The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The Democrats now find themselves cast into a Biblical wilderness, to wander in torment until supernatural powers or self-knowledge ignites in them some greater sense of purpose than the sordid patronage politics that forms their base among the ethnic and gender pleaders, social services industry, schoolteachers' unions, and senescent academistas. I am personally very glad to say goodbye to House Democrat leader Dick Gephardt, whose destitution of ideas and vision, and incapacity to inspire was emblematic of the party's torpor.

The party could have benefited hugely from taking up the battle against the WalMartization of America -- which included the destruction of every local economic network in the nation, and the implosion of the towns, cities, and neighborhoods that were their armature, and millions of occupational niches these places contained -- but the party had no vocabulary to describe the process in order to oppose it.

They could have opposed the hyper-suburbanization of the past twenty years -- which, incidentally, has imposed huge costs on the lower classes by making them slaves to their automobiles, and in so doing, made housing both unaffordable and disaggregated from all the other organs of civic life -- but the Democrats neither understood the insidious consequences, nor would they challenge the lumpenprole fantasy that endless motoring was the only political liberty of any value. This includes their failure to support passenger rail and other forms of public transit in anything but cosmetic form.

The Democrats will also, sooner or later, have to deal with the poison of Political Correctness which has evolved into the only thing resembling a central credo in the vacuum of their intellectual bankruptcy. The campaigns against Western culture, against men, against eros, against excellence all have their origin in an alienated puritanism that is unworthy of civilized people.

It occurs to me that the Democrat's position this year is a bit like the year 1856 when the only-recently dominant Whig party began its spectacularly rapid dissolution. That year, the nation moved inexorably toward the righteous convulsion of the Civil War. Now, the nation slides toward the yawning multiple catastrophes of war, global warming, financial meltdown, and the collapse of our ridiculous drive-in living arrangement (in which an economy is supposed to be an endless chain of hamburgers). All of which is to say that I don't know if the Democrats have anywhere to go from here; they may never return from the wilderness.

The Republicans are now left to defend a nation that amounts to little more than a 3000-mile parking lot. They wanted it that way. They cheerleaded suburban hyper-development and the WalMart economy that services it. They outsourced our productive capacity to places where factory slaves get paid a dollar a day or less. They pimp for the corporate colonialism that has erased community life. They stand for the United States of Television, not the wreckage that really exists on the ground in real places. And they're going to be at the controls as it all unwinds.