A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Recently I’ve been fascinated anew by the concept of the one-party state.
A single-party state, one-party state, one-party system or single-party system is a type of state in which a single political party has the right to form the government, usually based on the existing constitution. All other parties are either outlawed or allowed to take only a limited and controlled participation in elections. Sometimes the term de facto single-party state is used to describe a dominant-party system that, unlike the single-party state, allows (at least nominally) democratic multiparty elections, but the existing practices or balance of political power effectively prevent the opposition from winning the elections.
To American ears, “one-party states” and “Communist countries” are synonymous, but non-leftist regimes of fascistic and theocratic bents certainly have managed them, too. I never went to Spain under Franco (he remains dead, you know) or Iran when the Islamic Republican Party held sway, but my youthful travels included the USSR and most of the countries of the Warsaw Pact when they were one-party, or de facto single-party, entities.
The fact that I was drunk much of the time during these visits does not change the fact that on balance, they were sobering experiences.
Obviously, the very notion of a one-party state embraces the concentration of power within one sphere, according to a single set of guidelines, and with avenues of political participation effectively closed apart from reigning orthodoxy. In the absence of palpable opposition, the sole party devotes itself to maintaining its own entrenched bureaucracy, safe in the knowledge that governmental institutions merely mimic the party’s own time-honored levers, and cannot be detached either physically or metaphorically from the entrenched patronage of the party itself.
Or, in other words, much like political life in New Albany.
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Okay, okay.
I won’t contest for a single moment that my analogy is strained, because comparing a totalitarian system like North Korea’s to New Albany’s Demo-Dixiecratic stranglehold makes little sense apart from the unquestioned superiority of Kim Jong-un’s haircut.
In New Albany, there is a legal opposition party, even if a powerful microscope is required to find it, although as recently as Bill Clinton’s second term, the Republican Party actually managed to secure the mayor’s chair. Since Regina Overton’s rule-by date expired, the GOP’s invisibility in New Albany has made the word “nominal” appear almost superhuman by comparison.
Mental exhaustion might explain the urban Republican malaise. One fine night you’re having sweet, patriotically tumescent dreams of the heyday of the Gipper, only to awake and find that Dave Matthews is still the party chairman. Consequently, new ideas emanating from local Republicans are so exceedingly rare that we may have to erect a historical marker to commemorate the most recent one, assuming anyone is alive who remembers it.
My point is simple: While seemingly extinct in New Albany, ideas genuinely matter. As abysmally and resolutely stupid as humans are capable of being, we’re nothing without the primacy of ideas. Accordingly, in the one-horse, one-party Demo-Dixiecrat city that New Albany somehow has become, the disintegration of the GOP as electorally credible opposition has produced bitter irony: Both Republicans and their counterparts are plainly eviscerated when it comes to the health and vigor of ideas, perhaps because ideas are like muscles, and atrophy when unused.
What do you have for us, GOP?
(crickets chirp, pins drop)
Gads. All right, what about you, Demo-Dixiecrats?
(somewhere, a dog barks)
Is there a principled independent in the house? Please?
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It isn’t that individual Democrats can’t be fine people. Many are. It isn’t that they don’t have ideas. Some do. It’s just that their long-standing, one-party political culture invariably acts to portray the very act of thinking as subversive, pornographic and unnecessary for the task at hand: Urban decay management.
Recently, when at-large councilman John Gonder made yet another doomed attempt to publicly think outside the box, this time about possible future locations for the farmers market, a veritable mob of his fellow party members grabbed their Louisville Sluggers and aimed straight for his groin. Whatever merits there may or may not have been in his parking garage proposal, he was tarred and pilloried for having the temerity to think aloud.
How dare he question a payback already budgeted!
Inside this town’s city limits, it’s a revolutionary act to think at all, silently or aloud, but Gonder persists in trying; yet surely he knows that his party’s unassailable political hegemony precludes a marketplace of ideas, which always must remain safely behind closed doors, carefully guarded against unmanageable mutation, until they’ve been vigorously scrubbed clean of meaningful content, and can at long last be released in fully non-realized, formless dimension, shovel- and ordinance-ready, without the messy necessity of evolving in an open, transparent forum.
In due time, the Jeff Speck street study will become the greatest of all litmus tests of what I’m writing here today. I hope, pray, wish and yearn that Speck gets it dead right, the city energetically complies, and streets are calmed, completed and re-directed at long last – over a period of months, and not decades. It could happen, and if it does, it will be over the strenuous objections and self-immolations not of Republicans, but of the Demo-Dixiecrats themselves.
Speck’s fruition may well require a local Gorbachev. To put it mildly, one has yet to step forward, and so it remains axiomatic: If a one-party city can’t control the gestation of ideas and neuter the ones leaking through the cordon, then what good is it to have a monopoly on power in the first place?
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The root problem – for the city, its residents and the current Democratic Party’s own vitality – is that forcing creativity through a single narrow channel of a self-interested, self-perpetuating hierarchy deadens the reproductive capacity of ideas. In fact, ideas are best encouraged to be promiscuous, and in this sense, leaden monogamy under the aegis of one party’s ages-old prophylactic power structure, helmed by one party’s enduring, mind-numbing, time-serving usual suspects, severely inhibits creativity’s proper procreation.
The result is a dominant one-party tub of goo, a morass virtually indistinguishable from the forlorn, bedraggled GOP “opposition.” But the same grimy spoils of small-potato patronage are duly apportioned, just as they were when Glenn Miller ruled the airwaves, and the one-party band plays on – unable to afford a dose of Auto-Tune, and unwilling to stop.
With new ideas, creative expressions and future hope in New Albany confined almost entirely to an entrepreneurial ghetto of outsiders investing and existing light years outside the one-party intellectual straitjacket, a revolution of rising expectations slowly percolates.
Will the one-party city permit progress to come to a boil in our lifetimes? I doubt it, but maybe, for once in a Bicentennial, they’ll prove me wrong.
Where are you, Mikhail? We need another keg ... and fast.
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