you're one of them you say you're my friend but you're one of them
If there is any one thing to take away from this election, at least as far as politics on the domestic scene are concerned, it's that the Republican Party has ceased to be a healthy and properly functioning political party.
Naturally, party politics encourages a kind of regimentation and follow-the-leader mentality, and even a little bit of thuggishness, regardless of left-right orientation. Barring manipulation or cooptation by bigger, stronger organizatons, many times a party can either become hidebound or tethered to an abstract idea, instead of representing a mass of people in the abstract, like some people say the Democratic party did after the 1960s.
Though the Republican Party in 2004 may be organized around an ideology, it is not an ideology that is representative of people, of real people, and their interests. Thomas Frank has pointed out that the Republicans pay lip service to the right-wing fantasies of the feared "base," and though they make a good show on the anti-abortion/queer/family whatever thing, and though there are real threats to the gains in those issues both here and abroad (and you can bet it's just like the terrorism thing - if we make like we don't give a shit about queer rights, or about access to abortion, than no one else will really be concerned about even going through the motions elsewhere), it all comes down to economic exploitation, the kind we were supposed to have gotten rid of with all the Good Parts of the New Deal.
Grover Norquist - who manages to be creepy and intellectually offensive all at once - has made no secret of what the 2.0 version of the Republican Party's ultimate goals are. Even still, it's hard to say what the party will look like if Bush wins, but as of now, it resembles something out of one of the struggling anti-democracies that Herr Norquist used to mess around in...the closest comparison I can make right off the top of my head is to the PRI in Mexico. But other people are a little more clued in than I.
As Hunter Thompson recently said, "Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will."
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