The Republican Future

I just posted here an article by David Drake, author of Hammer's Slammers, Lord of the Isles, and Some Golden Harbor, as well as many other science fiction and fantasy novels. Dave is a terrific writer, and I've known him for many years. But that's not why I posted his reflections on the Republican Party. Dave's writing skills make the article a pleasure to read, but the main reason I wanted to post Dave's piece is that it expresses so well my own feelings, and those of a lot of other former Republicans.

In the movie A River Runs through It, the narrator notes that his father, a Presbyterian minister, used to say that Methodists were Baptists who could read. (By the way, as far as I can tell, the line does not appear in the story on which the movie was based.) For some years now, I have referred to myself as a Republican who can read. This was my way of distinguishing myself from the ignorant, superstitious, anti-intellectuals who have come to dominate the Republican Party.

In the history of American politics, stupidity has not been a monopoly of the Republican Party. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, the center of ignorance and superstition was the Southern Democratic party. The Democrats, after all, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President, and were represented in Congress by such paragons as Theodore Bilbo, Huey Long, and James Eastland. It was the movement of white southern Democrats to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights revolution that transformed the GOP into the party of medieval superstition. Oddly enough, it was Richard Nixon, that most intellectual of Republican Presidents, who decided to exploit the disaffection of southerners from the Democratic Party.

In the wake of Barack Obama's victory, the Republican Party has some serious decisions to make. The GOP may be on the path to permanent minority and irrelevance trodden by the Federalists and the Whigs. Avoiding that dead end road will require good decisions - decisions of a quality we can't expect from Sarah Palin and her ilk.