by Eyal Press
>>>>>Two long years ago, veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall published Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power. In the course of several hundred fluidly argued, thoroughly dispiriting pages, Edsall threw a wet blanket on the hopes of Democrats who thought their party stood a fighting chance of wresting power back from Karl Rove & Co. Republicans were more ruthless, more unified and more generously bankrolled by big business, Edsall maintained, in addition to being inordinately savvier. He was, of course, hardly alone in this view. "Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades," crooned conservative writer Fred Barnes after the 2004 election. "We are in a tremendous amount of trouble," sighed a glum Democratic chairman in the New York Times that same fall.
Although the Democrats may still find a way to lose the election in November, no serious observer would suggest today that it would be because they succumbed to an indomitable foe. Less than a full election cycle after Rove's "permanent majority" was said to be upon us, Bush's approval ratings have sunk to the lowest level of any President since presidential job-approval ratings were introduced. Republicans in Congress are streaming for the exits. Surveys show young voters identifying as Democrats over Republicans by double-digit margins, and the 81 percent of Americans who believe the country is seriously "on the wrong track" have conservatives wondering aloud whether Rove's dream has become a nightmare.>>>>>
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>>>>>>>Some who see a lasting realignment under way point to demographic factors, in particular the growing numbers of Hispanics, Asians, professional women and unmarried people who have joined the electorate in recent years and to whom the GOP has done little to endear itself. But while the number of registered Republicans has been falling steadily, more Americans still identify themselves as conservative than liberal. The main problem facing the conservative movement is not demographic. It is doctrinal. It is the problem that confronts any insurgency whose heady idealism comes crashing up against reality once power is seized.
For forty years, the most important trait of conservatives of all stripes has been their unshakable conviction that their vision and their ideas are right. Moral permissiveness, a feckless foreign policy, a welfare-dependent underclass: all the viruses that had infected the body politic under the stewardship of liberals would be cured if only conservatives were given a chance. The right was united above all in its belief that a new Eden would dawn when Americans were liberated from the tyranny of government, whose intrusive hands reached unwarrantedly into every aspect of citizens' lives (save, of course, the bedroom, where those hands were needed to prevent overly liberated citizens from indulging the wrong impulses). When Bill Clinton ended welfare and declared that the era of big government was over, the argument seemed to have been cinched: at long last, even Democrats had come to realize the folly of their ways. But something funny happened on the way to making the revolution complete: when Republicans were finally given the opportunity to free the citizenry from the chains of the Leviathan state, the result was crony capitalism, fiscal recklessness and bumbling incompetence on an unprecedented scale. The opportunity to govern without interference from liberals came, and the consequences--in New Orleans, in Baghdad, in neighborhoods ravaged by housing foreclosures, in levels of inequality unmatched since the Gilded Age--have been calamitous.>>>>>>>
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/press
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