From the Archives: Democracy in America, 2003
From the Archives: Democracy in America, 2003
From the Archives: Wilentz on the Republicans
At Dissent?s Summer 2010 launch event last night, our panelists debated Obama?s potential?past, present, and future?as a liberal leader. In discussing his failings and victories, one question repeatedly arose: is there something insidious and new in the nature of Republican opposition to the Democrats? agenda, and does this opposition constitute a true barrier to the president?s goals?
In 2003, during an era of Republican dominance and far greater liberal despair than today, Sean Wilentz wrote of the new Republican political style that emerged in the early 1990s:
Whatever the motivation, the Republicans’ partisan assault on democracy displays a will to power unlike any seen in our country since the fire-eater secessionist movement of the 1850s that led to the creation of the southern Confederacy. In 1856, the antidemocratic secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett bellowed that “a complete revolution” had turned the federal government into “a sheer despotism,” which could only be overcome by denying the national will by any means necessary-including disunion. The current Republican Party has no need for secessionism (although its pandering to racist Confederate sensibilities in the South has long been one of its key political weapons). What it shares with the fire-eaters is an implacable will to dominate and a combination of cynicism and contempt for our democratic constitutional procedures. This is not hard-knuckled politics as usual. It is radical and abnormal. It has already degraded American democracy. And it portends a crisis in our politics as great as any since the era of Reconstruction.
