WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- The Democrats have just been annihilated yet again at the polls. Their controversial candidate from the liberal Irish strongholds of the Northeast lost decisively by millions of votes and the Republicans swept the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The new president, championing the conservative, religious Heartland values of America's old Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish ethnic core is confident the party will set the direction of the nation for at least a generation to come.
Sorry, President Herbert Hoover, but this is 1928 and the Great Depression is about to come knocking at the door.
President George W. Bush's victory Tuesday with a record 59 million votes, the most ever cast for any American presidential candidate, was accompanied by a massive sweep of Congress. The Republicans boosted their Senate majority from a razor-thin 51-49 to a massive 55-45 despite Barack Obama's inevitable landslide rout of Alan Keyes in Illinois. The GOP lock on the House has now endured for more than a decade and been confirmed in five congressional elections in a row.
None of this is any figment of the imagination. What has been exposed as wishful thinking is the repeated Democratic fantasy that they could make the overwhelming institutional, geographic, socio-economic and media domination of the American body politic vanish by running a war hero, or a supposedly respected senator or by wasting scores of millions of dollars on enormous voter-registration drives that appear to have helped Bush at least as much, if not more than they helped his ultimately hapless challenger, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
When political parties put together dominant coalitions in American politics they tend to stay on top for a long time, at least 20 years, and in the post-Civil War era, six and a half decades.
What then does it take to break that lock, except when either the times are exceptionally bad for the dominant party, as they were for the Democrats in 1952 at the height of the Korean War, or when the minority party has an exceptionally skilful and presentable candidate, as the Democrats did with Bill Clinton in 1992?
The answer is, it takes an awful lot. If President Bush can avoid a full-scale war with a U.S. death toll far larger than the 1,100 American soldiers who have already lost their lives in Iraq, if he can avoid the collapse of the dollar and the bankruptcy of the United States government, and if he can avoid having a nuclear weapon go off in an American heartland city, then he will be able to name his successor in four years' time. If he wants it, he even has plenty of time now to leisurely prepare a constitutional amendment that would allow him to run and be elected for a third term. He wouldn't be the first.
What this means is that whatever the Democrats do to reshape their party now will be entirely futile if Bush's policies prove as successful and well-founded as not only the president and his loyal legions of supporters in Congress, but also the 59 million Americans who voted for him Tuesday believe them to be.
For dominant eras in U.S. political history have always lasted many decades, and it has always taken full-scale crises, usually economic and sometimes war and even revolution to end them.
The long era of Southern Democratic domination of the federal government and national legislature only ended when the Democrats split between North and South over secession in the fateful election of 1860. The new era of big-business Republican domination that followed lasted for decades.
It took a huge depression that lasted three years, from 1893 to 1896, to change the direction of the Republican Party in both domestic and foreign policies -- and in domestic terms even that was more of an on-course correction than a full political upheaval. It took the full catastrophic run of the Great Depression, leading to the brink of fiscal collapse for the entire U.S. financial system to sweep Franklin Roosevelt into power and unleash the energies of the New Deal. And it took the combination of the Vietnam War going sour, racial riots burning down the hearts of America's cities and an enormous and often violent popular youth protest movement against the continuing military draft for an unpopular and unsuccessful war to break the Democrats' hold on power in 1968.
Nothing less will shake the confidence and grip of President Bush and his 21st-century religious-right Republicans on the United States.
This is not to say that any or all of these things will not happen. The Southern hold on Washington, Congress and the Supreme Court never looked stronger than at the moment of the Dred Scott decision in 1857. It was unthinkable that only four years later armies of hundreds of thousands of men would be clashing in internecine conflict in the placid, rich fields of northern Virginia. President Hoover promised a chicken in every pot in his victorious election campaign of 1928 and was convinced he could deliver it too. Nobody, including the Democrats, dreamed that the perfect storm of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression was just over the event horizon.
If the next four years go according to the game plan Bush and his foreign and domestic-policy strategists have mapped out for them, the GOP's candidate will win yet again in 2008 in a walk, whoever the Democrats put up against him. But if those policies should prove unsustainable or even catastrophic; if tens of thousands of American soldiers should die in Iraq or Iran in wars gone sour; or if the huge and accelerating annual fiscal federal budget deficit becomes unsustainable with Chinese and Japanese banks refusing to hold sufficient U.S. Treasury Bonds to cover it -- then the House That Bush Built will collapse as quickly and staggeringly as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that fell that awful day of Sept. 11, 2001. If that happens, the future of American politics will certainly be in the melting pot and once more up for grabs.
But nothing less will do it.
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