I have stopped paying attention to politics but I love delicious writing. Jonathan Rauch – The Zombie Party:
“It is the summer of 2008. I am watching the telecast of the Republican convention with a sinking feeling. Here is Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts (repeat: Massachusetts), and current quarter-billionaire (that’s “billion,” with a B), denounces “Eastern elites.” Excuse me? Then he says we need change “from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington”–as if George McGovern, not George W. Bush, had been president for eight years.
Here is Rudy Giuliani. The former mayor of New York City (repeat: New York City) sneers that Democrats are “cosmopolitan.” He paints the election as “we, the people” against “the media” and “Hollywood celebrities.” As if it were Barack Obama who had spent most of his life and career in New York and whose second wife (second of three, by the way) was a television personality and star of The Vagina Monologues.
The crowd eats it up. Me, I am a little stunned. Even a convention audience, I would have thought, could not be manipulated so obviously, so cheaply. Ah, but now Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee, takes her turn. Surely, I tell myself, the bad-cop, snarling Giuliani has set the stage for an optimistic, big-tent, Reaganesque “City on a Hill” speech.
But no: We get the pit bull with lipstick. Palin is an unknown quantity, a neophyte in national politics. Yet Republicans who once might have wondered where a potential president stands on major issues now find it more than enough to know that she is a pro-life hockey mom who annoys liberals and can field dress a moose. It becomes evident, as they adulate her, that they regard her provinciality as being, in and of itself, a qualification for the presidency. As I watch, it dawns on me that the American conservative movement is not just down on its luck, it is zombiefied.”
And more specifically the definition of a zombie party. Alas it’s not only about political parties:
Further reading:“We know what happens when movements or parties continue to stagger forward after running out of ideas: They become zombies. Zombie parties are a recurrent feature of electoral democracies. Unable to articulate any coherent or workable governing philosophy, they mindlessly jab at cultural hot buttons, mechanically repeat hardwired tropes (“cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes”), nurse tribal resentments, ostracize independent thinkers. Above all, they feel positively proud of their doggedness. You can’t talk them out of it. Think of the Republicans in the FDR years, the Democrats in the Reagan years, the British Labour Party in the Thatcher period, and the British Conservative Party in the Blair period. Think of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party for most of the past half-century, or France’s Socialists today. To get a new brain, zombie parties usually need to spend years out of power or wait until a new generation rises to leadership.”