I was talking to my Republican friend on Friday’s ferry to Haines.
Out the window, seagulls were clamoring above Lynn Canal. A week of north winds had churned up to the surface the big-eyed lampfish and maybe some other bottom-dwellers. The gulls were getting them while the getting was good.
My friend was sitting at a cafeteria table alone, looking somber. I asked him if he would be changing political parties now that his team had crapped the bed. No, he said. Why would I?
I reminded him that his party was in tatters and would likely spend the next 50 years representing minority views. You can get away with a lot in politics, but leading a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol building is not on that list.
“Why should I care?” my friend said. “I’ll be dead anyway.”
The tide turned to the GOP in the 1980s, a few years before my friend abandoned the Democrats. He rode high in the saddle during the go-go 1990s and the salad years when Alaska politicians freely showered their friends with cash, tax breaks or capital projects.
It’s all crashing down now. George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary, laid it all out in “Political Communication,” a college class he taught. The class wasn’t so much about communication as it was about George telling young journalists a thing or two to look out for.
A political party’s success tends to be cyclical, George said. A growing party eventually attracts enough wing-nuts that the ideological tent can no longer be stretched to cover everyone. Under the strain, the tent collapses and must be rebuilt.
That’s what happened to Democrats in the early 1970s. By the time the folks in Peoria saw the likes of The Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, they were done with social change. The wing-nuts made fogies like Ronald Reagan, who promised nothing more than apple pie and baseball, look sexy.
Joe Biden is old enough and smart enough to know this game. He need only appear sane, solemn and steady to prevail and start building larger majorities in Congress. The GOP will devour itself for the next decade trying to decide its values and membership. It immediately faces two painful choices: Fragment perilously or surgically extract the gangrenous Trumpets, Proud Boys and QAnoners.
In the meantime, a generation of young people deciding their politics will join the team of the grandfatherly guy in the White House. Politics can be a complicated dance but not so much that the audience can’t tell when performers are out of step.
The GOP can’t call itself “the law and order party” and support murderous riots. It can’t label the other side “radical,” then march with Nazi or Confederate flags. It can’t be caught on the phone trying to cajole 11,000 votes out of a state election official and still claim to own the U.S. Constitution.
Some political tricks are impossible to pull off. There’s just not enough smoke and mirrors. And there are lies that even Fox News won’t repeat.
Mitch McConnell knows this and has launched his divorce from the toxic, mad former president. Trump, predictably, has now turned even on his Kentucky henchman. The inter-party bloodbath to come promises to be spectacular, and the Democrats will get rich selling popcorn to the show.
One NPR commentator on Sunday went so far to speculate that the Democrats didn’t call witnesses to the Senate impeachment deliberately, to let Trump off the hook, gambling that his survival as its Frankenstein monster would prolong the GOP’s suffering and recovery.
The Dems know this much: The folks in Peoria don’t like uproar. They like pickup trucks and ambrosia salad and Sunday football. The good people of Peoria don’t want to spend their lives fretting about politics. Sleepy Joe will be just fine for them.
And like gulls on Lynn Canal in February, Democrats will get fat on the legacy of rioting GOP bottom-dwellers churned up to the surface by strong winds.