Some ground rules: This is not a 2016 Presidential Election thread. CTOAN has threatened to murder a puppy if we go there, and I strongly believe that we should respect the poor little guy's right to live.
So what we want to do here is stick to generalities - essentially, the "view from height" thing. A lot of us (yours truly perhaps most frequently and loudly) have proclaimed that this is going to be a realignment election, and that whichever way it goes, the political landscape is going to be irrevocably transformed. This is your chance to address that theme: Will defeat for either party cause the current two-party system to come unglued, resulting (perhaps) in a different political balance of power, possibly with different political Parties?
In this thread, we'll talk about what might come to pass if the Democrats lose. If you want to talk about what will happen if the Republicans lose, do it in the other thread.
GRAMMATICAL NOTE: And yes, I recognize that "whither" (as in "which way?") isn't spelled "wither". It's a pun, son.
Before you read this post, you should probably read my OP in the Republican thread (cited above). I'm going to rely on many of the same arguments I used there, only I'm going to turn them on their heads.
Be warned, and go read.
<waits for reader to return>
Given the demographic trends I spoke of in the other post, a Democratic defeat in '12 would seem to be no big deal. If social and population trends are on the side of the Democratic Party, then all Democrats have to do is wait for the overwhelming momentum of history to carry them into power, right?
Wrong.
Republicans know that history is against them. They know that to wait and do nothing means political death. They have shown themselves to be willing to do anything to win, believing (as only fanatical ideologues can) that they and they alone can save America from disaster and restore it to its former greatness.
Therefore, it the GOP wins, the one thing they are certain to do is to act.
If the GOP wins the Senate, they will do away with the filibuster; if they don't, they will exert every ounce of energy that they have to take the Senate in '14, because they're not going to get many more chances after that. Once they have Congress and the White House, they will move to disarm the Democratic Party and effectively make it impossible for Democrats to win at any level - and they will do so by any means necessary.
The first and most effective line of attack on the Democrats involves getting rid of the unions. Unions raise a huge amount of money for the Democratic Party; but more importantly, unions provide a lot of logistical support for Democratic GOTV efforts all across the country. Eliminating the unions, then, is a good first step in eliminating the Democratic Party's ability to turn out voters on Election Day and win elections.
Some people here on NSG have argued that the 1st Amendment's right to association guarantees workers a right to organize. This is incorrect. First, the right in question isn't a right to association; it's a right to assembly. Simply put, it means that Americans can hold political meetings at will, and (at least in the eyes of a strict conservative court) that's all it has to mean. Having a right to meet with others of a like mind and talk is a powerful right - but it is not the same as a right to act in unison with others.
The greatest weakness of unions lies in what they do: They organize labor for the purposes of collective bargaining. Now, in the strictest sense, collective bargain - on its face - constitutes an effective restraint of trade. If workers all stand together and agree to only work for a single, mutually acceptable wage, then they are guilty of collusion, which is a violation of America's anti-trust laws. Worse, if the sole purpose of a union is, in fact, to restrict hiring to its members and/or fix wages in the workplace, then by definition said union is an organization expressly and entirely designed to achieve an illegal purpose: In terms of Federal racketeering law, it is a "corrupt organization", and therefore one that can be properly attacked by Federal prosecutors under RICO.
So what keeps this from happening now? One law: An exception to the Nation's anti-trust laws written into the Clayton Act, which unions got right along with Major League Baseball. It would be a simple enough matter for Congress to repeal the labor exception in Section 6 of the Clayton Act, and for President Romney to sign such a bill "for the furtherance of commerce in America" (or whatever). Once this was done, the Justice Department could unleash the full power of the FBI to descend on organized labor with all the same zeal it once mustered against the Mafia; indeed - legally speaking - organized labor would, in essence, be simply another form of organized crime, to be dealt with in the same way the mob was.
I have no doubt that such a course of action would produce unmitigated violence across America; yet it would be easy enough for the same Republican Congress that passed such a law to extend the 2014 edition of the NDAA to give the President broad powers to classify labor violence as either sedition or terrorism and deal with it accordingly (there's still lots of room at Gitmo, after all), and then to extend this to support for labor violence. This is not to say that we should expect President Romney to begin ordering drone strikes on Youngstown, Ohio; it is to say, however, that the full force of the Federal government could very easily be brought down upon the heads of organized labor, and that it would be fairly easy to intimidate friends and allies of organized labor to stand aside while it happened.
Such a move would swiftly and immediately cripple the Democratic Party, perhaps enough to delay the day when arithmetic might otherwise force the GOP to relinquish power; likewise, attempts to brand labor as "communist" in its intentions and to revive the Red Scare as a political weapon against pro-labor Democrats could be relatively effective in some political districts (and would be deeply appealing to modern Republican sentiment on a national basis).
From there, the next step would be to rewrite voter registration laws and impose uniform voter ID laws as draconian (or more so) than recent laws enacted in the State of Pennsylvania. Ideally, such laws would undermine Symm v. United States, 439 U.S. 1105 (1979), perhaps providing the Roberts Court an opportunity to overturn the ruling; the result of such a event would be to eliminate the right of college students to vote other than by absentee ballot. Highly restrictive absentee ballot rules, in turn, could effectively do away with the student vote altogether - another key in prolonging the viability of the GOP's current political coalition.
