Let's hope there's an emerging GOP minority?

Until I read this article by H. Brandt Ayers: I never knew that Kevin Phillips, who wrote the recent and disturbing book,American Theocracy also wrote the seminal piece on The Emerging Republican Majority.


This part really caught my eye and gave me a reason for hope:

Thus did the party of Lincoln, founded in opposition to slavery, not only abandon the black man, but use prejudice against him to pry the South away from its Democratic moorings. When the black man became a Democrat, the white South became Republican.

If Phillips is right that cycles of party dominance last roughly 36 years, then this year may be a turning point. Phillips himself was turned off some time ago by the party's narrow right-wing leadership.

Now the GOP is the party of social engineering: The federal government should decide who may marry whom, and when a woman, brain-dead for 15 years, should be allowed to pass away.

Those private decisions have become governmental responsibilities in the judgment of the current party leadership, which has given us a misbegotten, mismanaged and stymied war in the Middle East, an inept Katrina response, deficits as far as the eye can see, declining real wages, bloated oil company incomes while gas prices at the pump are pinching working and middle-income people, a still-spinning web of scandal, 45 million people without health insurance, etc., etc., etc.

Social issues such as the gay marriage amendment still have resonance in the South, as Alabama demonstrated Tuesday, and the historic comfort of a majority white party will keep Dixie Republican a while longer.

But the black urban rebellions are history; the symbol of the Black Power salute has lost its power. Even in the Alabama Black Belt, whites vote for the able black Congressman Artur Davis, and the nation would have elected Colin Powell president if he had run.

Democrats are focusing on pocketbook issues, leaving social engineering to the majority party. We may be seeing the early signs of an emerging Republican minority.

It's a topsy-tursvy world we live in. Now it's the conservative elites who are the social engineers, telling people how to live their lives, and suprisingly it's the Democrats who are arguing for fiscal sanity.

Maybe it is the end of the world....