Rick Perlstein | The Nation

After Lyndon Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, pundits incorrectly predicted the decline of the Republican party. (AP Photo/Bob Daugherty.)

Following Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney a certain argument became ubiquitous: the argument from demographic inevitability. That the Republican Party, absent deep-seated changes that are all but unimaginable, is in for a generation or more of electoral doom. Indeed the argument was being made long before the votes were even cast. Here was Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, etching the argument sharply almost a year ago:

The University of Chicago campus. (Courtesy of Wikimedia.)

As a freelance political writer living in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that encompasses the University of Chicago, it has frequently been my lot to be haunted by bright-eyed twentysomethings. They seek my professional counsel. Or are just eager to talk about politics. We have lunch; I take on all comers (presuming they’ll buy me lunch). One day in the middle of 2008, the fellow who approached me was named Alex Beinstein.

(AP Photo/Drew Angerer.)

I’m fascinated by Barack Obama’s arts of denial. Here we are in the midst of the greatest string of organized rule-bending and -breaking and norm violation by an opposition party perhaps in American history. Just this past week, consider the story from Virginia, where Republicans rammed through a redistricting plan by taking advantage of a brief respite in the State Senate’s 20-20 Democrat-Republican split—because a black state senator, a civil rights hero, was in Washington attending the inauguration. But that was just an especially egregious example of a decade-long pattern: Squeezing all the Democrats in an area into massively super-majority districts, Republican state legislators gerrymander their way past any semblance of democracy—for instance in Pennsylvania, which voted 54 percent for Barack Obama, but whose US House delegation is overwhelmed by Republicans, thirteen to five. It’s cheating, and they’re working hard to leverage that gerrymandering to fix presidential elections, as Nation colleague John Nichols notes: RNC chair Reince Priebus “is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.”

Ah, Algeria: thirty-two militants killed in a ill-advised raid of a hostage compound, but at the expense of twenty-three hostages’ lives (as of last count), saving face, posthaste, being judged more important than saving lives. What kind of testosterone-besotted incompetent fourth-raters could botch a “rescue” like that?

Why, our own beloved United States, of course, which once upon a time did something even more splenetically macho, unilateral, and stupid.

It was May 12, 1975. Not a fortnight earlier, the South Vietnamese army in whose cause America had bestowed hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and expended 56,000 lives, collapsed in the field and started randomly killing civilians and each other. A Viet Cong tank crashed through the gate of the South Vietnamese presidential palace in Saigon, immediately re-dubbed “Ho Chi Minh City.” A chaotic helicopter evacuation of 1,000 American diplomatic and security personnel and 5,500 South Vietnamese (supposedly loyal embassy employees and such, but mostly people with the money and savage cunning to bribe or force their way aboard), ended in that indelibly humiliating image of a line of teeming bodies snaking up a ladder to a precipitous shack atop the embassy roof, the embassy grounds having commandeered by what Henry Kissinger had once confidently dubbed a “fourth rate military power,” North Vietnam (now just “Vietnam”).