One party to rule them all: have journalists finally figured out the GOP's game plan?

• Author: Schmitt, Mark
• Position: One Party Country and Building Red America - Book review

One Party Country By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten Wiley, $25.95

Building Red America By Thomas B. Edsall Basic Books, $26.00

Last fall, after President Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, the conservative blog Redstate.com explained the vehement opposition to the choice. It was not so much doubts about Miers's conservatism, but the very fact that she could win confirmation without a fight: "[The White House] does not understand how badly some of us want the final showdown with the Dems."

"The final showdown" is a concept that fits awkwardly into the American democratic tradition. Democracy is by its nature a process of continual refinement and accommodation of new ideas, in which no answers are quite final, no structure of power permanent. While liberal ideas had their decades of ascendance, that was not the result of a conscious plan to battle opposing views to the death. And the happy accident that ideology, political party, and economic interest did not follow the same lines kept things always in flux. While it is always naive to think that the good old days were free from political lies and sabotage, there was generally an assumption that everyone would wake up the next morning and start the fight anew, perhaps with the advantage shifted or lines changed. The Armageddon strain in American politics is a new one.

It has taken a while for journalists, Democrats, and even many rank-and-file Republicans to understand that the DeLay-Rove Republicans were playing a very different game. "These guys are playing for keeps," a recent fundraising letter signed by James Carville warned me. The tactics that Rove calls "game-changers" were intended not just to win an election or two, but to use those victories to rig the rules forever.

The quest for permanent power has finally been chronicled in these two books, one by a pair of Los Angeles Times journalists and the other by the veteran Thomas B. Edsall, formerly of The Washington Post. The books differ dramatically in style and emphasis, and should be read together. Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten concentrate on Republican and White House tactics in a fairly straightforward work of journalism, while Edsall's book is more expansive and daring, traversing economic and demographic trends, history, culture, ideology and political institutions, armed with a bucket full of statistics, to map the external conditions that make those tactics possible.

All three authors are likely nervous that their books will appear just weeks before the 2006 election, and it could be that in November, the argument that the GOP was seeking to establish "permanent power" will seem a bit premature. Indeed, Edsall falters at the very end and admits that the current political setup is "in disequilibrium; if it were a corporation it would be ripe for takeover," although he believes that only a third-party candidate or a true insurgent within one of the major parties could capitalize on this instability. In fact, both books set out to prove that the Republican structure of power is built to survive election defeats, and that the Democratic weakness can persist despite victories, and for the most part, they are persuasive.

The great conservative narrative that drives this quest for power--the theory of history shared by Karl Rove, George Bush, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, and all their allies--is the myth of a loss of nerve. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and even Newt Gingrich, they believe, all pulled back before that final showdown. They were held back by civility, by a tendency to think of Democrats as partners in government rather than as The Enemy, by fear of bad poll results, by fear of the press, by a sense of the Things That Just Aren't Done, or by shame. As Edsall points out, "the ability to act without shame is a powerful political weapon." The Republican drive for permanent power as told in these books is mostly a story of disabling all those brakes, to ensure that hesitations--such as George H.W. Bush's agreement to a tax-raising bipartisan budget summit in 1990--can never occur...