UKIP and Brexit

What happens when a political party’s single most important goal is actually achieved?  I ask because of what happened in the UK this week.  The UK Independence Party was founded in 1991.  It’s a hard Eurosceptic party.  Their core issue is to get the UK out of the European Union.  Well, the Coyote caught the Roadrunner.  The British electorate voted to leave the EU.  Now what?  UKIP has one Member of Parliament [MP], and it isn’t Nigel Farage.  While sitting in a Frankfurt hotel I heard him on the BBC, saying that what Britain needs now is a “Brexit government.”  How’s that going to work?  He’s not going to lead it.  The ironic thing about UKIP is they have more Members of the European Parliament [MEPs] [24 so far] than they do MPs in their own British Parliament [1 – Douglas Carswell].  When the UK leaves the EU within the next two years, so too will the UKIP MEPs.  Now that their single issue has come to pass, how will the UKIP adapt post-Brexit?  Other than the aforementioned issue, I have no idea what that party stands for.   

This got me thinking about our own Republican Party.  During the good old days of the Cold War, when we knew who our enemy was, the Republicans practically owned the national security issue.  They portrayed themselves as the toughest to fight the Soviet “evil empire.”  Since the end of World War II, three Republican tickets [Eisenhower/Nixon, Nixon/Agnew, and Reagan/Bush] were elected and re-elected.  The elder Bush even won an election in his own right after Reagan was forced out by term limits.  Then like a bolt from the blue, the dominoes we thought would fall in Southeast Asia after Vietnam’s defeat fell in Eastern Europe instead.  When the Berlin Wall came down in October 1989, it was the beginning of the end for the Communists.  Even the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991.  The enemy was gone, and the Soviet specter was replaced by the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid!”  With that backdrop, Bush didn’t stand a chance against Bill Clinton in 1992.  Since George Bush’s election, three presidents were elected to serve for eight years each - two of them were Democrats.  

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers came down.  As I sat in a Godfather’s Pizza place in Sacramento that day, it occurred to me that because of what happened on that day, the Republicans had a new lease on life – the war on terror.  In my mind it was the new Cold War.  Or so I thought.  Fifteen years have passed since that awful day, and for some memories have faded.  So too has the Republican Party.  For decades the Republicans have been portrayed as the “party of the rich”, never mind that more rich people seem to support Democrats these days.  In the fifteen years since 9/11, the war on terror has worked for Republicans a grand total of one time, in 2004.  What happened since then was a war in Iraq that was badly bungled.  There was the Afghanistan fight that has never ended.  Since the end of the Cold War the Republicans have become an opposition party rather than a party that governs.  When Democrats win the White House and Congress, they tend to go hog wild with the things they want to do.  They can’t help it - it’s what they do.  The United States being for the most part a center-right country, there is the inevitable backlash and they elect Republicans as a check on Democratic power.  If we have a government that “does nothing” it’s because the American electorate want it that way.  That electoral success just doesn’t translate to the Presidential level.