Getting rid of the right of minorities to vote would be much, much harder. One way of doing it would be to step up the failed War on Drugs (assuming, absent cynicism, that said war's purpose really ever was about halting drug use) while simultaneously seeking to induce State laws stripping convicted felons of their voting rights for life. In recent years felony disenfranchisement has fallen out of favor; yet today's GOP has resurrected more arcane and reactionary laws before. Here the Supreme Court is clearly on the side of those who would strip felons of their right to vote for life: In Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24 (1974), the Court found such action to be acceptable under the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause.
If applied on a national basis, such laws could reduce the African-American voting population by almost 19% and the Latino voting population by roughly 10%, as compared to reducing the white vote by just over 3%. The War on Drugs would be the preferred vehicle for such an effort due to the differential treatment of minorities vs. whites in the face of drug charges; as Ron Paul pointed out in a GOP debate in New Hampshire back in January, minorities don't use drugs any more often than whites, but get charged and convicted of drug crimes at a far higher rate. More importantly, most of those who get convicted of crimes are poor, whatever their race may be - and the poor are a sizable portion of the Democratic Party's natural base.
Denying convicts the right to vote has other benefits for Republicans; prison populations count when the time comes to draw legislative districts, yet the prisoners themselves can't vote. This makes it a wise political move for Republicans to place prisons in conservative areas and use their population to draw smaller, tighter districst that are safe for Republican candidates on Election Day. Once released, disenfranchised minority voters also dilute urban voting strength, allowing precincts along the urban fringe to be sliced away and gerrymandered with wealthier (and more Republican) suburbs to further dilute minority voting power.
Ultimately, of course, an attack will have to be launched on the right of the Democratic Party to actually hold a place on the ballot. There are various ways to do this: If the Democratic Presidential candidate can somehow be declared ineligible to serve as President, for example (an extreme case, but not completely out of the question), the failure of the Party to run a Presidential candidate at all would effectively result in them losing their automatic ballot slot in most States, if only until the next election. Of course, such a thing isn't easy to arrange, but other legal challenges could certainly be engineered.
On the other side of the aisle, it's important to look at the impact that losing would have on the Democrats. From recent polling, it's fairly obvious that Democrats largely accept the notion that the biggest obstacle to Barack Obama's success has been Republican obstructionism. If Obama loses, the overwhelming temptation facing Democrats will be to fight fire with fire: To answer Republican obstructionism with obstructionism of their own. Of course, in the scenario described above, in which the GOP gets rid of the filibuster, bans organized labor, shreds the social safety net, and lowers taxes on the rich while eliminating tax deductions and credits for the poor and the middle class, flat-out total opposition is going to be the order of the day. Under such circumstances, the far left will rise to the fore, simply because they're the faction most strongly committed to no-holds-barred, last-ditch resistance.
The question then becomes this: Does the far left duplicate the tactics of the far right and commit fratricide against Democratic moderates, both on the grounds that they're much more likely to compromise with Republicans at a time when compromise must be refused, as well as on the basis of the notion that they don't have the gumption to fight for what's right? Such a move would be very tempting, but it could also marginalize the Democratic Party. As a Democrat, I would oppose such a thing - but as a former Republican who watched his Party get overrun by radicals many years ago, I can't rule out what I've seen before.
If moderates were forced out of the Party, they would likely end up dropping out of the political system rather than form a center Party of their own, disgusted by the excesses of fanatics on both sides of the aisle (a centrist Party would have too hard a time thriving in a FPTP environment, as it would face constant attrition of its voter base at both ends of the political spectrum). Such an event would delay the day that Democrats finally made a comeback by many more years, extending Republican power well beyond the next decade, and quite possibly as far as the middle of the century.
OTOH, if the Democratic Party kept is head, remained inclusive, and fought back hard against Republican efforts to keep it from amassing the voting power to win at the ballot box, it might only find itself out of power for a couple of cycles. Of course, it would still face the threat of domestic violence from right-wing militias once it finally made a comeback, just as it will this year if it wins; but at least it would have at its disposal the levers of power to wield in defense of the Republic once it won, and having done so it could then at last try to fix the damage done by the GOP during the course of the Democratic Party's long trek through the wilderness.
tl&dr: If the GOP takes control of the government, they're going to use every means at their disposal to eliminate the Democratic Party as an institution - or at least prevent it from winning elections any time soon. It's possible that this could result in the Democratic Party getting wiped from the pages of history; it's also possible that under the pressures of extreme resistance to the GOP, the Democratic Party might split, become radicalized, or end up getting overtaken by a more radical party of the left (like the Greens or the Socialists). The most likely scenario, though, is that after a long and difficult struggle lasting several cycles, the Democratic Party will finally get back on top - and that when it does, the GOP will be the Party that gets wiped from the pages of history instead.
And with that, it's your turn: What do you think will happen to the Democratic Party if it loses this year? Will it come bouncing back, will it find itself fatally weakened by Republican efforts to break it in the wake of the election, or will something altogether different happen?
