The disintegration of the GOP has provided no small amount of entertainment, from watching Michael Steele take the GOP to the masses with his new "off the hook" party of "hip-hop" to witnessing multiple apologies as underlings (i.e., congressmen) grovel to Lord Rush. I've been, frankly, surprised at the many-headed Hydra that has resulted from the wonderful losses the party that suffered.
I say this not as a partisan, but as an anti-partisan. I find it easiest at this point in history to describe my own position not as "Democratic," but as quite the opposite of modern Republicans. Old-school Republicans were never troublemakers at this kind of insidious level. They were more often, Nixon excepted, participants with whom it was possible to agree or disagree while maintaining certain core beliefs about this country. The debate was merely about how to govern most effectively. Since 2001, the debate hasn't been about that. Primarily thanks to the Republican administration, we're debating whether to torture, the "unitary executive," the "right" of a president detain Americans and non-Americans without charge, on and on. And now even the Democrats are discussing these things as if it's normal.
It's really astounding in retrospect, and I think only reveals that it wasn't "everything" that changed on Sept. 11, 2001, but that a slim majority (which has now become a small minority) of Americans changed and was willing to abandon even the longstanding common consensus to avoid feeling insecure. We're a mighty long way from the kind of cojones it took to declare independence from the world's most powerful empire. Where did that kind of thinking go? Can we do it anymore?
It takes a special brand of forthrightness, the kind that America has often stood for, for a nation to withstand assaults to its values. (If that sounds conservative, well, that's okay with me–it used to be a conservative statement, but it isn't anymore.) And it takes a special kind of fearfulness to believe, without seeing the contradiction, that the worst in humans must be dredged up in order to keep our "nobility" intact. Yet we homo sapiens return to that idea over and over.
That kind of fearfulness seems to make people dumber than they would otherwise be, as if circuits have been shorted. Maybe that's why much of what now passes as rhetoric seems only to pursue solely destructive ends. An actual argument, in the rhetorical sense, is a rare thing now. It seems a major strategy of the right is now to shut down debate, to distract, to undermine the possibility of progressing toward consensus. It seems so transparent, yet it works over and over. Should we torture? What did Nancy Pelosi know?!? Why do so many people want something different from Bush? Obama wasn't born in Hawaii! That kind of non-thinking is why I'm deeply opposed to the current incarnation of the Republican Party.
We only seem to see trees anymore, never the forest. It makes it very hard for the discussion necessary to self-governance to occur. What happens to the notion of governing when it's no longer debated meaningfully, but left in the hands of the powerful? We're all more connected than ever before, and yet the large majority of current "discussions" devolve to the meaningless, as if thought itself suffered entropy. It's easily observed, but certainly not easily cured.
