 I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
It's that transition--from one form to another, much like the phase transitions from solid to liquid or liquid to gas--that's what slime molds have in common with the GOP. Only instead of the chemical secretion bringing them all together into one super-organism, it's the other way around: they're secreting chemicals like there's no tomorrow, and flying off in all directions at once. It's almost as if they were a slime mold living backwards through time.
As the Democratic Party is not only growing in size, and growing more coherent in its policy, but also attracting increasing support from independents and Republicans, the exact opposite is happening to the GOP. It's not just a matter of religious conservatives vs. "free market" types, much less conservatives vs. moderates (both of them!) It's much worse than that. Like a disintegrating slime mold, they are falling apart into separate lumps--the Sarah Palin lump, the (rather tiny) not-Joe-the-not-Plumber lump, the always-reincarnating Newt Gingrich lump, the (possibly now extinct) Bobby Jindal lump, the (utterly hilarious) Michael Steele lump, and of course, the Rush Limbaugh ubber-lump.
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In order to defend the honor of the slime molds, I want to present a somewhat more detailed life-cycle description from Wikipedia:
The Dictyosteliida, cellular slime molds, are distantly related to the plasmodial slime molds and have a very different life style. Their amoebae do not form huge coenocytes, and remain individual. They live in similar habitats and feed on microorganisms. When food runs out and they are ready to form sporangia, they do something radically different. They release signal molecules into their environment, by which they find each other and create swarms. These amoeba then join up into a tiny multicellular slug-like coordinated creature, which crawls to an open lit place and grows into a fruiting body. Some of the amoebae become spores to begin the next generation, but some of the amoebae sacrifice themselves to become a dead stalk, lifting the spores up into the air.
As you can see, there are crucial distinctions between cellular slime molds and the GOP. These include:
(1) When slime molds run low on sustenance, they secrete a chemical signal that attracts them to all pull together first into swarms, then into a super-organism. When the GOP runs low on sustenance, it secretes a chemical signal that drives it to split apart, first into swarms, then into infantile balls of rage.
(2) With the slime mold, some of the amoebae sacrifice themselves, in order to lift the spores of the next generation up into the air, the better for them to be able to travel far, and find a new, more hospitable home. The GOP, OTOH, has no self-sacrifice, no desire to lift up the next generation, and certainly no desire to go anyplace new. It just stays right where it is, with the intent of making life impossible for itself or anyone else.
(3) Although slime molds appear to be an utterly alien form of life, as if from another planet, they exhibit a fascinating pattern of growth and development that has its own abstract beauty to it. Republicans, OTOH, look eerily almost exactly like us. And yet, they exhibit such grotesque patterns of decay and disintegration as to seem truly as alien at their core as slime molds only seem to be in their outward visible aspect.
There is, surprisingly, a serious point to all this. Fragmented collapse is one form of response to the waning of a political party system as it moves toward realignment. Both the Federalists and the Whigs disappeared prior to the realigning elections that brought the next party system into being. This makes perfect sense, since American political parties are typically coalitions of different groups (sort of like the slime mold swarms coming together to form super-organisms). As conditions change, it becomes increasing difficult for the old coalitions to hold together. They must either find some way to reinvigorate their collaborative relationships, find new coalition partners to bring together, suffer a gradual diminution, or else simply collapse.
While the GOP did not outwardly fragment prior to the 2008 election--and, indeed, may never disappear the way the Federalists and the Whigs did before it--it most certainly did fragment internally. This could clearly be seen in the run-up to the 2008 election, and even before it. Perhaps the earliest sign was the neo-conservative power-grab. The neo-conservatives were always a numerically small group (currently pretending that they don't exist and never did) which wielded enormous power precisely because there was a huge power vacuum left by larger conservative factions that couldn't establish hegemony beyond their own ranks. The simultaneous spread of complete incompetence and complete politicization was the swiftly-following next stage in the pseudo-slime mold life-cycle...or death-cycle, if you will. Decay is what has long given the GOP life--40 years of the politics of resentment--but it's finally caught up with them, and they are going through their decay process at lightening speed.
Unfortunately, the Versailles Dems seem incapable of realizing this, and are doing everything possible, not only to keep the GOP alive and relevant, but at the same time to join in with the rotting process themselves. The Wall Street bailout is the clearest example of this, but there are signs, large and small, in virtually every issue area. So it's no time to stand back and laugh at the GOP. It's time to reflect long and hard on how to avoid becoming exactly like they are now. |
