When our gallant heroes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are contemplating how to defeat the vicious and extremely deadly Killer Rabbit, Sir Galahad pipes up: "Let us taunt it. It may become so cross, it will make a mistake." Of which King Arthur sensibly asks, "Like what?" I am put in mind of this scene by the familiar sinking feeling I get preparing for another long year of watching another probable Republican mid-term victory creep inexorably toward us. A consistent theme of progressive blogs over the Obama era has been that the "Republican fever will eventually break". The endearingly consistent faith that if we just kept them angry long enough, they'd get so angry that they'd do something incredibly stupid. They'd make a mistake that would finally show the American people how lost they were, and allow the remaining cooler heads to prevail and at last turn the GOP back into a party of reasonable government. We must now accept that this isn't going to happen.
I understand where the impulse comes from. Watching the American Right go crazy in 2009, you felt there had to be a downside to it all. All that undirected rage, all that resentment, the increasingly cloistered thinking and the propagation of insane conspiracy theories: it had to be leading to a monumental fall, right? And there is a great satisfaction at watching an opponent get angry, as long as they're at arm's length. As long as they're angry they can't make informed decisions as to how they're going to get you. It was something of a staple of the kind of adventure books I read as a kid that the plucky young hero would be held captive by the arch nemesis only to goad him through his arrogance into a rage filled-decision to, I don't know, fight Young Hero hand to hand and expose his weakness or fire wildly bringing down the shark tank on his head or whatever. It's a trope Monty Python plays with, but as Arthur points out, there's not much of a mistake a psychotic bloodthirsty rabbit can make. And the same is true of the American Right.
The big mistake they were meant to have made was the government shutdown hostage crisis. Republicans received most of the blame for that and liberals came away smug enough to have felt they had won. The fools had, if not walked into a trap, then at least done exactly what their crazed groupthink would logically lead them to do when led by Ted Cruz on his noble resentment crusade: do something so crazy nobody would trust them again. And yet here we are with polls predicting a Republican takeover of the Senate and holding onto the House. The public, it seems, doesn't much care how ridiculously out-there the Republicans are. They don't really like the Democrats either, so they'll happily plump for the opposition as long as they just keep opposing. A killer rabbit guarding a cave can't make a mistake, and neither can an insane party guarding one side of a two party system. Everything is just too easily forgotten.
That leaves us with a situation where the Republicans, far from being ultimately hobbled by their anger as every liberal pundit has assumed from day one of the Obama administration, can indulge it to an unlimited degree and forever gain strength from it. There was an idea, fuzzy and half-formed in the liberal mind, that while a black president would piss off a great number of people at first, a combination of the failures of the instinctive kneejerk reactions (of which the shutdown was one) and the inuring power of time would inoculate the old white guard to a black man in charge and eventually achieve great progress for the country on racial issues. Again, the illness analogy. That is how liberal America sees its conservative cousin, as suffering from a malady in need of a cure. But the fact is that raging conservatism can froth and fester for as long as it wants, as hot as it wants, and only get stronger.
I and many others have looked on the current era of Tea Party crazy as an aberration, condescendingly believing that once the child has had its tantrum it will calm down and go to bed as told. We must now face what increasingly looks like the case: things aren't going back to how they were. The Eisenhower or Nixon Republican is not coming back. There will be no purge of the crazy, and eventually the crazies will be in government again. Instead of being so taunted by a black president that they make a terrible mistake, they have fed on the energy he gives them. The smug meme of commenters on progressive blogs when Republicans do something tub-thumpingly hubristic and crass has become "please proceed", a la Barack Obama in his debate with Romney. What they don't see is that jujitsu is pretty ineffective against an oncoming train.
If they proceed to the Senate and then the Presidency, there is no telling where they might take America now that their media systems have locked in the doctrine of "right wing good, more right wing better". US politics may end up representing another Monty Python sketch, one dealing with the pitfalls of two-party government. And it won't be very funny.
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