"The Slow, Grinding Phase"

If any of you were still harboring the hope that the current doldrums wrought by GOP RINOism were just a momentary trough or a reversible sag in the onmarching center-right revolution, Jonah Goldberg has some news for you that may make you want to consider avoiding high, open windows any time soon:

Behold: We have entered the Age When DINOs and RINOs Rule the Earth. See them battle each other for absolute dominion!

Though this might sound like a cool monster mash of the "Mechagodzilla versus Godzilla" variety, it's a good deal less exciting and more depressing, like a taste test between 2% milk and soy milk. What we are witnessing is the dawn of the boring phase of the Great Republican Realignment, and it promises to have liberals and conservatives alike going bonkers....

Which means it won't be "boring," but rather infuriatingly frustrating:

[W]hen tectonic plates smash into each other, there are earthquakes and, after that, it's slow inexorable grinding, with little chunks breaking off of one side and then the other now and then. That's where conservatives are now: the slow, grinding phase.

If you average out the spikes in the political Richter scale, the trends have been obvious for more than a decade: The Democrats are becoming a minority party. The 1990s saw them hemorrhage power in the House, Senate, state legislatures, etc., even as Bill Clinton [pretended to move] his party to the right on many of its core issues....

And we aren't drinking out of slippers here on the right either. Bush is a lame duck, Social Security reform is dead, the dreams of the revolution come up only when we gather around the campfire to sigh about what might have been. The RINOs are in charge now. Drilling in ANWR was pulled from the House appropriations budget, tax-cut extensions in the Senate were crushed in deference to the fearsome clout of ... Olympia Snowe. Even on judges, the power players are the Gang of 14 centrists and RINOs like Arlen Specter. It was Specter, not Kennedy, who gave John G. Roberts Jr. the toughest questions during his hearings.

The most depressing prospect is that this will be the status quo for years to come.

Personally, I'm not sold on J-Gold's sense of overpowering resignation. For one thing, a "Great Republican Realignment" that leaves "centrists" running the country doesn't sound like much of a Republican anything. And since GOP "moderation," despite all the dishonest extollation it receives in the left-wing press (think Giuliani and McCain), has been the formula for political death for the better part of forever, any "realignment" so situated is not one that can last even in the short-term.

The irony is that Democrat moderation, to the degree that it actually even exists, is eminently entrenchable, but has been an endangered species going all the way back to Scoop Jackson's 1972 presidential run and is by this time just about extinct.

The likely result of the interaction between these two phenomenon isn't "slow grinding," but rather perpetual oscillation within a limited spectral range. GOP voters, fed up with their party's bowing down to the vestigal Rockefeller wing, stay home in '06, leading to smaller majorities at best, or Democrat takeovers at worst. Then perhaps a Hillary Clinton presidential run revives Republican enthusiasm and that carries George Allen and Condi Rice to an upset victory in 2008. And back and forth and back and forth, neither side ever able to fully establish itself as a governing hegemony.

Call it the "bump & grind" phase.

And the only thing that will be established as a status quo is the constant, unremittingly vicious rancor that dominates the political landscape today.

Hey, I only said my take differed from Goldberg's; I didn't say that take was any more upbeat.

So stay away from high open windows until further notice.