
CIA, but rather a matter of deliberate deception by
the administration for which the appropriate words are
"high crimes" and the appropriate course of action is
impeachment.

The list of malfeasances and bad judgment could go on,
but the point is clear: the present leadership of the
Republican Party has chosen to lead by deception,
ignore economic reality, refute science when its
findings are inconvenient, foster class divisions,
snub the poor, vitiate laws and regulations that
protect the environment and public health by stealth,
destroy venerable alliances, flaunt international law,
undermine the foundations of democracy at home, and
destroy the capacity of government, painstakingly
created over many decades by Republicans and Democrats
alike, to solve serious public problems. The Party of
Lincoln has become a gang of thieves given to cutting
taxes for the wealthy and willing to "do whatever it
takes" to stay in power as Karl Rove once put it. The
results include a cascading national debt, a federal
government unwilling and increasingly unable to act on
the most important issues of the 21^st century, and
growing isolation from the world community. Not the
least, the combined effect of the radical conservative
blunder in Iraq is that the United States is more
vulnerable to terrorism than before 2001 and is highly
dependent on the willingness of the Chinese and others
to prop up an increasingly vulnerable economy.

When their reign collapses and the full extent of the
wreckage assessed, there will be no time for gloating.
There will be, at best, a small window of opportunity
to set the country on course again and restore a
government of the people, by the people, and for the
people, not one for the wealthy few. Equality before
the law, transparency, accountability, competence, and
foresight are the standards for good governance. The
first order of business will be to restore a truer
democracy and greater participation in public life now
more characteristic of European countries than our
own. That will require, in one way or another,
reducing the power of money in U.S. politics and
rebuilding a fair tax system. We will need to quickly
regain public control over the public airwaves
beginning with the restoration of the fairness
doctrine, tossed out by the Reagan administration in
1987. We will need to take immediate steps to
implement energy efficiency and solar power, long
known to be technically feasible, economically
advantageous, and the antidote for adverse climate
change. We must get America on track again, rebuilding
a national rail system that will reduce our dependence
on imported oil while reversing urban sprawl. We will
need policies to rebuild blighted urban areas and
restore widespread prosperity to rural areas-flip
sides of the same coin. We will need to rebuild
federal, state, and private capacity to protect our
common air, water, lands, and natural heritage. And we
will need a foreign policy once again grounded in
international law and a decent respect for the
opinions of humankind.

Most important, however, we will need to be summoned
back to greatness and away from fear, division,
culture wars, and greed. We need a renewed sense of an
inclusive America and what it means to be an American.
At our best we are a democratic people governed by
law. We are a pragmatic people, adept at solving
problems. And if wisely led, we can be a compassionate
people capable of acting on behalf of the less
fortunate and for posterity. It was once said that
America is the last best hope of humankind, and
perhaps one day we will live up to that standard.

David Orr is a Paul Sears Distinguished Professor at
Oberlin College and author of The Last
Refuge:Politics, and the Environment in an Age of
Terror (Island Press, 2005).

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