Take the conservatives.  Right now, their obstructionist tack is not only supremely annoying, it is actually a horrible political strategy.  I understand what they are doing. I get it.  They rightly believe that the economy is going to continue to tank for at least the first couple years of Obama's term.  So they are making the calculated choice of detaching themselves from any government stimulus plans, pounding their lecterns and spittling their radio mikes with invectives about waste, pork, fraud, and socialism.  Now, as we briefly outlined last time, this is an incredibly ballsy and hypocritical tactic, considering that the wreckage we see all around us was healthily augmented on their watch. But considering the short attention span of the American public and the mainstream media, it just might work.  After all, no matter how willing people seem right now to grant Obama a long grace period, a year from now, when unemployment has surged past double digits, and global depression is stretched out before us for decades, the reservoir of patience could well be gone.  Hungry, jobless people are not too comfortable with long policy timetables. So on the one hand, it may seem a highly pragmatic and positive tactic for conservatives to take themselves out of the stimulus process and wait for the situation to worsen.  Then they can swoop in for the mid-tern elections with a completely antagonistic platform, rack up some great gains, and lay the groundwork for beating Obama in 2012.  After all, if you think that the economy is going to bust no matter what gets done, then why have your fingerprints on it?

On the other hand, this cynical conservative strategy will ultimately prove empty, if not fatal.  Yes, it is likely that things will get much worse before they get better, if they even get better at all (which I actually doubt they will). But without some Republican involvement in shaping efforts to improve the national condition, they will not only open themselves up to electoral ridicule, they run the risk of turning their own minions into out-of-control fascist fodder.  Sure, it's easy to imagine a successful GOP electoral platform that blames the Democrats for the current and coming collapses.  But it is just as easy to imagine voters being swayed by an accusation that conservatives essentially betrayed their country by checking out of the most serious policy-shaping period since the Great Depression. Just when we needed them most, just when we needed bipartisan cooperation and an end to petty politicking, the Republicans picked up their marbles and went pouting home to the great nourishing haunches of Limbaughian vitriol.  By bailing out on a President who is reaching out as far across the aisle as possible, the GOP is essentially guilty of treason, of giving aid and comfort to the country's enemies. 

While the conservative miscalculation on the next couple election cycles is serious enough, the more dangerous element here is the fuel that they are giving to their rabid minions.  A conservative friend of mine, who is actually not rabid nor evangelical, recently said to me that Obama is going to go down as the worst President in American history.  And this was at least three weeks ago, a scant few days after the inauguration.  Now, I obviously did not vote for John McCain.  But if he had won the election, I would not be wishing failure for him, nor would I be making inaugural-month predictions of his impending awfulness.  Especially considering the dismal state of our nation, I would be pulling for a President McCain as hard as I could.  But on the conservative side, there is a wellspring of surging sentiment that wants no good to ever come out of anything liberal, or even slightly leftish.  Following the buffoonish Reagan, many always see government as the enemy, deserving of a Nordquistian drowning in the bathtub.  As Thomas Frank described in The Wrecking Crew, this crowd actually wants the government to fail, and fail spectacularly -- because that confirms their pre-existing ideology that gub'mint is bad for America. 

But this gamble at wishing for a deeper American wreckage will bite the Republicans in the ass. For beneath the conservative notion that they will garner electoral advantage via the Obama-fueled depression is the idea that someday, the economy actually will recover and improve.  They are banking (pardon the pun) that what we are experiencing now is just a deeper-than-normal trough in the business cycle, and that once the bad debt and bad habits are worked out of the system, things will eventually improve.  The GOP is just gambling that it will be a matter of timing: things will not get better soon enough to save the Democratic candidates in 2010 and 2012, which will open the door for conservative majorities, majorities that will coincidentally be around to reap the rewards when the eventual recovery comes.  Indeed, economic recovery as luck is all but built in to the conservative philosophy, since by definition the government cannot improve things.  

Unfortunately, we are not in a normal business cycle.  We are in fact seeing the dissolution of the American Algorithm, and all of the full employment, high consumption goodies that went with it.  The "lifestyle" of the 80s and 90s is not coming back, and the basic building blocks of our civilization will crumble and give way.  If the Republicans do happen to recapture some seats in the next couple elections, they will find as their constituency a seething mass of underemployed, hungry, angry zombies, ready to wield their political representatives as cudgels against all manner of foreign and domestic scapegoats.  We are heading for the kind of sociopolitical dynamics that create Islamic terrorism and good old-fashioned Western fascism.  Jobless, hungry, enraged people do not make the best democratic citizens.  And by abstaining from involvement in the current policy debates, conservatives are giving full license for any future domestic violence that emerges from our imploding national landscape.  I hope it's worth it for them.