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*Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda?* Although my crystal ball stopped working years ago, it looks to me like the electoral system in the United States is entering a major crisis. The center of the crisis right now is the Republican Party. What a circus! What low-life clowns! How could any sane human being vote for any of them? But this is the party of Lincoln. This is the Grand Old Party that won the civil war and rebuilt the United States. This is the party of business; this is the main party of the American capitalist class. And it is self-destructing. Food for thought. Since the 1960’s the GOP has rebuilt itself into a new party. Clearly a party of business owners and farmers in the 20th century United States was doomed to be a minority party in elections. Even if every small business owner voted for it, it would lose every election if the working class and poor all voted for some other party. The party of business needed to acquire voters from among the ignorant masses. It found them after World War II by being more anti-communist than even the Democratic Party. But, cold-war anti-communism was a card that had worn thin by 1960. John F. Kennedy’s razor thin election victor paradoxically gave the Republicans the key to getting a lot more voters. Kennedy’s cynical ploy of supporting black voting rights had helped him win the elections, but it insulted and betrayed the southern Jim Crow base of his party. When Kennedy’s southern born and bred Vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, took over, he only made matters worse for his southern Democratic brothers in arms by pushing through the Civil Rights Act. The revolt followed when Alabama Governor George Wallace led the southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party and temporarily into a short-lived new party called the American Independent Party. The GOP saw the opportunity to grab the very base of the old Democratic Party. Nixon’s southern strategy swallowed the AIP whole, and took the Texas Democratic Party along with it. By 1972 what had been the solid Democratic South had been transformed into the solid Republican south. Unfortunately for the GOP political strategists around Nixon, racism had been dealt a powerful blow by the great uprising of youth and black people of the 1960’s. Racism had not been killed, but it was mortally wounded and has never recovered. The fact that Barack Obama was elected president is very strong evidence of this. The fact that two of the most important clowns in the Republican primaries this year, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have Spanish last names, and the facts that one of the GOP candidates was black and another was a woman are additional evidence. The GOP needed to find another way to attract some other group of backward people. They found it in religion. The Moral Majority helped Ronald Reagan into the White House and transformed abortion from a medical issue into a political litmus test. To add to the toxic mixture, the GOP became the party of the National Rifle Association. This hybrid monster, led by the traditional Calvin Coolidge stratum of the Republican Party, was headed for a disaster. The problem is, even the most backward Republican voter expects something in return for his vote. And the voter base of the Republican Party got almost nothing from Republican victories. Less than nothing for most of them when it comes to the nuts and bolts of “the economy stupid”. Whether or not they were aware of the tenuous nature of their electoral victories, the GOP was working hard to use its electoral base to give it permanent dominance of the electoral system. They focused on gaining control of the Supreme Court and state legislatures. These were the keys to reversing the inclusion of poor people into the voting booths that had resulted from the civil rights movement and the black rebellions of the 1960’s. This strategy led to the creation of the Burger Supreme Court in place of the Warren Supreme Court, and it lead to Republican control of almost 40 state legislatures and a cascade of big and small court decisions and legislative actions that has whittled down the electorate to give a minority party the position of the majority party in everything but presidential elections. And it is all unraveling in front of our eyes. It is not just Ted Cruz and Donald Trump trashing each other’s wives. It is not just the Tea Party faction of the GOP running candidates against mainstream Republicans in primaries. It is not just the ever more intense crisis in the Republican Congressional and Senate delegations. The top of the Republican Party has fractured. The Koch brothers are not an accident. And, the fracture at the top has allowed the unstable base to splinter and explode. Donald Trump is not an accident either. So what will the outcome be? My crystal ball is very hazy. Let me try my Ouija board. Ted Cruz will not support Donald Trump if he is the Republican presidential candidate. Donald Trump will not support Ted Cruz if he is the Republican presidential candidate. If there is a brokered convention and someone else becomes the candidate, Trump will not support that person, and Cruz might not either. Who knows what Rubio and Kasich will do, but not very many people care anyway. Any way that you look at it, a lot of Republican voters are going to stay home on November 8. This almost guarantees that the Democratic presidential candidate will win. Most likely Hillary Clinton, but Bernie Sanders is possible. But, the fact that Republican voters are going to stay home has other very important implications. The Republicans control the Senate, the House and most of the state governments. They have “trifectas” in 23 states. This means the governor and both houses of the legislature are controlled by one party. The Democrats have only six trifectas. The other state governments are split, but the Republicans are clearly the dominant party in 39 of the 50 state governments. https://ballotpedia.org/Gubernatorial_and_legislative_party_control_of_state_government#Trifectas What will happen to all of this? First of all, the Senate is likely to change hands. The GOP currently has 54 Senate seats, but 24 of the 34 seats that are up for election this year are held by Republicans. Seven races have been called toss-ups by the Cook Report. If Republican turn out is low, the Democrats have a very good change of regaining control of the Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2016 And, if the Democrats keep control of the White House and gain control of the Senate, they will also gain control of the Supreme court for a long time. The Republicans can block Obama’s nominee until next year, but once a new president and a new senate are seated, there will be a replacement for Scalia – and if the Democrats win the White House and the Senate, they will get the majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in more than thirty years. More than this, four justices – two Democrats and two Republicans – are old enough to die or retire. There is a serious possibility that a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate will create a Supreme court with a 7-2 Democratic Party majority. And if that happens, what will the court do with all the cases about voting rights now percolating their way up the ladder to the Supreme Court? And, if the Republican election disaster is really big, they could even lose control of the House of Representatives and a dozen or so state legislatures. And, this would be a great disaster for the Democratic Party, and a great opportunity for the revolutionary left. Why? The Democratic Party has always depended on the GOP as its excuse. It can never do anything serious to benefit the working class people who vote for it because the GOP blocks all of its good initiatives. It can never advocate anything more radical like gay marriage, single payer health insurance, nationalization (God forbid!) because it would lose elections to the Republicans. Well, what will it do once its excuse is gone? _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
