Death Throes of the Two Party System

A recent post declared the 112^th Congress to be the most unproductive since the 1948 80^th Congress, which stonewalled President Truman and tried the same desperate means to unseat him in the ’48 election as the 112^th tried on Barack Obama.  Much to his credit, President Obama demurred from castigating the Congress for their obstinate mulish attempt to derail him.

Not so, Harry S. Truman of Independence Missouri.

Harry overcame his nemesis with a 22,000 mile campaign trip by railroad, speaking at every stop at small towns across rural America of that ‘Do nothing Republican 80^th Congress’; and won the election of 1948 over a dead certain shoo-in for Governor Dewey of New York. 

If Truman had lost the election, we can now speculate that it would have been the death knell of the Democratic Party.  With the left wing splinter of the Progressive Party and the right wing ‘States Rights’ Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, The cohesion of the FDR years would have fractured; the chances of reconstruction dismal.  But that didn’t happen, because Truman won.

Out of the history primer and into the present, Romney’s loss and the Tea Party’s rise to power may very well be the harbinger of a permanent dissolution of the Republican Party.

The Tea Party isn’t going away, despite the growing disgruntlement, to use a mild explicative, of large voting blocs of Americans who are beginning to see a visible threat to their well-being caused by the obstinacy of these ultra-ultra conservatives, nesting in the Congress like so many hatchling Cuckoo birds, pushing the reasonable eggs out on the ground.

No matter what happens with the fiscal cliff, people are pissed and the talk is now of throwing the bastards out in 2014.

Well, fine; but it’s going to take more than one eye-opening election to unravel the snake pit of gerrymandering that has cleverly disenfranchised the poor, the minorities (I use that term rather gingerly here), the blue collars and others not of the conservative ilk.

 

My opinion is that we are witnessing the end of the American two-party system as we have known it.  This is not a Chicken Little wringing of hands; but I don’t know what it may eventually portend.

We are used to one party in domination, with the other party providing a check and balance; the political see-saw-Marjory-Daw as it has been played through all the years of the last century up till now. What happens next?

Will the landscape be composed of divisive splinter parties—the Progressives, the Liberals, the Tea Party, Tea Party wannabes, a new Populist Party, a new Dixiecrat Party, a revitalized Raza Unida, a done-over African Congress?

All this in addition to Democrats and the remnants of the old Republican Party.

I am like most, not desiring change of something as venerable as the system I grew up with; however, I am reminded that change is only painful when it is not readily accepted.

I guess it’s a good thing we never scrapped the Electoral College for selecting the Executive, huh?  I think we’re gonna need it.

A Word or Three on Celebrity

Where have we gone, and what have we done?

The news on the wire today is  the suicide of Jacintha Saldana, the nurse who disclosed information about Duchess Kate to a pair of Australian disc jockeys posing as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip.

On August 31, 1991, Princess Diane was killed in an auto accident in which her car was speeding to elude the paparazzo photographers following in high speed pursuit.

This is the price of celebrity, we all rejoin, sadly shaking our collective heads.  It’s what happens when you are famous…or infamous.

Let us not delude ourselves.  We, the public sea of voyeurs, create celebrity by ghoulishly following every nook and cranny of people’s private lives, like so many naughty children peering over a garden wall—to spy on Princess Diane then, and now the Duchess of Cambridge.  Sunning themselves in bathing suits—on holiday—to escape the ever present exposure which they and those like them must endure.

Allow me to take a straw poll:  is there anyone out there who would NOT like to hear that phone conversation with Jacintha and the fake Queen and Consort?

Is there anyone who did not view those bathing suit photos of Diane and Kate?  I myself must regretfully answer no.  I am guilty.  All of us are guilty, save the Dahli Lama and persons like him who have elevated themselves above the mire of humanity’s daily perusal of celebrities.

If we did not crave the latest crude exposure of other people’s personal lives, perhaps that distraught nurse with a husband and two children might be alive.  Indeed, perhaps Princess Diane might still be alive.

To bring a curse on myself by quoting the Scottish play out of context, “What hath we wrought?”

My only consolation in all this, as cynical as it may sound, is to imagine what those two Australian jerks are going to have to endure when the floodlight of celebrity is turned on them…