The GOP Cannot Depend on Institutional Lag to Maintain Appearance of Legitimacy Indefinitely

Expanding from my last post.

It seems to me that the GOP is presently exploding in a spectacle that some are mistaking for a triumph, but which is sure to be exposed for what it is soon enough.

While the unprecedented obstructionism of the actually rather desperate "Party of No" strategy may indeed reap some of the mid-term electoral victories that inspired it, one wonders if Republicans gave any thought to what happens next?

No longer in a position to paint Democrats as constitutionally ineffectual due mostly in fact to their own obstructionism, especially if they have retaken the House themselves, they confront an atmosphere in which none of their dreams of dismantlement of Obama's America can overcome Senatorial deadlock or the President's veto, but more to the point they will discover that the anti-governmentality they rode to victory is inherently incapable of solving problems and that Americans may think themselves ideologically opposed to government, but only to the extent that they can have their government cake and eat it, too.

Anybody who lived through the awful Gingrich epoch Contract on America knows well that the storm of costly frivolous investigations and government shut-downs the prospects of which have the white racist and Randroid wings of the GOP salivating are nothing short of suicidal for the prospects Republicans as soon as just one election cycle out.

Meanwhile, the realities of a browning secularizing networked America ever more concerned with planetary social and ecological problems and possibilities, have in the short term energized (although the hysteria of ageing straight white men and the avarice of the richest of the rich is not actually the kind of energy one can count on for long or reliably control at all) the incumbent and reactionary elements to which the Republican have long primarily appealed even as it sets the scene for either the utter marginalization or transformation of the Republican Party.

Quite apart from these demographic realities, and speeding the GOP's demise considerably, just as Republicans looted America's physical infrastructure of utilities and basic services through tax-cutting neglect and privatization and looted America's normative infrastructure of trust and knowledge through de-regulation of profiteering and de-funding of education, now they are looting the basic constituent elements of professionalism, discipline, and even elementary concern with national problem-solving without which a party cannot function.

I don’t think that average Americans quite grasp the extent to which the present GOP has been captured by Crazytown. The whole party has now taken up the mantle of climate-change denialism, for heaven's sake. Republican rank-and-file declare they want to kick gay teachers out of schools and make women have their rapist's babies, that is to say, they want to act as if they won the Culture Wars they so decisively lost -- indeed the trauma of that loss is what is primarily fueling Crazytown, and its rabid white-racist queer-bashing Christian-Taliban howls that it wants "its America back."

I mean, it's been two generations since anybody who was not a complete scoundrel or at any rate very foolish has been a member of the GOP and this lowers the level of expectations and standards against which Republicans are judged as compared to Democrats. But I must say that the sorts of ignorant, self-promoting, unbalanced individuals who have been assuming positions as candidates and staffers in the national organizational structure of a party disintegrating to a regional marginal neo-confederate rump or else the notionally domestic tip of the spear through which multinational actors seek to direct a national polity against the best interests of its citizens are simply not sustainable.

There are plenty of Americans for whom the inherent legitimacy of a national party apparatus functions as a lens through which candidates and campaigns are judged as viable, come what may. But political legitimacy truly must be nurtured and maintained, there is discipline, and sacrifice, and hard-won know-how at the root of it, and while there may be an inertial institutional lag during which a disintegrating party apparatus can rest on past accomplishments, and while the swift succession of election cycles and the even sifter succession of news cycles may obscure for a time the extent to which one can score victories without anything substantial to back you up, the fact remains that all this self-serving and looting and ignorance of fundamentals is frankly lethal to the GOP.

Again, a browning secularizing America ever more aware of planetary problems was certain to pressure the Republicans to change their tune in the long-term in any case, but it seems to me that the GOP is hell-bent on eating their own party alive long before demographic realities might otherwise have brought on its well-deserved demise.