The last Twentieth Century election?

I always mistrust analysis of events that happen too soon and give them too great an importance. But this article — on how the election of 2006 may turn out to be a watershed — in ways that do not bode well for either the GOP (as demonstrated) or their Democratic successors — is an interesting read.

Washington pundits still persist in portraying our recent elections as a series of waves, alternately sweeping in the proponents of a blue team or a red team; by this theory, first came the Republican surge 12 years ago, and now comes the Democratic countersurge. But in fact, these two waves are more accurately viewed as part of the same continuous seismic disturbance: the growing frustration of voters with the Washington crowd of both parties, who seem stuck in the same ideological debate they were having in
1975, while the rest of the country struggles mightily with the emerging economic and international threats of 2006. After the midterms, that tidal resentment has now washed away both of our old governing philosophies: the expansive and often misguided liberalism that dominated American politics up through the 1970s, as well as the impractical, mean-spirited brand of conservatism that rose up in reaction to it.

 

It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins. Or, as Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist, recently put it in making much the same argument, ”Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century.” The
era of baby-boomer politics – with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all – is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological – and not a moment too soon.

(via kottke)