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the current forecast seems to be: GOP shrivels until it resembles Wallace's American Independents: white, homophobic, whose seats depend on appealing to fundies, gun nuts, wannabe soldiers, and whoever it is Steve Milloy's cretinous audience is the rest could join the Dems (to keep the name, and thus the blinkers of loyalty--as we saw with the effulgent DU praise for Specter, the wankerrific Bob Casey, and, while he was considering running, the readily-aroused Chris Matthews) an alternative is some sort of Unity, American, or National Party (which worked out so well in 1822-25), or a Grand Alliance like in Germany (under the ultra-progressive Merkel), post-1960 Colombia (hey, at least the Liberal party's in charge there! did you want Horacio SERPA to win???!!111), or post-1982 Honduras (Azcona was so better than Callejas! we must scream our Hope because democracy is working--not for any participation, mind you, but a ritual between two identical parties) Either alternative would prove frustrating to America's repeatedly-withered--yet growing, once academic Marxists fully came out of the closet in the 80s--left wing. They would turn away from the "better-than-the-other" system, the fanatic personalism which ascribes all good to the sitting Leader, and the grit-toothed bare-tolerance of leftists and critics of Dems--who seem to rank below child molesters and tire-iron murderers to many Dems. This would create a new alignment or even party--not Socialists, as "liberal" has barely been rehabilitated (despite their absence in the actual halls of power)--but Progressives or Americans. The Unity party would divert any popular movements to its own purposes: "Want to scare fanatic Repubs/homophobes/the NRA? Stock up on guns!" "Want to fight big HMOs? Endorse the Leader's HMO-written mandatory-health-insurance plan!" "Want to investigate Pelosi? You're a stooge!" "Want to protest? Rise up? Are a hothead who got overexcited in Seattle? You're an agent provocateur!" This totalizing pruning of any effective alternative, usually in favor of incrementalism and obeisance, is the core of "moderation": to create both a muddled policy that's half wrong and half right (the two seem to actually exist, even if not in any Manichean manner) while saying that it's "well-reasoned" and a compromise between two noble, rational, fundamentally equal sides. Sometimes moderation is endorsed because it's less offensive to the far right (and any African-American who votes in the South and part of North Carolina ought to kick themselves if they believe that). In short, this diversion and moderation is more damaging to any good change than a thousand Nixon-saluting, "pro-military," Kent-State-cheering Hard Hats or ten thousand Freepers waving Chairman Sarah's Little Pink Book and cheering Jumbotron videos of Afghan caves and shepherds being engulfed in high explosive. The Greens (boo! hiss! teh evil!) will be absorbed by the Dems/Unity and then the Progressives: one commentator noted that "green" issues will be absorbed by all parties as the inevitable catastrophes rack up. However, the "pragmatics" will remain anthropocentric, solely concerned with how environmental damage affects Man, the Ape Who Is God's Viceregent: nature has no value by itself, anything that can't be scientifically measured is worthless, and flora and fauna exist to be used isntrumentally (the only valid question being conservation of natural "resources" for "sustainability"). They'll fight global warming, but don't want humanity to make too many sacrifices, and the only times they'll endorse a species is when they can potentially get something out of it (the Amazon-as-medicine-cabinet meme). The "deep" greens will persist in the notion that the ecosphere has an existence beyond one species and, as recent evidence may indicate, may actually have been running INDEPENDENTLY of humanity before 100,000 BC! The sole exceptions will be the fundies--only Gawd can change nature, so it can't be us. Other fundies include the tacky, SF-influenced semi-Raelians (Kurzweil, Bjorn Lomborg), who want to spread GM crops into the environment (it's our right--and you can't object, because plants have been bred, and that's the same as tossing in genes from other species, and each gene is a blueprint for an individual part, not instructions for the growth of an entire being, as those frothing geneticists and embryologists claim) and pray to their computers and O'Neill colony diagrams, awaiting the Rapture of the Nerds in the form of nanotech which will end pesky problems like, population explosion, desertification, and extinction (I swear, they're like some Sharper Image-derived cult). (sorry about the rant)
The Unity moderate party would probably have those Dems who generally tell America to sit on it and spin: Baucus, Bayh, Begich, Michael Bennet, Cardin, Carper, Casey, Conrad, Dodd, Dorgan, Feinstein, Gillibrand, Inouye, Tim Johnson, probably Klobuchar, Kohl, Landrieu, maybe Lautenberg, Lieberman (or the Repubs), Lincoln, McCaskill, probably Menendez, Mikulski, Nelson and Nelson (or the Repubs), Pryor, Reid, Rockefeller, Schumer, Specter, Stabenow, Tester, probably Udall and Udall, Warner, Webb, Whitehouse, and maybe Byrd and Cantwell. These would be joined by the opportunistic moderates--Brownback, Collins, maybe Ensign and the great whore Lindsey Graham, "Peckerface" Gregg, McLame, and Snowe. It would have 39-45 Senators. The Progressives would be Akaka, Bingaman, Boxer, probably Sherrod Brown, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Kenndy, probably Kerry, maybe Lautenberg, Leahy, Levin, Murray, Reed, Sanders, and Wyden. This would have 14-20 Senators; in the House it would be Kucinich-led. Its distribution is mostly New England, the Great Lakes cities, and the West Coast--all the "unwanted" parts of the US to the Repubs, and later probably to the "anti-elitist" (yet somehow always pro-Wall Street) Unity party. The Progressives would have to overcome no little regional slander about "far-out," "extremist" constituencies that won't play well with the gun-toting rural psychopaths of "Real Amerika" (disregarding the fact that, before the 1920 Klan-assisted Red Scare crackdown, the CPUSA's foothold was in OKLAHOMA, and that the 1890s Progressives ran North Carolina and did swimmingly in the Blue Ridge/Smokies until the Southern Dems successfully whipped up some race hatred). The freshmen Burris, Hagan, Kaufman, Merkley, and Shaheen, I have no idea.
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