Inevitable Political Logic

In the November 30 edition of the Economist, there is commentary that the GOP is "A national party no more" - the logic is linear and absurd. It suggests that the GOP is increasingly confined to the South. This election lost any minor representation of the GOP in the Northeast and showed significant losses in other areas of the country save the South. The GOP lost in such bastions as Montana where long time Senator Conrad Burns, failed to be re-elected. But that may have been more a commentary on Burns than some trend. They commented that "Rhode Island decaptitated Lincoln Chaffee, despite his moderate record." Chaffee was an odd politician and his opponent fit that state better. And, shudder, they commented this is at a time when the "Democrats are becoming a more national party."

OK, so every couple of years some pundit comes out with a theory on the death of some political party. Kevin Phillips has been making a respectable (at least in terms of his compensation) living since he first published the Emerging Republican Majority, which argued that the GOP needed to attract the South. Phillips has since gone over the bend and worried that the GOP has been taken over by all sorts of hobgoblins. But even when he wrote about this new trend and its inevitability I thought he was a bit grandious.

Here is what I think. A) Both parties are in danger of becoming irrelevant in the process, if that has not happened already. True the GOP did lose some members in the NE which once was their foothold, but the NE has been a declining area for them since the parade of the RED and BLUE states. (Remember that one?) We are evolving into a nation of decline to staters. Both of the major parties are inhabited by substantial numbers of people who would have trouble holding up their end of a monologue with any level of intelligence. And this election did not change that. B) The Democrats, at least some of them, have learned that the American people do not like their leftist ideas which are predominant on the coasts and thus elected a group of new members who seem to be closer to the middle. Don't count on the notion that they will stay there. The leadership of the House is not there, and if those dinosaurs lead, the dems will be back in the soup in two years. C) The GOP has not yet learned that while Americans are somewhat offended by some of the leftist fashions of the day, that does not mean that they want the government snooping into their personal affairs. At the same time, I hope that they have learned that "pay to play" is not a winning campaign slogan and that the sloth and avarice in the last Congress was not well appreciated in the average American household. D) Governance is not about bringing home the bacon, either to your buddies or to your constituents. The American people want government that works. They understand that government is even less efficient in payoffs than the lottery. If the dems cannot produce and get into the same kind of silliness that the GOP did last summer (obviously on a different set of issues), they they will be asked to move on, and soon.
E) And finally, as Tolstoy would argue, events can help shape political outcomes. Inevitablity will look a lot less certain if something happens in the next two years. You can count on that more than some crackpot theory of the latest pundit (including me!)