A one-party America.
Look, it's clear the GOP is falling apart much like a poorly-built Canestoga wagon careening down a Rocky Mountain pass, but the prospects of the nation after it crashes into the rock slide in the river valley are troubling.
First, let's look at the likely scenario of the Tea Party or some form of it wresting control of the Republicans away. This is a small faction of America, roughly 25%, that lives in an insular bubble. It's well funded by con artists and Kochsniffers who have forgotten how hard it is to be an American.
You could, rightly I think, make the argument that the wealthy in America are no longer American as much as they are transnational, which is not as "Caitlyn Jenner sexy" as that sounds. While the bulk of their corporate and investment empires are firmly planted in American soil, their money vacations in the Cayman Islands and winters in Gstaad, and works in China and Southeast Asia to maximize it's exploitative potential.
They *say* they're American, but the truth is, that nationality will only last as long as it's profitable. After all, when Rupert Murdoch wanted to tame the entertainment frontier of China, he took a Chinese bride...after he became a naturalized US citizen.
These are the people who control the Teabaggers: wealthy corporatist Americans who believed that, through Murdoch's FOX networks and other propaganda outlets, as well as dismantling any worker protections like unions and government labor boards, they could extend the American corporate empire by a few decades until China and India became ripe for exploitation. Now that they have, you'll begin to notice signs of American decay.
This is because the construct that the Teabaggers have craved, a belief that somehow the private sector's patriarchal and patrician "bad dad" attitude is what makes America great -- that somehow individual greed adds up to social responsibility -- is being slipped out from under that small but vocal and violent crowd.
Destroying the party most closely aligned with that construct along with it.
Moderate Republicans, if any still exist, have long been pariahs in their own party, but you'll notice more and more that small voice of relative reason seeping through. Just yesterday, in the midst of the maelstrom of madness, Speaker-Apparent Kevin McCarthy said something very telling:
Asked if the House is governable, he says, “I don’t know. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom.”The rock slide in the river valley, in other words.
The historical perspective on this is ironic: the Republican party was a splinter faction from the Whigs in the 1850s, when moderate Republicans decided the Whigs had become too batshit crazy even for them. Republicans were for modernizing the nation.
Now the circle has turned. Moderate Republicans are in danger of extinction, leaving the Whigs back in charge. Karma, I suppose, but when you sell your soul to the Devil, he collects when its convenient for him.
The prospects of a Teabagger-owned and operated Republican party means there are very few compromise positions that can be had, and that makes governance next to impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. We've already seen something on the order of twenty years of mismanagement and mislegislation on the part of Congress, ever since Newt Gingrich passed his Contract on America components, an early Koch brothers paean America.
It's starting to look like the American people are about full of the nonsense, tho, and that may be a good thing. What may not be a good thing is that the conservative wing of the country played the long game of chess, and set traps and pitfalls that will be very hard to overcome: gerrymandering, wresting control of local and state legislatures to pass laws sympathetic to a fascistic hegemony of conservative oversight of the minutiae of local politics, all but guaranteeing a competitive advantage for any Republican candidate in nearly every district in enough states to ensure a voting bloc in Congress.
See, it doesn't really matter what the majority of Americans want or even vote for. So long as the manipulation of process, including violating the right to "one American, one vote", can be allowed to stand by the Five Horseman of the SCOTUS, America will not be American again.
We'll have what is effectively one political party, and a faction. And one political party...and here, I have to remind you how much I dislike Republicans...cannot govern effectively. Democrats need an opposition party, lest the country fall into a hive mind. Conflict generates ideas.
Too much conflict stifles them, however. RINOs need to step up and reclaim their party.
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