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There ought to be a ‘Southern Strategy’ variant of Godwin’s Law. It’s traditionally considered unseemly for the professional Beltway media to point out the Confederate revanchists, but Washington is a company town and the current GOP terrorists are damaging the company product. So Harold Meyerson gets to highlight “The Permanent Republican Minority“:
… What’s behind this two-decade drive to employ the obstructive power of a governmental minority to undo the policies that a majority enacted or to unseat an elected president? Plainly, the gap between the Republican Party and the rest of the nation has widened. And as that gap has grown, Republicans have become more insular and more desperate — a toxic combination for a functioning democracy.
The Republicans who swept to power in 1994 were the first House and Senate delegations that reflected the party’s new center of power in the white South. For the first time in Republican history, most of the party’s top legislative leaders came from former Confederate states, where resistance to minority and worker rights was an established tradition. Even today, this resistance remains key to the GOP’s hold on power; the voter-suppression efforts in Republican-controlled Southern states make this clear.
Since 1995, the demographic and cultural changes transforming this nation have deepened the Republicans’ marginality… this leaves only two ways that Republicans can affect public policy at the national level: They can embrace minority rights (through, say, immigration reform) and accept a legitimate role for government in the nation’s economic affairs (which, polls show, millennials strongly support) — that is, they can move to the center. Or they can try to maximize the power of their minority status by trying to disrupt the nation to the point that the majority will be compelled to support Republican positions.
Rationality dictates the first choice, but rationality doesn’t hold much sway in today’s GOP. Insularity is largely to blame. Right-wing media fuel support for Republican lawmakers’ most obstructionist tendencies. And Republicans in safely GOP districts don’t have to concern themselves with voters who may blanch at their radicalism.
Is this course sustainable? Ultimately, no. Eventually, the number of millennials, voters of color and fed-up moderates will rise to the point that 218 sufficiently white and conservative House districts can no longer be crafted. How much havoc Republicans can wreak until then, however, is anybody’s guess.
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What’s on the agenda for Day Three of America Held Hostage by the GOP?