While the political scrum is messy, as it always is, a narrative is starting to emerge. If we change the metaphor from rugby to movies about Transylvania, that narrative appears to be that a large number of peasants with pitchforts and torches will be assembling at the Castle of the Ruling Elite this coming November. The returns will not start coming in until after dusk, when we will be able to see the torches more clearly.
These peasants do have differences among themselves. The differences are not tiny in themselves, but they are tiny in comparison to what is going on in the main dining hall of the castle. The activities in there are of a metaphoric sort that got Belshazzar so talked about, with the addition of lots of symbolic vacations and golf. Meanwhile, outside, Ron Paul libertarians wave their pitchforts back and forth in a certain way, and Palin peasants on the other side of the castle shake their pitchforks up and down. Some inside the beltway neocons are holding pitchforks gingerly, thumb and forefinger, with an embarrassed look on their faces, wondering how this ever happened to them. Now there actually are important concerns behind these differences, to be sure, and I really don’t want to minimize them.
However, comma . . . But when you consider . . . So when your town is invaded by Martians with those big old insect eyes, perhaps you should make commmon cause with some folks you wouldn’t ordinarily team up with, and then return to your small town politics after the credits are rolling.
This will be a triage election. Will we do the next necessary thing? We have a Class IV Hemmorhage going, and so now is not the time to be debating that neocon splotch is a melanoma.
What is that necessary thing? The currrent wisdom is going back and forth about whether the congressional elections will result in the House going back to the Republicans, and some are saying that even the Senate might be in play. But it seems to me that to think this way is to set our sights way too low. Our goal really ought to be the dissolution of the Democratic Party. In the history of our nation, there have been several electoral shocks that certain political parties were not able to recover from, and there is no reason to believe this has happened for the last time. The Federalists are gone, as are the Whigs. Our structures and processes assume two parties, but we need a total recalibration of the center.
The repudiation of the Democratic flimflam machine needs to be so massive that multitude of Democrats go down, and those who have begun, even now, to run away from Obama just keep on running. Once that happens, we can appoint the “moderate” wing of the Republicans to be our new liberals, and they can form their own party, and the Tea Party gang can be our new conservatives. Outliers, like the greens and the libertarians and the strict constitutionalists, can continue to do what they always do, which is to complain about the lack of ideological purity. But if anything remotely like this unfolds in this fashion, the latter two of these groups can rest content in the fact that there are times when the complaints get heard. It happens every so often, like a comet.