Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dowd in her Sunday New York Times column, used the metaphor of an extinct civilization such as the Inca and Mayan to refer to the Republican Party in 2012.
“The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history…
As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within…”
The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating barriers to letting them vote.
Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?”
As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”
Congratulations to Ms. Dowd for the great imagery. However, I am not sure the GOP will not resurrect itself somehow. The Democratic Party is capable of shooting itself in the foot. I remember Al Gore while leading in the polls in September 2012, shunting Bill Clinton aside in his presidential campaign and opening the gates for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and the other Huns, to take over and rule for eight years.
Tony
