Every several decades, give or take, a giant crack forms in the North American continent and a tectonic shift in American politics grips the nation. Political institutions are subject to entrophy, like everything else in the universe.

Ponder this. What if we are on the cusp of such a shift, and have no idea it’s about to hit us?

The Republican Party is unraveling nationwide before our very eyes. What was once to be a permanent majority for decades to come, painstakingly crafted by the boy wizard Rove, was shattered in the 2006 midterms. The Republican Party was reduced to an insular bastion banished to the South and rural regions, a volatile cocktail of religious fundamentalists, flat-taxers, flat-earthers, and the Bush Admninistration. As Bush whimpers through his second and last term, Cheney continues to steamroll the Constitution, the American Way of Life, but most importantly to the future of American politics, the Republican Party.

In spite of Karl Rove. In spite of RNC strategists in the White House. The Cheney Branch of the federal government couldn’t give two arses for the future of the Republican Party–and a party cannot survive long when all the underlings sprint from the leader as fast as they possibly can. Witness the tricky tango Republican candidates are playing of being anti-Bush yet pro-Republican at the same time. Cheney’s leaving office after 2008, and it’s quite possible he’s taking the Republican Party down with him to Hell.

I would not rule out the possibility that years of one-party rule by the Democratic Party will begin after 2008. Will it last? No, it never does. Bear with me for a moment.

The Republican coalition is splintering. The top, George Bush, stands mute and emasculated while the rest of the party grapples with raucous infighting. Corporate moguls, their profits sustained by a steady IV of cheap illegal labor, find themselves at odds with nativists. Social conservatives hell-bent on using government as a cudgel find themselves fighting disgusted libertarians. Meanwhile, power-hungry neoconservatives that used all of the party’s facets to catapult to power are threatening to bring the whole structure down in flames.

Even if the present of the Republican Party looks bleak, the future is even more of a desolate wasteland. Democrats have taken away the Republican’s main advantage–fundraising. Even with the ban on “soft money”, Democratic coffers overflow with riches. The next generation has always been a reaction to the previous, but the long-term drift of the population away from conservatism toward the left side of the pendulum spells trouble for the Republican Party of today and the future.

Will the Republicans go the way of the Whigs?

The Democratic Party, at the same time, is poised to capture a broad-based majority. It will take years to repair the credibility of the Republican Party, with Democrats outperforming them in the eyes of voters on nearly every issue. As the Republican Party splits over what to do after the most disastorous administration in our nation’s history, Democrats are sweeping in to former strongholds and making inroads. Conceivably, the Republican Party could be confined to socially conservative areas of the Plains and the South, as libertarians turn off, and nativists grow frustrated with the pace of immigration reform.

While the Republican coalition splinters, the Democratic coalition grows no stronger. I would credit a good portion of current gains for the Democratic side to simple disgust with the Republicans. In the zero-sum game of two-party politics, the Democrats have found themselves on the up and up. As Democrats grow insulated in one-party rule, their common enemy–George W. Bush–will have been castigated to the dustbins of history. I see no signs that the party can maintain unity after George W. Bush. I remain optimistic only because the Republicans are markedly less able to.

After some time of dominant rule by Democrats, the Democratic coalition will falter and collapse. Do not expect the collapse of the two parties to morph into a pluralistic, multi-party system, however. Buzz over a potential independent candidacy of Michael Bloomberg and a bipartisan ticket called Unity08 indicate not that the two-party system is dead–it merely indicates that people are disgusted with the current two parties. Democrats will dominate because the legacy of the Republican Party will have been so tainted that they will face the brunt of disgust. The American political system is built to forever institutionalize a bipolar, two-party system, because two major parties of relative equal strength duking it out is, compared to the other options, rather stable. In a winner-take-all system, there is no other choice.

It is always advantageous for like-minded voters to congeal into blocks. In proportional or runoff systems, they form coalitions and blocs after the elections. In America, where winner takes all, we simply congeal into blocs beforehand–the two parties. When the Republican and Democratic parties finally shatter into a million pieces, it’ll be replaced by another tiresome, two-party system. While it may be aligned along a different ideological axis, the system will remain the same. The Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the Whigs, all major parties of the past were once components of the two-party system.

All major parties of the future will forever follow in their predecessors’ footsteps.