Fred Barnes's Formula for Permanent Republican Rule: Religion and Terror

[BurtWorm]

No wonder they're out on their asses.

Oliver Willis mocks a 2004 Fred Barnes prognostication on the "permanence" of the "Republican majority." I followed the link and was astonished (but not shocked) to find Barnes apparently approving of a professor's formula for sustaining this alleged majortity (my emphasis):

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/004/916rlnyg.asp

Listen to Walter Dean Burnham, professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, who is the nation's leading theorist of realignment, the shift of political power from one party to another. The 2004 election, he says, "consolidates it all"--that is, it solidifies the trend that has favored Republicans over the past decade. To Burnham, it means there's "a stable pattern" of Republican rule. "If Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time," he says. Burnham, by the way, is neither a Republican nor a conservative.

It's amazing (but not shocking) to me to see Barnes's myopia so prominently displayed. Granted, Burnham's analysis is partly based on what looked like a straightforward movement of latino votes toward the Republican party; over three elections, beginning in 1998, the percentage of latinos voting Democratic fell from about 75% to a little more than half. But in 2004, according to Barnes's article, latinos accounted for only 8% of the vote nationally. I wonder what Burnham and Barnes would have thought if they had been able to foresee immigration reform (i.e., migration-felonizing and wall-building) as a central part of to the Republican strategy for the 2006 vote. But they don't focus on the party's anti-latino biases as bumps on the road to a Republican America; they "speculate" (Barnes's word) that latinos are attracted by Republicanism's emphasis on entrepreneurship and traditional values. Maybe they expected Republicans to be able to freeze the latino portion of the vote at that measly 8%.

What election 2006 has shown is that Republicans really do have nothing but religion and terror to frighten voters into their camp, and nothing is not enough to sustain their phony "majorities." Their major deficit as a party (besides the national budget one they keep saddling us with) is an inability to see dynamically, to have a tendency to want to control change and restrain it rather than understand and change with it. I think Democrats will be more adaptible.

[kenny blankenship]

1. Enduring majorities are built by advancing the interests of the majority

I would think, not by pursuing polarization of the electorate through exclusive racial-religious identities.

If the Democrats move now to advance the interests of the majority of middle income households in this country--really strengthen them and really protect them, not from boogeymen in the skies or in the sands of foreign countries--then the Democrats will be rewarded with an enduring majority, no matter whether their leaders are black,white,brown,red,or yellow and no matter whether they privately worship one god, no god or thousands.

Herr Hitler's formula was a lot like Mr. Barnes's formula; they both worked by extreme polarization and the elimination of dissent through the perpetual emergency of war. They both worked shockingly well but they didn't lead to anything "permanent"--nothing good anyways.
Nazi Germany 1933-1945
GOP America 1994-2006
...12 memorable years that I want to forget.

These divisive ideologies always have brief, but violent careers.

[soleft]

2. It's the total Straussian - Neo Con playbook

[BurtWorm]

3. With undertones of paleo con Dominionism

I don't know how anyone can seriously build a "permanent majority" with that sad combo. Except, maybe, through prayer. ;)