Wondering What's Next For Republicans

Republicans seem to have decided that their job is simply to mock and obstruct the very people who are struggling to clean up their messes for them. They seem to hope through this ugly and infantile procedure to get the Democrats they undermine drummed out of power whereupon they would regain the power themselves the better yet again to mess things up for still future others to clean up while they mock and obstruct them again. The Republicans certainly seem to be enjoying themselves in the process, rather like dumb drunk belligerent bullies shooting randomly in the dark whooping it up.

The problem, of course, is that this is not a process that actually can be repeated endlessly. Eventually, if they got their way, Republicans really would succeed in destroying the American representative form of government altogether -- which is, after all and from the very beginning, exactly what Movement Republicans have always loudly, clearly, repeatedly insisted they wanted to do -- at which point we will all stew in their bloody toxic irradiated feudal mess to the ruin of our world.

Of course, it might be that people will finally grasp what it really means for people who call government a den of corruption to want in on the action, what it really means to be anti-government when government is of by and for the people, what it really means in practical terms to want to hold public office when you are the sort of person who thinks government is the problem rather than an effort to solve shared problems.

Then the process of self-marginalization into a know-nothing white-racist corporate-militarist Christianist-theocratic neo-confederate rump will continue apace, as ever fewer ever crazier fringe-figures hold on to power through the activation of an ever crazier ever fringier ever more marginalized base, with no countervailing forces of relative sanity to right the Party by moving it closer to the relevant center in this center-left secular-multicultural nation.

I personally think it is a useful thing for the Democratic party -- which is, after all, and properly so, a coalition rather than a lock-step monolith -- to have a comparatively non-crazy conversational Republican partner to its right, to help keep that Democratic coalition organized overall and especially its progressive wing focused and forceful. As is, I fear an unprecedented influx of corporatist candidates in the DLC mode and gobs of cash once earmarked for Republicans will flood in and stall the ongoing, already fraught and fragile project to move the Democratic Party coalition sensibly leftward to better reflect actual American attitudes and aspirations, which is urgently necessary work that is not just overdue but otherwise underway.

From a pragmatic standpoint (obviously I am not talking about guiding ideals or ideal outcomes here, that's a different kind of discourse than this is meant to be) a center-left Democratic Party and Moderate Center Republican Party would create an environment in which much more effective policy in the actually-existing US could be made in my view than the terrain that is likely to emerge from a complete Republican implosion.

Not to mention just what a stomach-churningly shattering, shabby, and unedifying spectacle it is to observe this ugly crazy rancid squealing Republican implosion for us all as a people.