Finita La Commedia

From Kyle Smith:

I’m not normally given to hyperbole, but it’s all over for the Republican party as we know it and hence all over for the United States of America as we know it. The Reagan period now looks like a blip. Only once has a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote in 24 years.

We’ve lost when we were the incumbent party and the economy was perceived to be doing badly; we’ve lost when we were the challenger party when the economy was doing even worse.

In future, our elections will be like those in Britain or New York. We will be presented with a choice between a statist liberal and an out-there uber-liberal. And with the uber-liberal enjoying the full backing of the media and Hollywood, it’ll by no means be an easy win for the ordinary Mike Bloomberg or David Cameron-style liberal, who will be portrayed as a heartless plutocrat if he happens to come from money, or as a hopeless rube if he happens to come from nowhere.

Liberalism multiplies and reinforces its own mistakes. As liberalism’s failures pile up, they will inevitably inspire more liberalism as solutions. As Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal points out, blacks have not only suffered in absolute terms under Barack Obama, with unemployment rising and incomes declining, but they have suffered relative to whites, with the gap between white unemployment and black unemployment actually increasing. Recognizing all this causes the black voter not to take an interest in the mighty wealth and job-creating abilities of the free market, but to wish even more fervently for more government programs to alleviate the pain.

To take merely one measure of the catastrophe: The Supreme Court is now permanently liberal. Roe v. Wade will never be overturned, a right to have your gay marriage recognized in every state will be discovered in the due process clause, and so on, but these are relatively minor issues. The progressive project can never be satisfied, so the Supreme Court will start behaving like courts in places like New Jersey and New York, where completely routine questions of budgeting and hiring get yanked out of voters’ hands and resolved to the satisfaction of liberal judges. The federal courts will fill up with Harvard Law School-type professors who will pour gasoline on the fire of liberal legislation, but if legislation stalls the bench will simply grant liberal presidents the power to do whatever they want with no input from Congress. If somehow a conservative policy slips through, judges will reverse it. No dispute will ever be over until the left has won. Just as a for instance: After George Zimmerman walks, there will be riots and he will then be railroaded on federal civil rights charges. Judges will simply ignore the double-jeopardy aspect because it conflicts with the Democratic agenda. The school choice movement will be killed off as “draining resources from public education,” which really means it harms a core Democratic interest group, the teachers’ unions. The simple matter of requiring voters to supply I.D. will be forbidden, not because it doesn’t make sense, the voters don’t want it or because it’s unconstitutional, but because it harms Democratic party interests. The two parties will fall all over each other in their efforts to mollify illegal immigrants. The new health-care entitlement will become increasingly onerous and costly, with all discussion limited to how best to “save” it, until one day employers’ efforts to work around it cause a frustrated government to convert it to a full-on single-payer Socialist scheme.

Read the rest here.