The End of the (Far Right) World?

Could this really be the end? Could it be that the apocalypse the Right foresees is their own? Columnist E. J. Dionne thinks so. Not just of the Republican majority or Bushite rule, but of conservative dominance.

Polls keep showing that Republicans are falling behind in congressional races across the country, both individually and generically, perhaps even enough for an historic loss of seats in the House and maybe enough in the Senate to end their control of both houses.

But while not predicting any outcome in November, Dionne believes the conservative movement has effectively ended already. "I would argue that this is the week in which conservatism... reached the point of collapse."

He cites the Senate's (failed) attempt to pass a minimum wage law combined with more tax cuts for the wealthiest. It wasn't so much the opportunism, Dionne writes--it was that Republicans really wanted the minimum wage raise, traditionally opposed by conservatives, because in an election year they need it.

The episode was significant because it meant Republicans were acknowledging that they would not hold congressional power without the help of moderates. That is because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.

Yet their way of admitting this was to put on display the central goal of the currently dominant forces of politics: to give away as much as possible to the truly wealthy. You wonder what those blue-collar conservatives once known as Reagan Democrats made of this spectacle.

There's the rub. The Bushite Republicans abandoned the less than wealthy conservative voters just as they abandoned conservative fiscal restraint in running up huge deficits to benefit the rich, especially their corporate pals.

"Political movements lose power when they lose their self-confidence and sense of mission," Dionne writes. "The decline of conservatism leaves a vacuum in American politics. An unhappy electorate is waiting to see who will fill it."

It could be an historic opportunity for a vision for the future. And the way things are going, it could be the last one.