The Potential Backlash that Democrats Should Fear

Gerard Baker, the US editor of The (London) Times, had it about right yesterday when he likened the Republican Party to the comically fractured, ideological donnybrook of Stanley Kubrick's war room in "Dr. Strangelove."

Baker's was one of many such pieces of late, and it's no exaggeration to say that I read more this week on the GOP's unraveling and infighting than on the presidential race, now but 10 days away. And my reading selections weren't entirely by discriminating design; that brand of coverage just happened to dominate the political press because the GOP really is unraveling, which makes it -- potentially and in rather short order -- an even bigger story than the presidential campaign.

More than a few Democrats, liberals and netrooted progressives are doing handsprings and uncorking champagne bottles in celebration of the Republican implosion, and for the next six months or so that's not only a natural reaction, it's a deserved one.

But I wish to drop at this perhaps inconvenient point an unwanted word of advice: If they're still celebrating a year from now -- which is to say, if the GOP still hasn't got its act together by then -- they'll be kissing their own butts goodbye.

Since we opened in a cinematic mode, let me put it this way. Michael Corleone had it wrong when he isolated history's principal lesson: that if it teaches us anything, it's that anybody can be killed. That may be a minor precept (although a profitable one for Corleone's family business) of history, but history's far larger lesson is that, simply and familiarly, power corrupts.

From feudal lords to French revolutionaries to the Republican Party's "permanent majority," time and again we have watched the seemingly forever powerful -- slowly, in some cases, and quite rapidly in others -- flush themselves right down the toilet. There's something so typically human -- meaning so typically irresponsible -- about unrestrained power that makes it the most effective hemlock available.

Healthy power, as a gathering of learned and small-r republican gentlemen understood a couple hundred years ago, requires checks, balances, restraints and abundant pushback. In its absence comes despotism and, in time, gothic disorder, because despotism will not hold. Or at least it never has.

What modern Republicans attempted was a kind of sickly, sophomoric version of limitless power. Their tenure was relatively short-lived because they never really could get it right, because, well, they're modern Republicans -- not the sharpest strategic minds in the political drawer. Nevertheless they had what every would-be absolutist absolutely needs: a disorganized, frayed, factious opposition. Since at least Lyndon Johnson, the history of the Democratic Party has been a history of remarkable ineptitude.

The Republican Party didn't steal power. It was handed to them, carte blanche.

At any rate, back to our little story, whose pending moral is this: Should (or rather when, in 10 days) Democrats regain that sublime unification of executive and legislative power, they had by-God better, after an appropriate celebratory spell, start praying that Republicans get their act together.

Because if Democrats are permitted to swagger about for four or eight years like a George W. Bush & Co., then they're putting an electoral knife to their own throats. They'll overstep, they'll simmer and swell in overconfidence, they'll screw up -- just as Republicans have so ably demonstrated that inevitability. And that, then, will be followed by a swift kick in the pants, right out the Capitol and White House doors.

As suggested, the best Democratic prophylactic against the ineluctable transmission of diseased power is, as distasteful as it may sound, a healthy GOP. And that, by definition, means a radically different GOP from its insufferable collection of boneheads and martinets of the past few decades.

Again, the Times' conservatively sympathetic Gerard Baker had the coming internal battle -- the GOP's, that is -- about right (excepting his enthusiastic confidence in Sarah Palin's political future, which, I'd wager, has an expiration date of Nov. 4). He cast it as one that "will pit neoconservatives against isolationists" and "social conservatives against libertarians."

Baker ventures not an opinion as to who will win, but I'm rooting for the isolationists (since liberals already hold a tradition of internationalism) and libertarians (since social conservatives are -- there's just no more fitting way to say it -- crazy).

These two camps combined, assuming they are responsibly led, would afford the greater distinctions to, and separations from, liberal power. They would provide the electorate with respectable and respectful alternatives, requiring Democrats to keep their wits sharpened and their policies attuned to persuasive reason -- not merely over-empowered possibilities.

I realize this is a bit hard for many Dems, progressives, etc. to swallow right now. The temptation to lord unrestrained supremacy over the formerly uncompromising is almost orgiastically irresistible. But, as Joe Biden put it recently, mark my words: that sound of Republican implosion you're hearing will also be a death knell for Democrats, should the latter take unwise advantage as the former reorganizes, which it had better do damn soon.