Published on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party
by David W. Orr

Following the election of 2004, much has been made of the weaknesses of the
Democratic Party, even its possible end. But it has escaped the notice of
our blow-dry television pundits and political observers alike that the
Republican Party, in the full blush of triumph in control of all the
branches of government and large sections of the media, stands on the edge
of certain extinction. The reasons grow daily more evident. Over the past
three decades, the moderate, business-oriented party of Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower was captured by its extreme right-wing
thereby becoming a party dominated by ideologues, increasingly divorced
from unmovable facts. But no organization, political party, or nation can
long survive by ignoring realities of ecology, social justice, law,
economics, and true security. Sooner or later, it will step off the
proverbial curb into onrushing traffic of events, forces, and trends that
it refused to see.

The Republican Party has already stepped into the road. The question is not
whether it will survive as presently constituted, but what else will be
destroyed as it collapses in ruin and ignominy, sooner than later. Beneath
the noisy spin of its media echo chamber, the true platform of the
Republican Party, its future epitaph, is founded on denial. The rules of
the Republican Party of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay, and
their brethren are these:
* Deny science when its findings are not agreeable to your base.
Republicans, notably, are on the wrong side of the largest issue in human
history: human driven, rapid climate change. Theyve chosen instead to live
in a Crichton-esque science fiction fantasy in which real science has no
standing and human actions have no tragic, irreversible, and global
ecological consequences. This is not just boneheaded, it is a form of
criminality for which we have, as yet, no adequate words.
* Deny the looming approach of peak oil extraction thereby advancing
the potential of economic, political, and social chaos when global oil
supply and demand diverge as soon they will.
* Deny the proven potential of superior technologies, design
strategies, and policies that would move the country toward energy
efficiency and a secure energy base of solar and wind power as well as the
reasons of self-interest and economic advantage for doing so.
* Deny the true costs of air and water pollution thereby undermining
the health of Americans.
* Deny the human and economic effects of pandering to the wealthy,
thereby undermining social cohesion and the sense of fairness?historically,
often a prelude to societal breakdown and revolution.
* Deny any and all mistakes, bad judgment, and corruption, relying on
spin not truth and thereby building a solid reputation for mendacity and
incompetence.
* Deny the limitations of military power to impose order on a
recalcitrant world and thereby condemn the U.S. to a future of
international isolation, conflict, and endless terrorism.
* Deny the great vulnerability of the American infrastructure to
malice, malfeasance, and acts of God, thereby laying the groundwork for a
future of recurring disasters.
* Deny the necessity for civil discourse, honesty, and transparency in
the conduct of public life, thereby holding the citizenry in contempt and
promoting a spirit of meanness.
* Deny without admitting it the democratic values of the country
enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of
Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms of Franklin
Roosevelt, thereby undermining democracy at home while purportedly fighting
for it in Iraq.

The Republican Party has chosen to deny social, ecological, cultural,
religious, and economic realities which are unavoidably complicated,
complex, diverse, ironic, and paradoxical. Instead they have chosen to make
their own simplistic, ideological, and chauvinistic fantasy world that has
little affinity for law, science, a free and independent press, fairness,
true security, ecological sustainability, and the accountability that is
requisite for genuine democracy.

That fantasy is on the cusp of becoming a real life nightmare. Having made
the United States a large bullseye for terrorists and malcontents, it may
implode catastrophically taking much else with it. It may come undone more
gradually, but no less catastrophically, as the economy sinks under the
weight of war debt and foolish tax cuts. It may be overthrown if and when
thoughtful conservatives disturbed by fiscal recklessness and imperial
pretensions, all honest persons offended by mendacity, bombast,
criminality, conniving, and diversion, and all Christians sufficiently
alert to notice the discrepancy between the words and life of the Prince of
Peaceand our foreign and domestic policies finally shift alignments. It may
take longer as the die of climate change and ecological deterioration is
finally cast and we trigger adverse global changes of which we have been
often warned. Unlikely as it seems, in a different scenario the Republican
nightmare still could be averted by an effective, committed, agile, and
strategic opposition smart enough to recognize the historic convergence of
opportunity, patriotic duty, sheer necessity.

David Orr (<mailto:David.Orr@oberlin.edu>David.Orr@oberlin.edu) is a Paul
Sears Distinguished Professor at Oberlin College. Author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559635282/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>The
Last Refuge (Island Press, 2004).