America In A Generation's Time

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there as well as here:

A generation from now, the Democrats will be different but recognisable, the heirs and person of Barack Obama. But the Republicans will be completely different, the heirs of the late Ron Paul, never President despite his Nobel Peace Prize.

With the long-ago passage of universal public healthcare, the old Republicans will finally have run out of anything to say, having sold the paleocon pass on trade and war to Obama, and everyone having seen through their con trick on abortion. So the people with things to say will have set about replacing them, especially after Palin lost every state in 2012. It is not unusual for parties to define themselves against their own past leaders. Our own Tories are currently doing so. If Labour wants to survive, then it will have to do so, too. And in a generation’s time, both American parties will be defined against George Bush, which in the Democrats’ case will also mean against Bill Clinton. The nomination of Barack rather than Hillary was the beginning of that process. The current Administration is the definitive break with NAFTA, with GATT, and with the bombing to smithereens of here, there and everywhere.

To the wider world, both parties will be equally unobtrusive. America will not have fought a war since the withdrawal from Afghanistan way back in 2010, and everyone who knows that there still are a few troops in Iraq will be calling for them to be brought home, since the one country with an outstanding threat to launch a nuclear strike against any other will by then contain so few secular Ashkenazi nationalists that it will hardly seem worth bothering to deter them. The days when presidential candidates were expected to pay court to Israel will be as forgotten as the days when several of those same candidates were on the payrolls of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. And cross-party shifts in energy policy will have consigned those regimes and their region to irrelevance in American politics, while other cross-party legislation will have dismantled their gigantic stakes in the American economy.

Domestically, the differences will be very real. That said, being the party of Obama rather than Clinton, the Democrats would never dream of repealing the phenomenally successful Pregnant Women Support Act, or introducing federal funding of abortion. The Republicans, meanwhile, would never commit electoral suicide by threatening to repeal healthcare. Indeed, having seen the fate of their predecessors, they will go out of their way to avoid discussing the matter at all. Both parties will be equally tough on illegal immigration, and equally insistent on English as the national language, by then barely an issue due to the success of Obama’s bipartisan second-term paybacks to his black base. On this as on any possible reversion to Clinton-era job exportation, warmongering or enforced social liberalism, Senator Bob Conley of South Carolina will be the conscience of the Democratic Party. Both parties will leave the definition of marriage to the states, with as many Democrats for traditional marriage (always favoured by Obama) as Republicans for a more libertarian approach. A similar cross-party divide will exist over drugs, although the federal prohibitions will still be in place.

The signs of all of this are already apparent. Just look at the hysterical rage of the remaining Bush supporters. (Or, indeed, Clinton supporters.) Only a year ago, it was treason and terrorism to criticise the President, who was said to be above both the Constitution and the law. Where does that leave them now? What does that make them now? It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.