This really get to the heart of what's ailing our politics:
According to a 2009 poll by Public Policy Polling, “52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.” Conservative commenters are pointing to the indictment as further proof of rampant voter fraud and more evidence of the need for voter ID laws nationwide.
This also explains why it was a completely inexcusable and pointless waste of time for the President to attempt any good-faith negotiations with the opposition party at any time, for any reason, for as long as he was in office. Because a majority of people in the opposition party no longer believes in the legitimacy of our two-party political system. This is kind of, you know, like a big fucking deal.
This should come as no shock to anyone who's been paying attention to the devolution of Republican Party politics in the Limbaugh Era, or to anyone who figured out what was underpinning all of the myriad Clinton pseudo-scandals the Mighty Wurlitzer farted up throughout the 1990s. It's a natural byproduct of an authoritarian mindset, and it has been many decades in the making. I guess for the long term, the question I have is: How much further to the right do the Democrats continue to shift to placate a gang of crazies who view them as traitors before they marginalize themselves into irrelevance? Or will a future Democratic regime (in the House, Senate or elsewhere) halt the slide and finally jerk the party---and our discourse---sharply back to the left where it belongs? I would have expected this to have happened already, starting in 2009, and I don't think this was an unreasonable expectation, then or now, contrary to what some of the President's backers claim. Frankly, I'll go to my grave believing that Americans didn't elect a liberal black man named Hussein in a landslide so they could watch him dithering away half of his term of office negotiating over tax cuts that voters don't care about, and running interference for financial industries that consumers despise---and that's why there's a Tea Party militia in Washington now. Not because Hussein Obama was guilt of liberal overreach, contra the conventional wisdom, but because he ran away from liberalism at too many opportunities, and hence made himself irrelevant to voters who want their elected officials to stand for something they can identify with, whether or not they agree with him on all the particulars.
Where do we go from here? Given the centrality of High Broderism in official Washington, the only reasonable forecast anyone can make---if nothing substantively changes---is that we wake up 20 or 30 years from now to find we're living under a government that very much resembles, say, the government of Mexico, where they have a Constitution and elections, and term-limited Presidents, and competing political parties, and all the appearances of a democracy, but where the country is basically run by a single dominant political party and the 5,000 families who bankroll them and control virtually every facet of the private-sector economy. Sometimes I think we're more than halfway there already.
Yes, I know the coming change in America's racial and cultural demographics don't seem to favor the crackpots. But the demographics in Mexico never seemed to favor the PRI, either, but they've managed to maintain a near-monopolistic grip on power anyway. But one thing that those of us on the left side of the aisle can do is be willing to work for Democratic candidates---like this guy---who understand what we're up against, and withhold our support from Democrats who don't. We may or may not be able to prevent America from turning into Mexico-with-better-wireless-access, but if we can't, at least we can refuse to become accessories to our political marginalization.
Okay, it's 3:30 on the west coast . . . Is it too early to start drinking yet?
---Vitelius
Comments