exposition II

Two posts in a single day--holy amphetamines, Batman.

Paul Krugman, God love him, wrote in the Times today about California, and how much of a disaster it is. He seems somewhat surprised that the state does not in any way function like a state should, even though that is the gist of the news I've heard coming out of California since I was but a wee little weeling. It was one paragraph that stood out to me, and did so for a reason almost completely unrelated to California. It goes a little something like this:

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore.

And that party still has 40 senators.

Nobody should be surprised that, in a pinch, the Republican Party went to the looney bin. Someone, somewhere, at the back of my mind, in the vestiges of past days, made the point that the Reagan-era transformation of the party bore a striking resemblance to Lenin's approach to the Bolsheviks. Decision-making was centralized; the agenda, with a few, easily sloganized goals, was set in stone; and the rank-and-file were picked for their adherence to that platform. The stupider and less thoughtful a politician could be, the more likely he was to get a handshake from the Great Communicator. As the person-whose-name-I-do-not-remember-but-want-to-credit put it, the Republicans became nothing more than a bunch of snake oil salesmen. And as we should all know from political science, snake oil will not protect you from the end of the world.

But Krugman is right: they still have 40 senators. Proportionally speaking (not that the number of Senators has anything to do with population, of course), this means that they technically represent 120,000,000 Americans. Why, if they have jumped headlong into their mudslinging, millenarian roots?

Does everyone here remember the dinner we had at Niu Ji, just before the Canadian election in, I don't know, whenever Canadian elections are held? It was the dinner at which David and Sarah castigated Zak for being an apathetic pile of crap. David, in fact, more than being aggressive, seemed to express genuine disbelief that anybody could not care at all, not even slightly, about the state of political discourse in their home country.

Now, no offense to Zak (other than the fact that he represents everything odious and miserable about the human race), but something about those 40 G.O.P. senators makes me think that the Republicans are, in some way, the party of Zak. Anecdotal evidence from conservative strongholds seem to support my case. My father was in Laurel, Miss, this weekend, for the extremely extravagant wedding of my cousin to the daughter of the town's (and maybe even the state's) Southern gentry. I'm talking serious, oldschool gentility, here: the men wore seersucker suits at the ceremony. These people have voted Republican since black people started voting Democrats--a long, long time, in other words--but none of them seemed to take anything but passive interest in the state of the nation as it is currently shaping up. They were content to cast their vote as they always had and then go back to minding their business.

Given what the magnitude of what the Republicans have done to us, the fact that they hold onto 40 senators is pretty much astonishing. Part of that has got to be tradition, but part of it is most certainly apathy. After actively depoliticizing much of America by applying heavy economic pressure to it, the Republicans have, in a sense, birthed a golden-egg laying goose. The fruits of their labor is that they can hang onto a substantial amount of power even after wrecking the United States so thoroughly that it may even be, to borrow a new news media meme, an inflection point in the path of American power and prosperity. That, in turn, reconfirms just how bad the shape we're in really is: we don't even have the political morality to address, even hazily, our own wretchedness. We've given ourselves a political class composed of nebbishig Democrats and Republican dreykopen. Let's hope I'm wrong, and that in 2010 that 40 gets knocked down somewhere closer to the 0 that it should be. Maybe then we'll have the good fortune to inflect at a minima, not the reverse.