Gotham Notes...

Thursday, August 20, 2009


Meyerson Goes Behind The Red Curtain


Nicely done op-ed piece by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post today.
Republican ideology has shrunk alongside its geography and demographics. Where once its view of the role of government ran the gamut from Rockefeller activism to Goldwater libertarianism, today the party largely adheres to the religiosity and the anti-statism of the white South. (In its ideological uniformity, today's GOP looks—O, the irony—more like a classic European party than an American one.)

In short, the Republican Party with which Democrats could make deals no longer exists. The GOP is too narrow; the gap between the parties, too wide. Our politics are not those of the mid-20th century, when bipartisanship was fairly common. If anything, they're more like those of the mid-19th century, before the Civil War, when North and South combined only to make a house divided against itself—a conflict resolved not by compromise, but, as Lincoln predicted, by a nation then half-slave and half-free becoming "all one thing or all the other."

Lincoln's prophecy still holds. Our current conflicts may be resolved only as the South becomes traditionally less Southern and more diverse—home to more Northern transplants and immigrants. That process was already at work in the 2008 elections, when [Barack] Obama carried Virginia, North Carolina and Florida on the strength of those demographic shifts. As that process continues—perhaps only as it continues—the course of reform in America may run more smoothly.

This White European screaming does, in fact, look ever more like the death throes of a dying culture, yowling as it succumbs to the tar pits.

If these White Europeans are to survive as the politically dominant segment of the population and the drivers of the culture, their mission is difficult and complex indeed: Just however do you turn a melting pot stew into a clear broth?

posted by Gotham 12:30 PM
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