Sidney Blumenthal

The 2008 election is poised to end the Republican era in American politics — an era that began in reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Vietnam war and the civil rights revolution, was pioneered by Richard Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan and wrecked by George W Bush. Almost every aspect of the Republican ascendancy has been discredited and lies in tatters — its policies, politics, and even its version of patriotism — down to the rock-bottom notion that progressive taxation, initiated by a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who John McCain hails as his personal icon, is unpatriotic.

McCain’s own chronic helplessness in establishing rapport, prompting him to latch on to mediums from Sarah Palin to Joe the Plumber, is aggravated by his party’s decay. He is a character to make the last stand on behalf of a party he has been at odds with his whole career. McCain is less a victim of age than of the age — the end of the age of Reagan. Realignments in American politics are the consequence of catastrophe. The coming of the civil war produced the Republican party that more or less ruled until the Great Depression brought about the New Deal.

The modern Republican era began with the fragmentation of the liberal Democratic consensus in 1968 over Vietnam, civil rights and urban mayhem. Southerners and the urban ethnic working and middle classes shifted allegiance, forging a coalition that delivered 49 states first to Nixon in 1972 and then to Reagan in 1984. The strange death of Republican America has been a long time in the making. As early as 1988, the Reagan coalition threatened to unravel. Only when the Republican candidate, George W Bush, resorted to a vicious campaign, conjuring the pledge of allegiance to the flag and an African-American rapist named Willie Horton, against a worthy and weak Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, was the hold on power preserved.

Despite Bush’s unprecedented unpopularity and the general disgrace of the Republicans, two weeks after the Republican convention McCain led in the polls and the key swing states. He appeared to be defying political gravity. Obama, still an uncertainty, was sliding. Then came the crushing blow of the economic crisis, which brought out the greatest vulnerabilities of the Republicans. Now, certain factors that have dominated US politics for 40 years seem destined to recede to the far corners.

In economics, supply-side panaceas and deregulation created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, requiring a conservative Republican administration to part-nationalise banks, something unimaginable under any Democratic administration. In foreign policy, neoconservatism led to the morass in Iraq and Afghanistan while undermining the western alliance. In social policy, the evangelical right battered science, the separation of church and state, and the right to privacy. Finally, the conservative principle of limited government has become a watchword for incompetence, cronyism, corruption, hypocrisy, and contempt for the rule of law.

Obama may still be an unknown quantity, but the judgment will be made about the known. The election will determine more than the identity of the president. It will decide whether one era is to end and another will begin.