The Republican Party needs to be put out of its misery. A functioning Republic needs at least one opposition party, but the current and likely final iteration of the Republican Party is not it. The current iteration of the Democratic Party could be it, should it continue to fail to live up to its greatest history and increasingly mythological ideals, but that would depend on the creation of a legitimately viable progressive party, and for now at least that is not going to happen. But for the Democratic Party to recapture the magic of its greatest history, or failing that for a legitimately viable liberal party to emerge from the wreckage that is our current political system, the Republican Party must be put out of its misery. Whether you are a loyal Democrat, a wavering frustrated Democrat, a progressive Independent, or whether you are dreaming of the emergence of a legitimately viable liberal alternative, the Republican Party must be put out of its misery. All liberals and progressives should be able to unite behind that idea. Because if the Republican Party is put out of its misery, the Democrats no longer will be able to use the Republicans as excuse or foil and will once and for all finally be forced to prove what they are or aren't really about.

The embarrassment of embarrasments that is the Republican presidential field ought to be the final proof that the Republican Party has ceased to serve any valuable role in our political system. The lunatics have taken over. The Republican rejection of science and rationality once served various tactical purposes, but in previous generations it always was a feint to the theocrats whose primary political purpose for the Republicans was to enable the kleptocrats and the neo-Royalists. But while the Republican financial base continues to be those extremely wealthy who lack all conscience, its voting base now is the ignorant and the reality challenged. Most of the current Republican presidential field is not merely playing to this base, it is of it. No serious person can look at Herman Cain or Rick Perry or Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum and see a future president. In a less surreal world these would be but cartoon characters. And yet one of them or someone equally absurd still may become the Republican presidential nominee. The base of the party desperately hopes so.

According to most polls, Mitt Romney remains the Republican frontrunner. That alone is proof of this essay's thesis. Had he not been born into political aristocracy, Romney's highest career aspiration may have been realized as a game show host. His entire political resume consists of a single term as governor, which he himself ended by not seeking reelection, largely because it was clear he would not have been reelected, thus destroying his hopes of becoming president. But as semi-permanent presidential candidate, Romney has spent the bulk of his campaign strategy running away from his own policy record as governor. Think about that. The leading Republican presidential candidate's main qualification to leadership is a single term in political office the accomplishments of which he'd rather everyone forget. Overall on policy, his astonishing whiplash flipflops are now coming at such a furious pace it leaves the observer dizzy. As People for the American Way's Michael B. Keegan summarized:

In Ohio, he endorsed a bill that took a sledgehammer to workers' rights, then couldn't decide if he would oppose its repeal, then finally decided he was for the anti-worker bill all along. On Tuesday, Ohio voters killed the bill by a whopping 61-39 percent margin. The former governor performed an almost unbelievable flip-flop on a proposed referendum in Mississippi, which would have defined "personhood" as beginning at the moment of fertilization -- thereby banning not only all abortions regardless of circumstances, but also hormonal birth control, in vitro fertilization and the treatment of ectopic pregnancies. Asked about such "personhood" bills by Mike Huckabee, Romney said he "absolutely" supported them. Asked by a participant at a town hall meeting whether he really supported banning hormonal birth control, Romney hedged the question. Finally, the day after Mississippi resoundingly rejected the restrictive amendment, surprise! Romney's campaign came out to clarify that he was on the side of the majority after all, that he had never supported personhood, and thought these decisions should be left up to the states anyway. Got that? Pick the one of those three positions that work best for you.

And that was in but a few days. And those elections last Tuesday also demonstrate just how extreme and out of touch the Republican Party itself has mutated to be. It tried to take on unions and working people in Ohio, of all places, and not surprisingly got buried. Its war on women is so obsessively bizarre that even Mississippi rejected it. With the polls showing the national electorate wants at least a semblance of economic fairness and justice, the Republicans continue to demand cuts in social services, more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, and perpetual subsidies to the wealthiest industries. With the scientific evidence screaming about a climate crisis that is now more here than impending, the Republicans remain deliberately oblivious. If someone two decades ago had scripted the current political climate, no one would have bought it. Other than as lackeys to oligarchs, and as televangelists as imagined in Hunter Thompson's most fevered hallucination, what purpose does the modern Republican Party serve? The Democrats must put the Republican Party out of its misery. For the sake of the nation. For the sake of the world. For the sake of the proposition that the human race is evolving forward and not sideways and upside down.

You want a better Democratic Party? You have to vote for the current one. Plenty of progressives and liberals and non-identifiable idealists are exhausted by that argument. The Democrats disappoint on so many issues, and in so many ways resemble what the Republican Party once was. There is no argument with that. But the failures of the modern Democratic Party are symptoms more than causes. There is no easy cure. But one path to a cure is to deny them their foil and excuse. Take away the modern Republican Party and the Democrats will stand, wobble, and fall on their own, or they will reawaken to what the party has occasionally proved itself capable of being. The Democratic Party has been the only viable party to champion a social safety net, economic and human justice, and even the concepts of environmental and international responsibility. That doesn't mean the party has come anywhere close to consistently working toward those ends, but it has had its moments. And the best that this nation's government was in the past century was almost entirely due to Democratic Party policies. And there still are plenty of elected Democrats working consistently toward idealized ends. We need more of these better Democrats. We need to empower them. And the party's overall drift to the right and into subservience to plutocracy would not have been possible had the Republicans not continually defined dystopianism down. But no one wants the Republicans anymore. Only a tiny minority of this country's electorate still believes in Republican ideals.

The 2008 election could have been the beginning of the end, and many thought it was. Many believed the Republicans were about to go the way of the Whigs. But those believing such overestimated both the political skills and policy goals of a Democratic Party that has grown complacent and been corrupted by its self-satisfaction in merely not being as bad as them. It seems a paradox: the only way to liberate the Democratic Party from its own propensity to failure is to fully empower it. Putting the Republican Party out of its misery would be a good thing at face value, but it also would force the Democrats to prove themselves. No more excuses. No more emulations that are rationalized as compromises and capitulations. Let the Democrats prove what they are rather than resorting to gloating over what they are not. The Democrats then will stand as the party of true progression or they will find themselves challenged by something new and viable and vibrant.

Something is stirring in the streets. Something is awakening to public consciousness. The Democrats do not yet seem to understand it, but it will transform this nation. It may take time, but once it has a momentum it will not be stopped. The Democrats may not yet be ready to meet this awakening moment, but given the opportunity they may realize they have no choice. Put the Republicans out of our common misery and the Democrats may realize that if they continue to fail politically they too will prove political anachronisms. There is only one way to find out.