Tuesday's report from the Justice Department Inspector General constitutes yet another nail in the coffin of the national Republican Party as we know it As in many other of its responsibilities, the party overreached, and now is paying the price. Party leaders forgot that the purpose of political power is to try to govern usefully; instead, they directed their energy and capability toward establishing partisan supremacy, and now voters are ready to throw them out.
Over most of the years of the Bush II presidency, hiring supervisors rejected otherwise highly qualified individuals seeking work in the Justice Department if anything in their education or work history demonstrated or implied liberal or Democrat affiliation. Even veteran Republicans took offense at this intrusion of blatant partisanship in the justice system, that branch of government that must be militantly neutral and free of prejudice, pre-judging.
Our democratic republic can't function without political parties; that became clear during the first and second Washington administrations when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson fell out over Hamilton's fiscal and economic policies and Washington's proclamation of neutrality in the revolutionary war in Europe. But later, Hamilton broke the electoral impasse that engulfed the House over the election of a president in 1801 by telling his Federalist Party supporters there to vote for Jefferson. And in his inaugural address, Jefferson noted explicitly that our first loyalty is to the country, its political integrity and its constitutional system; in that regard, he remarked famously, "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Today, that would be "we are all Democrats, we are all Republicans."
The British have long celebrated what they call the "loyal opposition," meaning technically, the party with the largest number of seats in Parliament that is not part of the government. In the United States, Republicans appropriated the term during World War II to signify their support of the war, and the troops, while disagreeing with the president and majority party on other issues. Conceptually, the term is broader; it means supporting the constitutional system while opposing many of the policies of the government. It's a concept we could make good use of today.
According to such conservative spokesmen as David Brooks and William Kristol, the Republican Party is falling apart today both because of its failed policies -- imperial adventurism, trade, environment, the economy -- and because of ruthless partisanship. It turns out that Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and, now we learn, Alberto Gonzales did the party no great favors, for Americans have tired of a vindictive politics more attentive to gaining and holding power than knowing what good to do with it. In addition, lack of leadership within the party defeats attempts to unite its various factions coalesced around social (abortion, gay rights), security (global domination) and economic (deregulation, libertarian government) issues. And the Reagan and Bush Supreme Court appointees continue to loosen the cautionary guards that long restrained corporate rapacity. Voters will almost certainly elect Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, and probably Barack Obama in the fall.
In victory, Democrats would be wise to forgo both gloating and revenge. Their own skirts are hardly clean of corporate money, which creates obligations that impede change. And to govern successfully they will need to meet the Herculean foreign policy challenges of extricating America from Iraq and dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions. At home, they will have to fashion an effective health-care policy, a task at which they have already failed. And they will need to construct an energy policy, which, because its pay-off will be long term, will not produce any instant comfort at the gas pump or when paying home heating bills.
Much more important, however, will be resisting the urge to get even. Like tribal or gang warfare, "pay back" simply generates "pay back," cycles of degeneration. Only enlightened leadership breaks those cycles, which is what the Democrats must concentrate on. The American people sense that possibility in Obama, which is why he is as popular as he is, above all, among young people.
Labeling that quest "naive" or "impractical" is what has mired our politics in self-defeating partisanship and crippled the Republican Party. Vast numbers of Americans want something better.
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
STEVE HAYCOX
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