RADIO 2GB BROADCAST:

The election of Barack Obama as the next US President is being hailed as a turning point in world affairs - a person who is young and black, with Hussein as a middle name. In addition, the election may also foreshadow a once in a generation change.

Sidney Blumenthal in his brilliant new book The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party (NewYork: Union Square Press, 2008), argues that perhaps the US is in a for once in a generation political "realignment".

The two main American politics parties are the Republicans and Democrats. The modern Republican Party began in 1860 and Abraham Lincoln was elected as President. He took the US through its Civil War (1861-5) - still the most violent period in American history - and he set his party on a path of political dominance.

In those days, most political and economic power was in the North - and this was firmly Republican. Northerners were proud to be associated with the "party of Lincoln".

 Few white persons in the South could ever bring themselves to vote Republican and so they voted Democratic. As the decades rolled by, two Democratic parties evolved: a very conservative one in the South and a more liberal one in the North. Since the party was divided, it rarely obtained presidential power.

The next realignment occurred in 1932 and the Great Depression. The Republicans were held responsible for that disaster and so Franklin Roosevelt came to power with a broad-based Democratic coalition. He took the US out of the Great Depression and then into World War II victory.

The Democratic Party held power on and off until 1968. The next realignment was foreshadowed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson when he signed into law the historic 1965 Civil Rights Act. He at long last put into law the rights that the Civil War a century previously had been fought over. But he said privately "We have now lost the South for a Generation". How right he was.

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 recognized a new opportunity for his party and embarked on his "Southern Strategy'. His party may be the "party of Lincoln" but it was not the party of the new Civil Rights legislation. Gradually more and more conservative whites voted Republican.

The Blumenthal argument - written months before the November election - was that the Bush-dominated Republican Party was now in deep trouble. The Republican Party has now lost its stronghold in the North. The President's grandfather was a Northern Senator. There are now very few of them left in the North.

Ironically the stronghold of the Republican Party is now in the South and the Mountain States of the Old West (but not California). It has become the rump that the Democratic Party was reduced to after the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

It is notable that Bush was not welcome at the 2008 Republican Nominating Convention and that McCain emphasized that he would not (if elected) going to follow Bush's policies. Bush had become the "toxic president".

The challenge for Barack Obama will be to hold together such a broadly based Democratic Party. But he will be aided by the complete disarray into which the Republican Party has now fallen.

This was first broadcast on Radio 2GB's "The Brian Wilshire Show", between 9pm and 12 midnight on November 14 2008.