The Republican Party is at such a low ebb, its "brand" so damaged, that catastrophe in the upcoming state and local elections is widely thought to be inevitable. The rejection of the Party's candidates in 2006, the loss of quintessentially "safe" Republican seats in subsequent by-elections, the horrific polls and prophecies for November, and the plummeting number of voters even willing to be identified as Republican all indicate that the current problem may be much more serious than the usual cyclical repulsion voters feel for both Tweedle parties when, after one or the other sweeps back into office, they get new opportunities to see the greed, corruption, and incompetence of Republican Dees or Democratic Dums all over again. What doomed the Contract-with-America bully-boys, for example? Their election! All the little newts had to crawl out from under their Opposition rocks, and the people could see them. What elected the hapless, embarrassing Nixon? A good long look at Johnson and Humphrey. But the current Republican affliction may be so systemic and malignant as to be, in fact, terminal.
There is bold medicine that would not only cure the Republican Party but restore it, rehabilitate it, and put it on a fast track to new electoral triumphs. Really. As unbelievable as that now sounds.
Republicans: before I give you my sure-fire prescription, I want to issue a disclaimer. I loathe you. Seeing you consigned to the dustbin of history, one with the dinosaurs and the dodos, the Know-Nothings and the Whigs, would give me so much joy it might be dangerous. I loathe the Grand Old Party with the Single Idea - No Taxes! I believe you are monstrous anachronisms, Gilded Age grotesques, and that you continue to present yourselves as a major party only because of the incomprehensible (but apparently not limitless) greed, stupidity, and shivering fearfulness of so much of the American electorate.
So why would I give you what I really do think is such good advice that it might save you and even ultimately bring you back to power?
I have my reasons.
I've been sliding downwards for a while toward a word I generally despise: bipartisanship. How can I say that? How could I despise the holiest ideal of all bloviating blather? The next thing I'll say is that I don't even try to be "fair and balanced." I don't! Not here, not now. BECAUSE MANY ISSUES DO NOT HAVE TWO SIDES. In the epic divisions between slaves and their owners, Jews and Nazis, moguls who pay policemen to shoot strikers and the working men and women they shoot, between fascists and democrats, between Republicans and Democrats, I am militantly not "bipartisan." Most of us draw lines somewhere: those are some of mine.
I had to argue with a dear friend the other day, a liberal, a schoolboy refugee from the Hungarian revolution, who was trying to calm my rage by warning me about the dangers of all extremism, dangers from the left as well as the right. The point I had been making was that a nominee for Attorney General who asserts in his confirmation hearing that the President has the right to ignore any law he chooses in the fulfillment of his Constitutional responsibility to "protect" the country is fascist. That assertion is fascist, that nominee is fascist, the President that nominated him is fascist, and the legislative leaders who confirm him are fascist. I'm biased against fascism. I'm biased against the Unitary Executive: it took Hitler an act of the Reichstag to achieve what our own Arturo Ui, George W. Bush, has accomplished by fiat, with no significant opposition. The unchecked supremacy of the President, the evisceration of the Legislative and Judicial branches: that's not our democracy. Even if you think you have compelling reasons to support Mukasey and his President, reasons like the health and welfare of the great corporations and your own bank account, or the threat of terrorism, even if you have a good heart and these wonderful reasons for deciding that's what you believe in instead of democracy, it's still fascism. You're a fascist. That's the "right" in today's America.
I had just told my friend that I could not vote for Obama because of his FISA vote, and he was trying to temper my anger and get me to behave sensibly. He saw my refusal to be reasonable, my unwillingness to compromise, as extreme; I was agitating from the "left" end of the political spectrum, as bad in my own way as all those neocons at the other end, and somehow presenting an equivalent danger to the poor, good, decent, beleaguered citizens in the middle.
Where's the middle? It took me some time to get my friend to understand that only on the distorted scale of contemporary American politics could opposition to neocon corporatism be stigmatized as "left." The equivalent "left" side of the real political spectrum is Stalin. Was I advocating some sort of Stalinism, or any sort of communal rule, or any sort of revolution? Maybe a little high-minded but fatal Girondism? Or even a little Jeffersonian spilling of patriot blood?
Of course not. I believe in our Democracy, our Constitution, our laws. I loathe dictators of the left as much as I do dictators of the right (even if a frightened public has elected them). Finally my friend understood that what is at the heart of my "leftist" extreme in this poor, damaged country, is not "left" at all. It is, it has to be, the middle. All right, I'm biased: toward the Constitution. I'm against a Unitary Executive. I'm for democratic elections, checks-and-balances, accountability. I'm against war crimes, any other high crimes, and even misdemeanors from our elected officials. I'm for liberty and justice for all. Is that really "left"? If you think so, you are probably no more opposed to the obscene profits of the oiligarchs than Bush or McCain have been, no more worried about the price of gas than Limbaugh or Hannity are; and you shouldn't be surprised that America is poised to sweep leftwards in November.
