New York Times reporter Dean E. Murphy does not look forward hopefully to the assassination of President Bush. He says so himself in a form letter responding to criticism of an essay that he wrote for yesterday’s Times entitled “Can History Save the Democrats?”:
The goal of the article was to review some of the history surrounding so-called realigning elections, as many have described President Bush’s victory, and examine clues from the past about how such realignments have come to an end. In a sense, it was meant to look at what tomorrow might bring through the prism of yesterday.
Readers might have gotten a different impression from the fact that the two historical events discussed at greatest length are the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and McKinley, after which the piece ends ominously:
Professor Wilentz of Princeton said that even if the 2004 victory was an incremental one, that should not comfort the Democrats. He said Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush now have a chance to do what Hanna and McKinley never did: Lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance.
“The Republicans are basically unchecked,” Professor Wilentz said. “There is no check in the federal government and no check in the world. They have an unfettered playing field.”
Until the next act of God, that is.
All quite innocently meant, the writer avers in his apologia:
As the article states near the beginning, “an act of God” during the Bush presidency could range from “a national calamity, a deep schism in the ruling party, the implosion of a social movement under the excesses of its own agenda or the emergence of an extraordinary political figure.” While assassination would certainly qualify as a national calamity, many other events would as well. Certainly, the article never advocated any of them.
Very well. I grant that Mr. Murphy had no malign intention. His analysis is instead a good example of how Bush Derangement Syndrome leads men without malign intentions to write driveling nonsense that reinforces dementia in their readers.
The essay has nothing accurate or informative to say about “how such realignments have come to an end”. Its linking of McKinley’s death to the end of Republican electoral hegemony is preposterous:
Had McKinley not been killed, Marcus A. Hanna, the political handler who was as instrumental to McKinley’s success as Karl Rove has been to Mr. Bush’s, would have pursued his dream of “creating a Republican machine that would go on forever,” Professor Wilentz said.
Instead, Theodore Roosevelt became president, and pursued progressive policies at home and power projection abroad. “What followed shifted the Republican Party in a direction it had not planned to go, and created the groundwork for 1912 and eventually the New Deal,” Professor Wilentz said. When his successor, William H. Taft, turned back to conservatism, Roosevelt ran against him in 1912 on the Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket, and split the Republican Party, yielding the White House to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson.
“One can't imagine what American history might have looked like had McKinley continued to the end of his second term,” Professor Wilentz said.
Yes, one can. Progressivism would still have been a major force within the Republican Party. TR was hardly the party’s sole progressive and he would have been a strong contender for the Presidential nomination if McKinley had served two terms. Had he been thwarted, a Democrat might well have captured the White House earlier than Wilson, drawing votes from Republicans restive under dogmatic conservative dominance. In any event, no Hanna-built machine could have survived the Great Depression.
Mr. Murphy’s counterfactual evidently differs toto caelo from mine. He (for it is clear that he quotes Professor Wilentz with unstinting approval) views McKinley’s assassination as a fortunate deliverance from what would otherwise have been perpetual right-wing Republican misrule.
Nothing else is treated in as much detail, and the other suggestions for ending realignment that are casually tossed about – a schism in Republican ranks, “the emergence of a paladin the Democratic Party”, “new waves of immigrants entering the electorate” – are patent long shots. A Democrat who swallows Mr. Murphy’s theses will be drawn to the conviction that President Bush is in a position to “lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance”, an ascendancy that will be “unfettered” with “no check in the federal government and no check in the world”.
Doesn’t that sound ominous? Mr. Murphy offers his readers a choice among despair, hope for an improbable rescue and the direct course of killing the tyrant. He apparently regards trivia like regular elections as no limitation at all on the ruling faction. There is only one logical inference to be drawn from such a chain of discourse. If Mr. Murphy does not like that inference, he ought to reconsider his premises.
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