20090507

centercannotstand

I came across a snippet mentioned in passing in Casey Jones' political humor column in the Trib from Sunday. Some googling brings up this:

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.”

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

The resolution, proposed by a committeeman from Washington state, was agreed upon by 16 RNC members from 16 different states and is part of a petition asking RNC Chairman Michael Steele to set a special committee meeting next month when the state chairs meet in Washington, D.C.

I think it's kinda funny. The Republican leadership has been attacking their own moderates because they've moved so far right that anything too close to the realms of sanity looks like the October Revolution to them.

I'd be all for the name change if the Democrats even halfway resembled democratic socialism. (Which covers a number of diverse viewpoints, all a far cry from the imagined resurgent Stalinism the Republicans think to define their goodness by their opposition.) In realms closer to reality and fair judgment, the Democratic Party is pragmatically centrist and has been so for a long time. They play host to some people with real leftist views who don't have anywhere else to go if they want influence, but most of these people are successfully corralled to pose no risk of actually upsetting the status quo. If there was Hope in President Obama's campaign, I held some glimmer of hope he might be one of those who successfully broke free, but I don't think that's really likely anymore.
Pragmatism means Democratic Party will occasionally be on the right side just because being seen to be right can be good for the party. So for example, in the sixties they placed a bet on which way society was moving and shed their Southern Dixiecrat stronghold to attract black voters. Likewise, though I hope they've underestimated the pace of social change, they've mostly aligned themselves with the right side of the gay rights movement.

Of course the Republican Party has not usually been less pragmatic. The current Republican leadership is blinded by devotion to the holy trinity of neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy (and those two are very intimately linked), and evangelical Dominionist social values. This is a temporary holdover from what probably was a very safe bet in the later decades of the 20th century. The Clinton Presidency likely should have been an alert that the third point of that trinity wasn't as safe a bet as they thought, but Clinton didn't vary much from the first two points, and Republicans missed the lesson. And having the 9/11 card to play during Bush II meant they didn't think they needed a lesson. This all will change, and the Republicans will very likely return in coming years once they find a new center. (And finding a new center won't necessarily mean "moderate" just different from what they are now.)

Pity, I'd rather like to see the Republican Party weld itself inescapably to the wrong side of something like gay rights and be ground to nothing by the course of history. Ideally something would lead the Democratic Party to schizm and implode at about the same time and then maybe we can ban parties from the political process.
Change; I can always Hope.
 
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