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At every place I have turned for wisdom and guidance in these troubled times, I have encountered the same message: the Republican conquest of Congress in 1994, combined with impressive statehouse gains, means that the GOP is now the permanent governing party of this great republic, and that the Democratic party ought to do us all a favor by dissolving and selling its mailing list to the American Association of Child Molesters.
No problem there, although it could lead to some confusion in Colorado because we don't really need Republicans here when we have Democrats like Roy Romer, who never met an outside corporation that couldn't use some welfare.
On a national level, well, remember the stories we heard
every time there was a Soviet election. Those poor Russians
could vote only for one party, the Communist ticket. That
was on the news one day when a friend observed that we
Americans are better off because we get to pick from two
branches of the Capitalist party. Do we really need
both?
he asked before he was shouted down as a
subversive.
Further, the best history of the Democratic party is a
book called The Lesser Evil,
which pretty much says
it all. Think of an America where the Libertarians or
Greens were a major party, rather than those disheartened
disheveled disorganized Democrats, and you're thinking of a
better country.
However, all this learned commentary about the demise of the Democratic party sounds familiar. It dawned on me that I had heard pretty much the same thing 30 years ago, when I first began to take an interest in public affairs because my ninth-grade social studies teacher required us to bring a current event to class every Friday.
In the 1964 election, Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide victory for the presidency over Barry Goldwater, whose most effective campaigner was some has-been buffoon actor named Ronald Reagan. Democrats also gained huge majorities in the House and Senate, and controlled many state governments.
If you believed half the stuff we heard in current events then, Republicans were as obsolete as Whigs or Populists. If you ever saw one again, he'd be stuffed and mounted in the dodo wing of the museum, right next to the great auk and the passenger pigeon.
What happened to the Democrats, who were poised to run America for the rest of the century, perhaps eternity?
Thurgood Marshall, a strong civil-rights advocate, and George Wallace, who stood in the door to keep black children out of school, were both Democrats. So were George McGovern, who wanted to end the Vietnam war, and George Meany, who supported it.
Diversity may be noble and noble and worth celebrating and all that, but it's no way to keep a party united and winning elections.
When you're on the outside, it's easy to maintain a common goal -- defeating the other guy. Once you've won, though, things are different. Look at the United States and the Soviet Union, firm allies against Germany in 1944, and bitter enemies by 1949.
I doubt the 1994 election means the start of any monolithic Republican era. Instead, they'll start fighting with each other, just the way Democrats have.
Take some wholesome gold-plated Republican issue like school prayer. The corporate Republicans don't care one way or another, since a voluntary moment of silence won't do diddly to reduce the capital-gains tax.
The libertarian Republicans will see school prayer as a side issue. They'll fight to replace public schools with vouchers. Thus all parents, if they so choose, will be able to send their darlings to some campus where both matins and vespers are required when the kids aren't getting their geology from Genesis.
The fundamentalist Republicans promote school prayer, but they risk alienating a lot of their constituency. Many Baptists trace their heritage to Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and a firm enemy of anything that smacked of an established religion.
Further, someone is eventually going to ask the fundamentalist Republicans which religion they follow. It can't be Christianity because Jesus told his followers not to pray in public, the way the hypocrites do, but to pray in the privacy of their closets after locking the door.
By biblical standards, these prayer-in-the-classroom advocates are pharisees and hypocrites, no better than the money-changers in the temple.
That's just one issue. You can look at gay rights or environmental issues or Proposition 187 and find Republicans all over the map. All that really unites these triumphant Republicans is their hatred of Bill Clinton, no matter how much he caters to Wall Street bond traders, supports more capital crimes or promotes two-parent families.
If Bill Clinton really wanted to destroy the Republicans as much as they want to destroy him, he'd resign in January. And he'd get Al Gore to resign, too. Then Newt Gingrich would be president.
Without the hatred of Bill Clinton to unite them, the Republicans would fall apart, just the way the Democrats have without Richard Nixon to kick around. The enemy of my enemy may be a friend, but only as long as the enemy stays around.
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