Republicans Have Failed America, But....

It has been a long dismal slide from Ronald Reagan in 1981 to George W. Bush in 2006; the longer the current generation of Republicans have stayed around, the more their philosophy has drifted dangerously to the right at great cost to American power and prestige while leaving tens of millions of Americans behind and our future less certain than it was only a few years ago. Can anyone doubt that the conservative philosophy that has been pushed by Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay and the neoconservative think tank types has failed?

For years, Republicans have bragged that 'they' are the party of ideas. Harold Meyerson of The Washington Post has noticed the change:

In 2006 the campaigns that the Republicans are waging in their desperate attempt to retain power are so utterly devoid of ideas that it's hard to believe they ever had an idea at all.

With fewer than 60 days remaining before the November election, the only two Republican strategies left standing are to scare the public about the Democrats collectively or to slime the Democrats individually.

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What's a party to do when its high road leads nowhere but down? The Republicans tried privatizing Social Security, but their numbers never added up. They tried spreading democracy with unilateral, preventive war but instead unleashed a sectarian bloodbath. So the party of big ideas, of Milton Friedman and the neoconservatives, is now just one big Swift Boat flotilla, its ideas sunk of their own dead weight, kept afloat solely by its opposition research. For their part, the Democrats still champion common security; they call for a government that can build dikes and reduce the costs of college and medication and that knows that remaking the world becomes more plausible when some of the world is actually willing to go along with us. Those are, in the campaign of 2006, just about the only ideas in play.

Devoid of ideas, showing only a trail of failure, the current generation of right wing Republican politicians should have the decency to step aside, but of course that's not how politics work. If by chance, Americans finally recognize the need to change course, Democrats may have a chance to get a handle on things in the next two to four years. But there's a catch. First, there is the enormous damage that Bush has done to our country. If the Democrats win a house, they can slow down the damage that Bush and his friends are doing. But the damage already done needs to be repaired. That alone will require leadership that may not come until after the presidential election in 2008, but already one can see the outlines of the some of the things that need to be done.

But it's the second catch that Democrats need to watch out for and the stakes are much higher than many realize. The world is changing rapidly, partly due to years of Republican blundering but mainly because much of the change has been inevitable; the biggest danger is simply not recognizing those changes quickly enough and recognizing the profound difference between what are only political solutions only suitable for the next election cycle and real solutions that have a chance of succeeding in the long term. But first Democrats need to recognize the new problems that are coming or already here and understand them in depth without the empty sloganeering or clever rationalizations Republicans have been using for more than two decades.

At least two of those problems are becoming more urgent: energy and global warming. Republicans are doing everything they can to run away from these two issues and therefore intend to do nothing. However, from what I can see, most of the Democratic leadership, while recognizing these problem are considerably behind the curve in understanding them and doing the work necessary to know what to do about them (the exception, at least on Global Warming, is Al Gore). Let it be noted that there are other problems coming.

As soon as the Bush era is done, we need a government again that remembers one of the great strengths of democracy: the free exchange of ideas. We're going to need ideas, good ones, and we're going to need an environment again where good ideas can thrive and even overwhelm the politics of expendiency and short-sighted convenience. Ideas are always going to be challenged, and in a democracy that's the way it should be, but Democrats need to do a much better job of puncturing the false claims of those who only wish to confuse the American public for their own purposes. If the voters turn to the Democrats, the good news is that we might see some new Democratic faces in the next two elections and they will be the ones reshaping the Democratic party and bringing in new ideas and perhaps a new knowledge of how to fight for those ideas.