IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE WATER?

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

It's long been the belief not only of political scientists but those who practice practical politics that the American two-party political system works as it does because the Democrats and Republicans try their best to calibrate and aim their messages to appeal to the median voter, those in the broad middle of the political spectrum. It has long been argued that this sort of centrist moderation was created by the fact we have a two-party system.

If it wasn't clear before last November's election, it's clear now that the Republicans are no longer appealing to the median voters. Instead, they are adopting policies, strategies and tactics that feed the fires of their core constituencies: the neo-conservatives, the unilateralists and - most especially of late - the fundamentalists. The GOP's amazing behavior during the Schiavo case, the recent legislative moves for tort and bankruptcy "reform," and their now-open threats against the federal judiciary, are all designed to "excite" their hard core constituencies. While the Democrats continue to believe in the median-voter theory - as advanced most notably by the Democratic Leadership Council and the "liberal people of faith" who call for the party to pay attention to the religious-minded - the Republicans are playing a totally new game, the extremist-activist game. This portends an ever widening, more acrimonious political gulf in America. Bush and his "brain" Karl Rove, have decided that they can govern from the right, that they do not need to practice bipartisanship beyond empty rhetoric and appeals for cooperation that amount to surrender. More and more, George Bush appears willing to be the President of half of America.

The fundamentalists, being fundamentalists, have taken the GOP (which some of them refer to as "God's Own Party") at its word that they were responsible for the re-election of George Bush and are now demanding their pound of flesh. The President has demonstrated his willingness to cut short a vacation for the first time in his presidency and fly across country to at least act as if he is at the beck and call of these people, which only makes them more resolute in pushing forward their demands.

Phyllis Schlafly, Grande Dame of the looney right, has left no opportunity untaken in a career spanning the past 40-odd years to remain on the cutting edge of the Far Far Right. From her days as a John Bircher writing "None Dare Call It Treason" (which many of us at the time called "None Dare Call It Reason") for the Goldwater Campaign, to organizing the fight against feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, to today when she most recently appeared at the "Justice Conference" in Washington that saw far right activists applauding a speaker who lauded the political strategy of none other than Josef Stalin for dealing with political dissent: kill the opponent and end the dissent. Schlafly herself spoke against judicial review - a concept that was first discussed in "Federalist 78" and has been considered a settled part of government since it was enunciated in "Marbury v. Madison" the Supreme Court decision in 1803 that established the right of the courts to review the actions of both the Executive and the Legislative Branches.

What makes me wonder if there's "something in the water" is that since November the Crazy Right has been making itself more and more public, with increasingly-crazy ideas. And with much of the mainstream media treating them as if they weren't the drooling morons they are, it seems to make no never-mind to them that when they force the government to act on their demands, the public response is 80 percent disapproval of such efforts.

This past week, the ever-more-crazed House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, was quoted as saying, "I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them."

This is absolutely amazing stuff. The second most senior individual in the House of Representatives is campaigning against the First Amendment, "Marbury v. Madison," and "Griswold v. Connecticut." This is the bedrock foundation of what most people consider American freedom to be, that he is assaulting.

Not only is DeLay willing to campaign against the 20th Century, but the Senator Majority Leader has announced he plans to participate in a campaign run by the literal descendants of the creators and defenders of "Jim Crow," calling judicial review an act of "discrimination" against Christians that is as odious as was the decision in "Plessy v. Ferguson," that established the doctrine of "separate but equal." It was these same "people of faith" were involved in the fight against the Court's decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" that overturned segregation (let's recall that the Southern Baptists were formed in 1859 to defend slavery when the rest of the Baptist movement favored emancipation). Whether they admit it publicly or not, most leaders of the Christian Right agreed with Trent Lott when he lamented that "many of today's problems" wouldn't exist if Americans had voted to elect the unreconstructed Confederate traitor Strom Thurmond President in 1948. That these unreconstructed Confederates would now try to compare themselves to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. - both of whom they still hate - is the height of hypocrisy.

Shortly after the election, I was out at my favorite aviation museum, a place I have enjoyed going to for nearly 30 years. While there, I heard another visitor say that "fossils and stuff like that don't really exist, they were put in the earth by God to test our faith." What surprised me was that no one else who heard this said anything. When I replied "I guess the laws of aerodynamics don't really exist either then, it must be true that airplanes fly because angels hold them up in the sky," I was lectured by a bystander that it's not nice to mock someone's religion.

These people are bolder and bolder. Every poll shows they are no more than 15 percent of the population - at most! - yet they proclaim themselves the mainstream majority and the ones most fit to rule.

In an electoral system where only 48 percent of those who are eligible to vote actually do so - and in which all of this 15 percent of the total turns out to vote en masse - that minority becomes 30 percent of all the voters. With this kind of math, the Republicans who have made their deal with this most dangerous faction in the country can indeed be the majority in both House and Senate, despite the fact that 80 of the American people disagree with them.

This situation happened once before in a democratic country. In 1933. In Germany.