By PAUL KRUGMANMaybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.
Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?
You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon. Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots…
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat. This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.
The background subtext of this election centers on this undiscussable gulf, and Barack Obama has a pivotal role in how this is going to play out. While he is an African American, he is not an afroamerican. I’m sure that has something to do with his popularity. He is also tempermentally a populist rather than a black candidate. He seems to genuinely represent the entirity of the middle and lower classes. The equality he preaches bridges the equality of the Founders and its broader meaning. I personally think that’s how he beat Hillary. Her First Woman was out front. If Barack Obama is driven by his First Black, it doesn’t show. So while Obama’s testing ground will be his success with the Founder’s Mandate on equality, the result of his success will be to expand that meaning.
And Krugman is right. The Republican Party has become the bastion for opponents of both brands of equality. To lament their persistence is to deny the equality debate that continues to dominate the American experiment. It is not the conscious racism/sexism of the fringe that’s the problem. It’s the fear based unconscious or barely conscious racism/sexism of the many that matters. And the approach to that kind of "ism" isn’t contempt or accusation. It’s finding ways to help people let it see the light of day, so they can deal with it in the fullness of their minds. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can do a lot to facilitate that process. In fact, they already have…
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