That said, against all my deepest principles, I find myself sliding toward bipartisanship. It isn't that I loathe Republicans less; it's that I am coming to loathe Democrats more. I should have changed my registration to Independent the day that Schumer and Feinstein gave us Mukasey. Bush proposed him, yes, but why wouldn't he? Bush is a fascist. It was my erstwhile party, the Democrats, who confirmed him: no Schumer and Feinstein, no Mukasey. No Democratic votes, no Roberts, no Alito. I promised that I would change my registration if the brilliant, charismatic Obama, after mowing down all the progressives in the primaries, voted to validate the Decider's gutting of the 4th Amendment, and will, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I said before that I loathed Republicans, and I do, excepting only the flawed but perhaps not irredeemable progressive wing (I. e., Teddy Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller . . . ); but I have come to believe that the centrist, corporatist, collaborationist Democrats are even worse, as a decent Frenchman might have loathed the Vichy toady next door more viscerally even than he loathed the Nazis.
So here is my prescription, my bipartisan advice to help restore a Party I despise, in order to achieve my true agenda and, incidentally, to confound and punish the Vichy Democrats.
Republicans! Who has done this to you? Who has ruined your Party, perhaps forever, and (even more important I'm sure) pushed you so roughly away from the public trough? Who has done this to you? Who?
George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. Karl Rove. Etc, etc. You know their names and their records, you were there. You rubber-stamped everything they did. The rest of us, progressives, all Americans, all the world, feel the dead hand of their misdeeds, but so do you! Maybe more!
The Vichy Democrats took impeachment off the table. Why? Why make themselves, by inaction and omission, as culpable, as greasily obliging and accommodating, as you have been? Many on the "left" (the middle!) believe the Democratic leadership has laid off poor George because his impeachment would reveal their own complicity in his high crimes and misdemeanors. War crimes (he blithely admits them), waterboarding, torture, wiretapping, all the assaults on the Constitution (he has the right to do whatever he pleases) - the Democratic leadership probably knew all about everything he did at every step of the way; and their actual private assent or their public silence has made them partners in his crimes. They know full well the fine details of Bush's perfidy, details they most emphatically don't want us to know. That's why all their ballyhoo, their headline-seeking committee investigations, quietly slipped off the front pages (if the disgraced corporate press covered it to begin with) and then died away on hold. That's why the nauseating Democrats won't even enforce their own subpoenas. (Mukasey's supposed to do that! He wont?!! Shocked, shocked!)
The Vichy Democrats, for whatever deep and secret reasons, are not interested in accountability. And why should they be? Why should they risk anything, potentially exposing themselves, tarring themselves with the Bush brush, damaging their own ascendant "brand"? They expect to win everything anyway, just because THEY ARE NOT REPUBLICAN. Bush has killed you, and that's fine with the Democrats, Plenty. All they need. Look at all those empty places at the trough! Perfect. The Democrats won't hold George W. Bush and his thugs to account.
You do it.
That's my advice.
Impeach him.
What do you owe him? He's killed you.
Enforce the subpoenas. Get the headlines. Let the folks at home see you on television being angry and righteous and strong and good. Demand the "truth." Investigate. Issue more subpoenas. Ask tough questions. Ask the floundering Rove tougher questions than the Vichy boys and girls do. Jumpstart all those stalled hearings and the American people will rally behind you with a tremendous roar.
And then impeach him. George W. Bush is easily impeachable, you know that. And if you - the Republicans - demand "fair and balanced" "bipartisan" justice, he and Cheney will both be thrown out of office, awaiting trial. (Nancy Pelosi may be gone, too, beside them in the dock.)
Republicans: if you do this, if you make yourselves the newly-awakened Party of Change, of Reform, if you demand accountability, if you become the leaders of the seething, despairing, plague-on-both-your-houses American electorate, your "brand" will be more than restored.
The Democrats, blindsided by your nerve and resolution, will have to go along with you, but the nation will see that it is you, the brave, honest, self-sacrificing, truth-and-justice-serving, Constitution-loving, triumphantly resurgent Republican Party, that is responsible for the change we all so much need and long for. The country will lift away from despair and anger to fierce joy and a renewed faith in our system of government, and you will be the beneficiaries. You probably won't win in November, but you won't lose by so much, and you'll soon be winning the way you used to, by deluding and frightening the stupid.
If you bring your own leaders to justice - all those liars and incompetents, all those corrupt and arrogant perpetrators of the Iraq War and the failed economy - the American people will soon be voting for you for the exact reverse of the reason they are now voting against you. Not me, of course. I won't be voting for any of you, ever. But many Americans will. They'll be swayed by the most compelling and fundamental of all reasons for voting one way or the other in all American elections: because you are not the Other Party, the failed Party. Because you are not the Party that threw away its astonishing opportunity and collapsed (in the dustbin of history?) as the Party of sluggish acquiescence and silent collaboration. They'll vote for you because you are not Democrats.
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