As far as I’m concerned, American politics has entered a transitional period - the Republican Party has fallen into a tailspin and the Democrats’ ideology is vague enough that at this point almost anything could happen. In light of this, I’d like to offer a hypothesis explaining the current situation and a sober warning to the right - whose countervailing influence, however unpleasant, is ultimately necessary to purge the left of its unreasonable transitory fetishes.

As the Baby Boomers age out of the mainstream, we find ourselves approaching the year in which no one who has ever seen an ideologically coherent Republican Party is voting. Since the mid-1960s, and especially since the fall of Nixon, the concept of conservatism has gradually been fading away, replaced with something irretrievably vile - for it was the explosive growth of youth culture, and the violent reaction to anything it represented, that violently set the nagging influence of reactionary instincts free. Starting with Goldwater, an ideology with identifiable principles giving a clear origin to its praxis could no longer be said to exist for the Republicans.

Long story short: freaking out about the Dirty Fucking Hippies did this to you, because many of the best and brightest among the DFHs were as deeply conservative as you - and yet the Republican mainstream continuously decried them, denied them ideological access, and forced them into an uncomfortable marriage of convenience with the left.

The Sexual Revolution was an incredibly useful tool for maintaining in a disaffected generation a strong interest in the products of commercial capitalism; the surge of interest in ecology and pollution gave romantic localism (one of the right’s strongest draws in older times, and perhaps its single strongest rallying point in Europe) a shot in the arm. The hippies were spiritual without trusting intellectual theologians; they were interested in change without being interested in revolution; and they later turned out to have a real knack for turning the products of an emergent globalism into inoffensive pap. If it hadn’t been for twisted-up monsters like Goldwater, you’d have claimed world music (comfortably capitalist from the word go) instead of new country (all-too-heavy with that parvenu’s eagerness to escape its socialist roots); you’d have claimed charity and foreign aid instead of finding any idiot glibbie willing to toss you a proverbial liferaft and rather more proverbially jumping aboard as if it were the Cock Boat; and you’d still have a wide coalition of churches at your back instead of a dwindling population of lunatics who feel your insanity will bring Jesus closer to destroying the Jews.

Instead, the Democrats have maintained the cultural momentum of the 1960s, and you became the soulless, shameless party of the rat race. It gained you enough support with dour Calvinist corporatists and bloody-minded fascist cowards to keep you alive as a party - and, indeed, skilled bullshit artists like Reagan and Bush have kept you in elections, along with the enormous amounts of cash you take in being corporate whores - but you’ve lost any kind of deeper principles. Any ideology that associates strongly with the right, with evolutionary change, with pride of place, with capitalism, and in general with the Good Life your forefathers have quested after since TR - they’ve all become our unpleasantly dynamic cousins, uncomfortable fellow travellers to a destination neither of us is happy with.

And a fat lot of good it does us! Because of a tiny population of doddering old idiots freaking out about the mop-topped kids on their lawn, you lack a future in politics and we lack the ability to go out in public and get things done without becoming part of a movement to strengthen third-world dependency on us, to keep scientific progress from compromising bodily sovereignty, or to further shunt all of society’s roads into the service-capitalist middle-class.

We offer you two solutions; one of them is specific and one of them is broad.

a. Never again judge a book by its cover. Yes, the DFHs were uppity youngsters, but some of the best right-wing thinkers have been intolerable to their coideologists. Every movement I’ve named above is a product of middle-class thinkers in recent memory, and if their political sympathies ever shifted at all it was out of pure situational necessity. Besides which, sometimes the quirks are a blessing in disguise - look up the respective partisan affiliations of Frank Sinatra and Paul McCartney sometime, and bear in mind which pony Goldwater and Reagan picked - for no reason except puerile fixation on aesthetics.

b. Start working for principles instead of people. You’ve been slaving away to satisfy not just the narrow interests of a small faction of America’s super-rich but their crass tastes and stupid bigotries. It’s become far too easy for us just to bide our time and wait for you to make assholes of yourselves; we can find gotchas about Ron Paul that make him look like a racist fucknut, but he’s got identifiable beliefs.

Balk at all this however much you like, but you’d do best to remember that the Man the hippies fulminated against authored the Great Society and the EPA; you’ve always had the same enemies, you’ve just been too credulous when wealthy white misanthropes snatch the mic to give it a moment’s thought.