Extinction

This is an expansion of something I touched on at the end of my last post. There's definitely a consensus in the blogosphere that Republicanism is irrelevant now. They had their chance and they blew it. The architects of their apparent dominance--Rove, Cheney, Norquist, whoever--turned out not to have been so prophetic after all. The party, having lost control of all aspects of federal government, is doomed to indefinite decay as its territory shrinks to the deepest of the deep south and the country's demographics slowly tick-tock away its electoral viability. Having fallen prey to the darkest corners of its fringe base, the GOP will grow rumpier and rumpier until it's down to its barest nub, at which time presumably the now-swollen Democratic party will undergo its own schism, leaving the country with a new dividing line.

I think that's a bunch of balls. The Democrats met with not two but three stinging defeats, only to rise again for what were really very ordinary reasons--a dissatisfactory war, a scandal or two, a mismanaged natural disaster, a financial upheaval. There's no reason to think that perfectly analogous events won't happen during the next four-to-eight years, and still less reason to think that if they do, voters will capriciously give a rebranded Republican party a second chance. The current GOP regime may be doing a terrible job at pretty much everything, but it's not as if the Democrats are offering up a pleasant contrast, nor do they seem particularly willing to or capable of taking steps to get government to be the way they want it and to fix the daunting problems the country is facing. Give people a few years to rose-tint 2002-2007, a few years of a sluggish economy, a few years of escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a few years of Nothing Getting Done (for which the last few months serve as an inglorious template) and they'll be crawling back to Sarah and Bobby and Charlie and Michele and inviting them in for tea (or a tea party).