General Discussion

babylonsister

(171,065 posts) Fri Mar 15, 2013, 07:00 PM Mar 2013

So what if the most honest self-evaluation of the Republican Party concluded “We’re screwed!”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_03/we_have_met_the_enemy_and_he_i043602.php

We Have Met the Enemy And He Is Us
March 15, 2013 11:35 AM
By Ed Kilgore

So what if the most honest self-evaluation of the Republican Party concluded “We’re screwed!”

That’s sorta the impression left by Matthew Continetti’s piece in the Weekly Standard entitled “The Double Bind.”

And the impact of his analysis, unless there’s just a collective decision to ignore it, could be significant. He is not, after all, some tweedy RINO interested in high-fives from the MSM or the opposition; he’s a stone partisan warrior (founder of the Washington Free Beacon and hagiographer of Sarah Palin) who would very much like to bring liberals weeping to their knees. He’s the sort of guy who would probably be quite happy if a one-party dictatorship could be established, or who may think the godless “elites” have already established one.

But he’s not in denial when it comes to the political dilemmas facing the Republican Party, which he neatly summarizes in a few graphs:

Here’s the problem. The domestic proposals that have the greatest chance of making the Republican party attractive to the “coalition of the ascendant”—immigrants, members of the millennial generation, single white women—involve far more government intervention in the economy than the GOP coalition—married white people, Wall Street, the Tea Party—will allow. And we haven’t even mentioned changing the GOP approach to social issues, which would drive the Republican base of religious conservatives out of the party. Pursuing such proposals would break the coalition that puts Republicans close to a majority.

On the other hand, sticking with the policies that glue this so-close-to-a-majority coalition together would foreclose the possibility of expanding the GOP vote. And it would limit the vote Republicans pull from disaffected voters who used to support the GOP but have turned away for various reasons.

There’s more. Trying to appeal to the coalition of the ascendant and the Reagan coalition simultaneously would give the party a severe case of political schizophrenia. The GOP would bewilder its historic base of support while disappointing newcomers, leading to confusion, disillusionment, apathy, and perhaps (ultimately) dissolution.

snip//

Continetti closes by suggesting, as is common in pleas for significant political change, that it may take some exemplary leader like Reagan (ironically) to usher in the era of the “conservative welfare state,” and convince Republicans to abandon their illusions. The ritualistic invocation of RR’s holy name in this particular cause may greatly offend his intended audience, since one of their chief illusions is that Reagan presided over a latter-day Coolidge Administration that was steering the nation towards prelapsarian innocence until the treacherous Bushes and the wily Clinton (not to mention the Kenyan socialist Obama) spoiled his legacy. But conservative denialists will have a harder time rebutting his argument that the path they are on currently leads straight to nowhere.