The American Party System Made Easy: Theron's Election Night Report
by Theron Dash


The voters---all 30% or so of them---have spoken, and now we will get the gloating. Republicans are very good at it. Their money and their ideas---which amount to the same thing---have won the day, with considerable help from Democrats, the corporate media, and the people who will live to regret the consequences of this election, even if they never quite connect those dots. They voted patriotism but what they will very likely get is oppression, war and Depression. They are already getting arrogance.

The Republican party is the party of arrogance. It is the party of mean-spirited arrogance with a happy face. No Democrat can whine as loud or become vicious past the point of psychosis like Republicans, though by now apparently nobody remembers how these folks eventually scared them during the Clinton years. Just as they don't remember the results of Republican arrogance when in power, like all the scary craziness Reagan and Nixon instituted.

Now the Republicans have been given a huge shot of perceived power, so you can expect very scary things for the foreseeable future. Like war, body bags and dead babies, plus more tax cuts for the wealthy while the rest of the country goes under. There's nothing and nobody to stop them now. They've gotten away with the incredible arrogance of the corporate foreign policy establishment represented in this administration. There's nothing to hold them back now. But their arrogance won't stop with mere war. They will pursue a domestic agenda that will materially impoverish what remains of the middle class, and they will ignore environmental crises as long as the snow machines at Aspen are unaffected.

With this perceived power freshly minted, they are already reinforcing the expression of their arrogance as the only acceptable language of political discourse. We will hear nothing but the wonderful things tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization will bring, as if there had never been a federal budget deficit caused by these policies of Republican Reagan, and as if the economy weren't now crashing and consumer confidence with it. Hey, even Newt Gingrich was rehabilitated for TV in time for the late election night news.

We will hear how paying taxes is a horrible burden, but going broke paying for health care, retirement and all the formerly public utilities and services privatized by the likes of Enron, while people work harder for less or else can't find work at all-well, that's good, that's free enterprise. That's arrogance.

And in this election, by and large the Democratic party turns out to be the party of cowardice. Most of its Senate candidates backed the Bush war and the Bush tax giveaway to the arrogant wealthy. Some apparently did so because they thought they had to, in order to win. So instead of standing up for principle and risking the consequences, they were cowards and still lost. The American people were cheated out of the debate they deserved and very probably wanted.

The party of arrogance versus the party of cowardice is not much of a choice. The Green Party in America is the party of self-righteousness and denial, and is no choice either.

There are a dwindling number, but still some decent members of Congress and the Senate, and reasonably good governors, but no national leaders so far to counter Republican arrogance and Democratic cowardice. There are two possibilities---other than dumb luck or divine intervention---for the near future. The first is the beginning of renewal through political turmoil, outside the electoral system, putting pressure on the parties. That unfortunately is most likely to occur because of horrendous war or economic Depression, or both simultaneously (and thanks to technology, it is more than just possible to have both at the same time.)

The second is to continue present trends, which on an historical timeline will look like the fitful, slow decline of America. This was probably just as invisible to most people in other declining civilizations as it is to most people in ours.

American democracy, once the envy of the world, is failing. It's somewhere between a plutocracy and a kakistocracy. The big money, the low turnout, and now the outcome of this election. The policies of the Bush administration don't match up very well with the real world of the twenty-first century. American ingenuity and efficiency, once the envy of the world, is stuck in obsolete ideologies.

When Senator Paul Wellstone died, many media reports called him a "60's liberal." This is the extent of how successful Republican ideology has been in taking over the terms of the debate. Wellstone's critique was based on principles he derived in part from Robert Kennedy for instance (and those who called themselves liberals in the 60s didn't consider RFK to be one of them), but which was clearly responsive and relevant to contemporary contexts, especially in terms of corporate power. Wellstone was indeed one of the last officials in Washington who reinvigorated this tradition and was energized and guided by those principles and passions. But that he could be so easily stereotyped as quaintly out of step, when in truth it is the Republican ideology that is in a state of rigor mortis and bears no relation to reality, characterizes the current perversity of public discourse.


America is not only behind the times, it is behind most of Europe in dealing with civic, social and environmental realities. If America didn't have the world's largest nuclear arsenal and most advanced weaponry, other nations wouldn't be wasting so much time listening to what our leaders say.

Arrogance, cowardice, viciousness and oppression, the suppression of criticism and creativity through federal, corporate and self-censorship, and as a thoroughly predictable byproduct of greed, envy and lies. Did I mention arrogance and cowardice? That's what's we have, and much more is coming. As well as lots and lots of noise.

Remember these words. You might not see or hear them again.