Wait, is there actually good news?

I do not often come upon things that make me feel good about America. Between Heart Attack Grill, high finance windfalls, Glenn Beck, and Couples Retreat, everything could be said to suck. I was mildly surprised, then, to read an op-ed in the Times by Frank Rich contending that we are, contrary to everything I have believed up until this moment, movin' on up.

How? We're all familiar with the absolutely abysmal behavior of the Republicans since Obama's inauguration (and really, since time immemorial), and, moreover, that it has been disturbingly successful at hiding the fact that they are an impotent mess of a party. Rich takes no exception with the first part of that statement--the Republicans are clearly shitheads--but he gives some positive evidence to contradict the conclusion. Apparently, according to a WSJ-NBC News poll, only 17% of Americans now self-identify as Republicans. That's undoubtedly a generational, if not watershed, low. The previous record for disaffection with the party was set in the mid-70's, when 25% of Americans identified themselves as Republicans, well below the 55% or more who self-identified as Democrats.

Source: http://lanekenworthy.net/category/politics/

Rich's point is that the hardliners who have seized control of the red slate have committed a grave error, and only their very public blustering has kept attention away from the fact that their base is nearly insignificant, and is only continuing to shrink.

His primary example of this trend, and the story around which the article is written, is a congressional race in upstate New York that's become something of a fiasco. When Obama nominated John McHugh (R-NY:23) to be Secretary of the Army, he inadvertently prompted a vicious round of GOP bloodletting. $3,000,000 has already been poured into the race to fill McHugh's seat by out-of-state sources. To put that in perspective, 650,000 people live in the 23rd and its largest employer is a local military base; it is poor and it is rural and it is not usually a hotbed of political maelstroming. Yet every Republican luminary from Palin to Kristol has intervened in the race, in what is clearly a proxy war for control of the party. And even though the reactionary candidate, Doug Hoffman, doesn't live in the district and was described by district officials as "showing no grasp" of local issues, he is, through the largesse of the far-right, set to beat out right-of-center local politician Dede Scozzafava.

Rich thinks that this is a sign that the Republicans are seriously jeopardizing their electoral chances, and that Democrats everywhere should feel more sanguine about the party's chances in the midterms. Republican candidates in the Virginia and Jersey governor's races, both with solid conservative credentials, have actually complemented Obama on his Nobel Prize and even used imagery of him and his quotes in their campaign ads. They are apparently aware that the 44% of Americans who call themselves independents wouldn't bat an eye if Michele Bachmann was eaten alive by barracudas, and that most of them--unless they're 67--do not watch Fox News. It's good to be reminded that much of the fear of the GOP's resurgence is in fact GOP artifice, and that we might have already moved further left as a nation than anyone has yet acknowledged.

Then again, 1975 was five years before the election of Reagan and a total victory for conservatism in not only the political but the social and cultural spheres of America as well. And what Rich doesn't highlight, though he mentions it, is that identification with the Democratic party is, at 30%, while stronger than with the Republicans, nowhere near what I would call burgeoning. If anything, the trend is, as it has been for a while, towards more Americans becoming independents, and that is a much trickier demographic to read. I doubt that they would be any more reliably liberal than they would be conservative, and their lack of principles is what makes them--and the States more generally--so politically flaccid.