Pendulum of pollitics swings away from GOP.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Karl Eysenbach For The Register-Guard

We are in the closing chapters of an era in American history. The loss of GOP control of the U.S. House marks the end of the Reagan revolution, an era that was conceived in 1964 and born in 1980. No one knows what will happen in 2008 or 2010, but within four years we will be in a different age with a completely different agenda. Terrorism will be out; environmentalism will be the issue for a generation, and the future is likely to be Democratic.

I say this because periods of party dominance run in cycles in the United States. Social movements (often outside of regular party structures) supply new ideas. Politicians using these ideas take control of a minority party, eventually transforming the minority party into a majority.

Once in power, the majority party stays in power until almost all of its ideas are adopted into law. Through mismanagement and a lack of new ideas, the majority coalition then becomes weak and unravels, setting the stage for insurgents who can capture the minority party, thus repeating the cycle.

In the 20th century, the ideas of progressivism were the catalysts that allowed for GOP control until 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal ideas took the stage. The Democratic majority held the political stage until Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation produced a reaction that led to the GOP takeover of the South. This takeover initiated the Republican domination that has lasted from Reagan up until today.

Bush's Iraq adventure has eroded GOP support, and domestically the Republican Party has exhausted its supply of ideas. In the last 26 years, industries and governments have been deregulated. Unions have been crushed, and tax cuts have skewed the pattern of income distribution to historical extremes and produced huge deficits.

With nothing more to offer except more tax cuts and the privatization of Social Security, the Republican Party represents a spent force. A recession in the near future would further damage the GOP.

Congressional Republicans are showing the same kinds of infighting that bedeviled Jimmy Carter's Democratic majority, and conservatism is being questioned the same way liberalism was in the 1980s. Christian fundamentalists are becoming a thorn in the side of mainline Republicans, and people such as Illinois Sen. Barak Obama are going to move many evangelicals closer to the Democratic Party through their genuine expressions of Christian faith and spirituality.

Republican hot button issues are losing their power when 70 percent of the country feels we are headed in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, global warming and renewable resources are becoming front-burner issues. Politically savvy groups outside the Democratic Party, such as the Bus Project and MoveOn.org, have been using new ideas and technologies to increase Democratic votes. These liberal-progressives can be compared to the Barry Goldwater conservatives of 1964 - the party insurgents who came to dominate the American political landscape we are in now.

What will the new era look like? The issues of global warming and the end of petroleum are not going away, and the pressure to act in these areas will get stronger and stronger. At the same time, we have huge overhangs of debt and military spending.

To solve the problems of global warming and oil dependency, it will be necessary to divert money away from debt and defense. This not only means increasing taxes, but putting our money into Apollo-style megaprojects to develop environmentally friendly energy supplies and ease global warming.

In order to cut military spending and promote peace, it will be necessary for the United States to plan the deepest cuts in its atomic arsenal as it promotes and encourages worldwide nuclear disarmament. These are the issues for the next generation of political and economic leaders.

Strangely enough, these global forces will push America in the directions in which Eugene and Oregon already are headed. Oregon's peace culture and environmentalism fit hand in glove with the issues that will dominate the new era.

And Oregon's electoral transparency serves as a model that could very well spread nationally over time. The adoption of freer and fairer elections across America based on the Oregon model could be another factor in promoting a long-term Democratic majority.

Karl Eysenbach is a retired teacher who did graduate work in American government at the University of Oregon. He also has been active in the Democratic Party and MoveOn.org.