Zakaria and DeLong on the GOP

Brad DeLong quotes Fareed Zakaria's depressing review of the state of the GOP presidential race:

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood," he recently declared.

But Iran is a Shiite power and actually helped the United States topple the Qaeda-backed Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Qaeda-affiliated radical Sunnis are currently slaughtering Shiites in Iraq, and Iranian-backed Shiite militias are responding by executing and displacing Iraq's Sunnis. We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war -- putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It's stupidity.

I think every presidential debate on both sides should start with one of the candidates being asked to explain the differences between Shiites and Sunnis, as Jeff Stein of CQ has been doing.

Unfortunately, DeLong's response to Zakaria was to call on "patriotic Americans" to "shut down" the GOP as a "liability and a danger we can no longer afford":

I think it's clearly time for all patriotic Americans to join in one common task: to shut down the Republican Party. It's liability and a danger we can no longer afford.

In a two-party system, this kind of rhetoric borders on the anti-democratic.

Update 6/5 6:30 AM: In a comment, DeLong writes:

It's not anti-Democratic, it's anti-Republican.

A two-party system is a good thing--but not if one of the parties is the Republican Party as Zakaria describes it. We need to shut it down, and replace it with a different opposition to the Democrats.

But of course, I didn't write that his statement was "anti-Democratic," I said it was "anti-democratic." There's a big difference.

More fundamentally, you don't get to pick the opposition party that you want. Calling on "patriotic Americans" to shut down the opposition party and replace it with one more to your liking is, well, anti-democratic. Consider this -- if President Bush called on all patriotic Americans to shut down the Democratic Party, do you think DeLong would consider it a justified expression of his views or an attack on the democratic process?

(As always, I'll also note the substantial obstacles to third party success, which are extremely high if you want to supplant one of the two major parties -- the last time it happened was the mid-19th century when the Republicans replaced the Whigs.)

Comments

[Brad DeLong]

It's not anti-Democratic, it's anti-Republican.

A two-party system is a good thing--but not if one of the parties is the Republican Party as Zakaria describes it. We need to shut it down, and replace it with a different opposition to the Democrats.

[Lou Delgado]

Brendan:

Come on ... by shut down he means DEFEAT.

This from Dr. Zakaria is saying a lot.

Best --
Lou

[Lou Delgado]

Ooops. Sorry wrong attribution.
Lou