Elephants and Lemmings

"You know your party's in trouble when you read this: A: The rape guy lost. B: Which one?"

~ Alec Baldwin

And thus ends another election cycle in the United States, and with it a plethora of lessons to take to heart. To start off the list is Todd Akin, the now former Republican candidate for Missouri's 2nd Congressional District, and his lessons regarding the anatomical defenses of women to guard against becoming pregnant as a result of rape. Needless to say, the fiery death of this lesson, and Akin's political career as a result, was bright enough to see from orbit.

Next is Richard Mourdock, the defeated Republican senate candidate for Indiana, who many would say led himself to the gallows when he stated that a pregnancy that resulted from rape was 'a gift from God.' I will submit that I have known two women who became pregnant as the result of a rape, and carried their pregnancies to the full term, and none who chose an abortion. This fact can easily be skewered by the fact both girls were in their early teens, and their families forbid them to have an abortion, despite the girls' pleas to the contrary. Now, I may be only a simple male, and relatively unable to fully understand the mental trauma of rape, but situations like this don't seem to ring of divine providence.

The list goes on, across a wide range of topics, from lunar bases to 'job creators,' but I think the point can be made simply from looking at the psychology behind these two ideas, and the psychology of the party itself.

Many years ago, many more than I care to count, I first learned about the animals used to symbolize the Democrats and Republicans. One was symbolized by the elephant, a strong but nurturing animal, aged and wise. The other was an ass. I thought these two were a very fitting representation of the two American parties - until I realized I had it backwards. The Republicans have disjointed themselves so much from the mood of the United States as a whole so much that to my eyes, they can't help but look like a bunch of braying donkeys.

The problem the Republicans face is one of fundamental values. Even in generally hardened Republican strongholds, previous attempts at so-called 'personhood amendments' to write into law that life begins at conception (effectively equating abortions to homicide) failed miserably, and yet they still had several people running for office that blasted the airwaves with promises they would allow for no abortions in cases of rape, incest, or the health and survival of the mother. It was surprising to me, a vociferous defendant of a woman's right to elect for abortion, that so many people would thus choose to vote for a party whose presumptive leader, Willard 'Mitt' Romney (yes, Willard is his given name) sided with this policy more times than he denounced it. And with this, we come to the heart of the matter.

Mitt Romney raced back and forth so often between mutually exclusive points of view that it's a small wonder he made it past the primaries early this year. (Speaking of which: Yeti, I think I still owe you that $20 from betting Rick Perry would be the Republican candidate.) In his defense, he really had no choice, if choice it was at all. At the same time he had to appear acceptable to those Democrats that may be receptive to a different direction from Barack Obama and, as Kelsey Grammer said on an episode of 'The Simpsons,' '...a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king.' And the direct result of this was him tripping over his own feet time and time again, giving the Democrats more ammunition than they could use.

So the question becomes how the Republicans will act in the future. They spent the last two years, at least, since Mitch McConnell's notorious 'one-term President' remarks, obstructing everything that could breathe new life into the American economy. Will this become the norm for how they conduct themselves going forward? Worse yet is the question that prompts me to write this diatribe: do they have a choice? The Republicans have effectively, and for far more reasons than I've listed here, labelled themselves as a fanatical group of right-wing zealots. In this election cycle, it's become more and more apparent that this is the behaviour their base expects of them. Birtherism still rears its ugly head from time to time, and their demagoguery of 'socialist policies' that we Canadians treasure above all else, our health care system chief among them, continues a rampant charge. The Republicans in the end have no choice but to follow the policies demanded upon by those that elect them.

In the end, I can't help but consider the Republicans going forward to be a group of lemmings, walking across a tightrope stretched over the Grand Canyon, with a pack of wolves waiting on the other side. They can follow their instincts, trying to appease 50.1% of the voting population in their own radical way, and run the risk of falling off the rope. Or, they can fight their instinct, break conformity, and run on policies that will in many cases run contrary to political doctrine in their party, only to be torn to shreds by the wolves in their own party.

I will grant that some of them will make it over the rope and past the fangs - it's a near inevitability. What worries me is that one day, one of the more fanatical, and potentially psychotic ones, may manage to run the gauntlet and move into 1600 Pennsylvania. One of them nearly made it four years ago, and only needed a 72-year-old cancer survivor to win the election, and have his heart conk out to reach the pinnacle of power. Now, as a Canadian, I find myself asking if that is the kind of person I want guarding the world's largest nuclear stockpile?

May God grant me the opportunity to move to New Zealand.