I had trouble figuring out a concise way to state my question in the title of this thread. Most days when I listen to the radio or read in the newspaper I hear someone saying that ‘we are at a critical junction right now’ or ‘this will be viewed as a turning point in American history.’ Being a relatively young guy (this will be my second presidential election) I was wondering if people always say this kind of thing every four years, or if I should actually believe that I am living in a very special time.
Well I don’t yet have any presidential elections under my belt, so I have no better experience from which to address the question of whether people say this stuff every four years. But I’ll toss in my two cents about whether this election really is special.
In terms of party politics, until the past few decades there has always been what we can look back at and call a clear majority party. Lately there really has been no majority, and it would take some realigning election to create one. However, these majorities depend on somewhat long-term control, so if this election were to cause some major realingment, we couldn’t really be sure of it until a number of years in the future. So if that turns out to be the case, then I guess in the future we might look back at this election as something of a turning point. However, it seems to me that there remains a sharp and fairly even political divide among us, so I don’t foresee any major long-term impacts on partisan control of government coming from this election.
I think most of what seems so crucial about this election has more to do with current issues that are not going to drastically change the course of American history. They certainly are a big deal, but I think they are things that will be resolved in the relatively near future. That is, I don’t think that in a hundred years peope will look back at this election as a huge turning point.
So IMHO, this election may be more important than others, but not to a spectacularly huge degree, and if it is so much more important, we can’t really know right now.
It’s possible it’s just another election with no particular ramifications other than those which would attend any presidential election.
But George W Bush is representative of a school of politics that has fairly strong support of a sizeable minority of the country, and yet strong antipathy from a different sizeable minority. These are very polarizing politics.
I can’t go much farther without abandoning any presense of painting a nonpartisan picture of what’s going on. I think there is no “objective” viewpoint because political meaning is meaning to the observer and the observer’s attitude and situation are going to cause things to be viewed differently than they would look from another angle.
Having said that, I believe that if he gets turned out of office this year it becomes decently possible that the politics associated with him fall into disfavor within the Republican party; and even more so if a similar candidate in '08 gets his ass handed to him running against Kerry. OTOH, if Bush is reelected, the Republican Party folks who have been consolidating religious/authoritarian control of the party will probably continue on their trajectory and continue to nominate such people.
They seem to have (some of them, in high places and large quantities) an attitude that the presidency intrinsically belongs to them, an attitude brewing since the Nixon era. They have long believed that the Democratic party, and liberalism, is on the fade and that they would control American politics, especially on the national level. They regarded Jimmy Carter as an aberration, a fluke attributed to the Watergate scandal. Bill Clinton simply infuriated them, a horrible blot on the map that was supposed to be painted in all-Republican colors.
This sense of entitlement is meshed with a lot of money and long-term planning, consolidation of media control, passing laws and setting up rules and practices that work to make it easier for them to win elections and harder for anyone to upset them. Their tactics against their opponents tend towards the Machiavellian and they are entirely willing to lie, steal, run scams and traps, disenfranchise voters, mess with voting processes, and orchestrate the activities of supposedly nonideological federal and state bureaucracies so as to turn them into extensions of their organization in order to win elections. (So far, as far as I know, they have not assassinated their opponents or had them locked up on spurious legal charges, but their single-minded and unrestricted “win at any costs” attitude and behaviors scares the shit out of me).
Trying to kick this stuff into a larger context for a moment, I’d say that I have for decades had a strong fear of any social-political movement or force that consolidates power and moves towards absolutism; which has a fondness for identifying “enemies” and paints the relevant ethical-moral opposition between them and their enemies in black and white and then justifies any activity that works to defeat the enemy. And that my current fear of the GWB administration is a result of how much they seem to match that general fear of absolute authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, I think if the Democratic Party is to remain relevant in American national politics, it will be as a consequence of them reforming around a set of core values and issues that they could embrace as “theirs”, as what they stand for, some of them old and already traditional for the Democrats (civil liberties, some form of using the government as a tool to help disempowered and disenfranchised people get on their feet), some of them available for claiming as “Democratic Party stuff” as a consequence of fairly recent history (fiscal responsibility, a balanced federal budget, keeping taxation and spending in alignment with each other), and some of them available by contrast with George W Bush this very season (the Democratic Party stands for “we don’t invade other countries unless they attack us first / except as part of an international force under international law”; the Democratic Party stands for “the US is a leader among nations together as a whole, not a runaway rogue nation”).
There is plenty of constituency to support a viable Democratic Part off into the future, and likewise plenty of room for a mildly changed Republican Party (perhaps one more fond of personal liberties and rights, more conservative than the Demos on government-as-solution for folks not doing well, perhaps more pro-Church-in-public than the Demos but less beholden to the Christian zealots on the right, etc). But those possibilities both become thinner if Bush wins this election.