The long, slow death of Republicanism

The debate about healthcare provision is now reaching a fever pitch in the US, with the Republican Party insisting that the US ‘left’ is out to turn the US into a socialist country, which is apparently the worst thing that can happen to any country. The debate itself has now become largely incoherent and shrill, with voices of reason being pushed to the side by increasingly aggressive or defensive partisan voices from both sides of the political divide. To the extent that the voices of reason are now also becoming increasingly confused and unsure of themselves and are flittering away to either side in the hope of surviving this giant death match. What emerges from this scenario is a bizarre and poignant account of the US’s development as a nation and a country and its simultaneous regression as a culture. It also tells a sad story of President Obama’s term in office so far.

Obama was supposed to be a uniting President, a bipartisan worker who would bring the best elements from both parties and even the irascible and irreconcilable to a happy medium; a man of reason with a nation behind him, set to bring the United States back out of the quagmire of war, political scandal and international disrepute that the Bush years threw it in. But from the outset, a roundly beaten and humiliated Republican Party had already set itself to oppose just about everything Obama did tooth and nail, led by a vanguard of jingoistic caricatures like Sarah PalinSarah Palin.

What is it about Obama that arouses these passions in people, his opponents as well as his supporters? Is it simply his overwhelming popularity or is part of it his race as well? His story is appealing to a large mass of the people, who feel inspired knowing that a black man can stand in his position where 40 years ago he might not have voted. But the overwhelming part of the opposition comes from the Republican Party’s own convoluted history of the last 30 years, a history that has seen it abandon its most cherished values in order to garner a vote base, has seen it squander the moral certitude of standing for a particular kind of America in order to promote ideological ends. To this end Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan portrayed the USSR as Godless, and so won the support of a heretofore unknown voting block, the Christian South, and blurred that fine line between state and religion that had persisted for 200 years before his arrival. It was further blurred by George W Bush who flaunted his religious credentials in an attempt to redefine the American dream as a distinctly Wasp-ish enterprise, under threat from a competing system of values and morals.

It was in the pursuit of power at these costs, which Strom ThurmondStrom Thurmond would have balked at, that the Republican Party gave up its credentials and lineage as a party for the essentially anarcho-syndicalist, community driven America of the past, to become weighed under by the competing ideological aims of the powerful corporate and religious interests without which its survival was threatened. It was in overtly displaying those relationships and then proceeding to make strategic blunders that George W. put the final nail in the coffin of the GOP. Led by the Sarah Palin’s and Rush Limbaugh’s, the Republican machine, once so feared, has lost the vibrant cutting edge it once possessed that could reduce any political opponent to a quivering mass of wordless jelly in the space of a few well chosen comments and a testimonial from a high school teacher.

The Republican party of today now stands for little that it did in the past, and its most ardent voices are incoherent and unintelligible at best, downright offensive and lewd at worst. Now the majority of the Republican faithful are the bible-thumpers, who far outnumber the genuine anarcho-syndicalists and libertarians that believe in an America with a distinctly pioneer spirit but have no ideological barometer outside the party. They are left floundering between the vague and distasteful categorisations of the current GOP leadership and their own values, under threat from an increasingly small and cohesive America under a larger more powerful state apparatus. It is resistance to the state apparatus that now defines this minority and it is their vociferous and panicked voices that cry shrilly at the edges of the airwaves at any attempt by Obama to do anything, good or bad. It is merit based judgement in as much as they see anything with government intervention as distinctly lacking in any merit. Hence the outcry at Obama’s recent address to school children and his healthcare plan, which is, for all effects and purposes, not very ambitious or large.

The healthcare plan itself simply envisions a government backed health insurance plan that would be available to all citizens and would hence be cheaper, with a minor amount of government subsidy involved. It is not universal healthcare on the British, Scandinavian or Canadian model, where anyone can just walk into a hospital, get treatment and walk out again. It is a state sponsored capitalist enterprise, in which the state benefits from having a healthy and happy citizenry. The majority of citizens are quite happy with this, since the wealth gap in the US has become increasingly lop-sided since the mid-1970’s which saw the greatest equity in wealth distribution. But the bottom 80% of the country have seen their share of wealth drop by 10% since 1992 alone, and the top 20% now maintain, by conservative estimates, about 70% of the country’s wealth, the top 5% owning a solid 48%. The majority of voters now find it easier to relate to Obama’s ‘liberalism’, which is more right-wing than anywhere else on the planet and owes far more to Bush than Obama would like to acknowledge.

The Republican Party is now rudderless and immobile, its stalwarts wandering in the vague ideological and idiomatic no mans land between denial and introspection, rejecting views that are classically similar to their own but come from the wrong sources or have the wrong names. It is saddled with the fundamentalists that embarrass it. What leadership there is panders to the religious fundamentalism that has slowly crept in to help define the party. In this situation the healthcare debate is a last gasp for the republican virtues of liberality and innovation, but in the face of the giant mechanism of empire and state that is now built up in the US and only just beginning to move, these voices are lost amidst the grind. Oddly, they have no one to blame but themselves, which is the most painful truth of all. The party needs a reinvention, a new analysis of thought and philosophy outside of the mainstream to redevelop and challenge its own stereotypes. It needs to recognise that by taking the word democracy, it gave up the word republic, that by looking after Christian values, it neglected family values, and it needs to get back to its roots. Otherwise the Grand Old Party will become nothing more than an anachronism of what America used to look like, before the empire went global.