Realignment?

For all of Karl Rove's hyperventilating over the last eight years about a Republican realignment, this election may be the real realignment. Demographic developments have been favoring Democrats for sometime now (this blog focuses on the Democratic trend) and they are finally expressing themselves in the nation's politics.

Having played to immigration fears and outright xenophobia, national Republicans may fall to the same kind of fate that California Republicans did after Governor Pete Wilson's decision to use anti-immigration fervor to help win re-election in 1994 - despite the fact that Hispanics were becoming a larger and larger portion of the electorate. California Republicans have yet to recover from that self-inflicted wound, and may not do so for decades to come. The same dynamic may be at work nationwide!

Since Bush took power in 2000, we have been living a kind of hallucinatory, fast-forward version of the 1920's. Certainly the fundamentalist preachers sound much the same. The scapegoats are superficially different, but Prohibition, with its schizophrenic law-breaking codes, lives on in modern gay-baiting, with its closeted homosexual subtext. Palmer raids live on in the bowels of the Department of Homeland Security. The 1927 Mississippi flood lives on in Hurricane Katrina's 2005 New Orleans' devastation. Much as the 2004 election reminded me of the 1928 election (with urban Catholic Al Smith and urbane Catholic John Kerry as losing Democratic candidates), the 2008 election, with its financial chaos, reminds me of 1932 - a kinder, gentler version of 1932, of course - but 1932 nevertheless.

2012 = 1936? Obama = FDR? Is an enduring Blue America at hand?