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Observations about Republicans and Democrats

The Republicans are a party of eclectic camps. It is called a “big tent” party, what this means is this organization houses a 6 ring circus. These include the corporate Republicans, the evangelical/values camp, the libertarians, the conservatives, the liberal Republicans, and another camp we will have to define as the blunt, out-and-out bigots. These 6 camps have greatly different views and programs. Logically speaking, they don’t even belong together in the same party. The big business camp could care less about the conservative camp of small business types; the liberal Republicans despise the evangelicals and so on. This party is actually a patchwork put together out of fear of the Democrats. But this cannot hold together unless it has one particular thing, a kind of super-personality.

The factional structure of the Republicans demands a special kind of individual. Charismatic is not the word, for this persona is beyond charisma-- which is a far too common a skill. The concept is more like “mirror”; each camp must see in this individual itself, and yet not see competing interests of other camps. This special personality has the power to suspend fear and argument, and thus pursue its own agenda. The German word for mirror is “spiegel”, we may call such a persona a “spiegeler”, one who is a mirror. Reagan was spiegeler; Barry Goldwater was not, he was too harsh and polarizing, though he had similar views with Reagan.

This kind of persona is very rare, you can only think of handful in history – Napoleon, Mussolini, maybe Churchill. We know them as great uniters though that unity is false or very temporary. Today the Republican have no such person available. So given the current ideological trends and the lack of a “spiegeler”, we can only see more decline for the Republicans.

It could be that a catastrophe befalls the Obama administration and the right gets back in, but history is not with it for the long run. The future is with the Democrats, let’s examine their core structure. They aren’t a party of camps with vastly differing paradigms. The Democrats are a party of “degree”, that is, they have the same ideology, what they differ on is “degree”. They agree on general goals -- end poverty, create diversity, world cooperation, environmental attention. But Democrats differ in assessment of the degree of a problem, priorities and strategies. And here is where the arguments occur.

So the issue is how much money and stress to put on job programs, housing assistance etc. When to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan is another flashpoint. These are issues of debate among Democrats; here is where the Democrats are going to conflict from here on out. Charges will be leveled about extreme views and impractical idealism, and compromise and opportunism.

If Obama is not successful with the economy then the party will split. If at some point neglected minorities and poor demand more jobs and aid, then conflict will erupt. If things go badly in the Mideast then there will protests against the party. Just as in the 60s, present day Democrats may well split. But we can not say at this point exactly how and when this might happen, but we do know that there are many problems to come given the economic and international situation.

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