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.
