 Rendezvous With Irrelevance In virtually every long-term social or political debate, there's eventually a point at which most sensible and intelligent people agree: The public has made a definitive decision.
On the subject of smoking, for example, after nearly fifty years of anti-smoking measures, only about 19 percent of Americans smoke any more. So while Wednesday's announcement by the pharmacy chain CVS that they'll no longer be selling tobacco products after October 1 was significant news, it wasn't exactly Earth-shattering. Americans already passed that decision point on tobacco use twenty years ago. Sure, smoking is still legal, though in far fewer places than it once was. For the most part, those who still remain addicted have been severely minimized as a political power group, effectively making smokers politically irrelevant.
In a similar, yet frightening way, recent studies have confirmed the American middle class has almost been nearly erased, politically, by right-wing political policies over the last forty-plus years. Politicians may still claim to pander to the middle class, but as stories in both Business Insider and the New York Times this past week confirmed, the businesses that depend on the middle class are struggling - because much of the economic and political power of the middle class has already been erased.
There is another major group of Americans that is about to become irrelevant though, and it's one we - and others - have been pointing to for some time.
Of course, we're talking about Americans on the political right, in general, and Republicans in particular... |
