From Salon.com today:
Nov. 11, 2008 | Surveying the wreckage after American voters gave their party the bum’s rush, Republican thinkers have pondered what went wrong, searched their souls—and decided that the way to regain power is to move further to the right....
Predictably taking the hardest line were the braying tribunes of the right-wing plebs, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. The McCain-detesting Coulter wrote, “The only good thing about McCain is that he gave us a genuine conservative, Sarah Palin. He’s like one of those insects that lives just long enough to reproduce so that the species can survive. That’s why a lot of us are referring to Sarah as ‘The One’ these days. Like Sarah Connor in ‘The Terminator,’ Sarah Palin is destined to give birth to a new movement.”
Limbaugh managed to refrain from comparing McCain to an insect, but he joined Coulter in anointing Palin the future queen of the Republican Party. Noting that a Rasmussen poll showed that 69 percent of GOP voters love Palin, Limbaugh sneered, “So all of you wizards of smart on our side, all of you intellectualoids who think that Palin was a drag, the party loves Sarah Palin. The vast majority of conservative Republicans love Sarah Palin. Twenty percent of Republicans who say she hurt the ticket, you are probably the ones that need to go and walk and join across the aisle with the others that you find so much more palatable because they are able to communicate and they are writers and they are intellectual ... The party loves her.”
It’s hardly surprising that buffoonish entertainers like Coulter and Limbaugh are sticking to their guns: Their livelihood depends on catering to the rabid GOP base. But you’d think that the right’s cooler heads would realize that something has gone terribly wrong with a party and a movement that can seriously consider nominating Sarah Palin for president....
Right-wing ideologues are suffering from massive cognitive dissonance (not to mention a healthy helping of denial). They can’t grasp why their party imploded because the vast majority of them always supported Bush and his policies and still do. A few conservative critics have blasted him for lacking fiscal discipline, but most right-wing pundits liked Bush’s policies just fine—until the public turned on him and on McCain....
The painful truth for conservatives is that the dogs aren’t eating their dog food—and every national trend indicates that they will never eat it again. Which means the GOP faces a wrenching choice: remain true to its increasingly irrelevant and rejected ideology and fade into political insignificance, or remake itself as essentially a more moderate version of the Democratic Party....
The GOP faces two problems for which it has no answers. The first is that its two main branches are fundamentally incompatible. The right has always been divided between a libertarian, free-market, anti-government, no-tax wing, and a traditional-values, moral-issues wing. These are strange bedfellows. Libertarians abhor any kind of coercive policies, no matter how “moral” their aims, whether they’re imposed by government or anyone else. They tend to be tolerant on social issues. Traditionalists, many of them devout Christians, regard their version of morality as the highest value and demand coercive governmental measures—on abortion and gay marriage, for example—to instill it.
Two things have always held these two branches together: national security concerns, and a sense that however much each branch might dislike some of the GOP’s positions, the Democratic alternative was even worse. Both of these unifying factors have now waned, and they seem unlikely ever to return.
The collapse of the USSR fatally damaged the GOP’s “tough on national security” appeal. Sept. 11 and Bush’s “war on terror” revived it for a while, but when the American people realized that the Iraq war was a disastrous mistake, the terrorist boogeyman shrunk to its rightful proportions. (Sadly for the GOP, fear is not a state that a healthy organism or society wishes to live in for very long.) By crying wolf, Bush weakened the right’s ability to use fear as a political tool. As with the economy, Bush’s overreaching ended up hastening the demise of the very “movement conservatism” of which he was so loyal and exemplary a servant. Indeed, Bush’s “war on terror” opened a new set of fissures in the already-cracked GOP, this time between neoconservative interventionists and old-fashioned conservatives opposed to gratuitous foreign meddling.
As national security has faded, the last thing holding the right together is its hatred of the Democrats and everything they stand for. This glue still binds the party’s ideologically driven base. But for the GOP to win national elections, it has to convince moderates of the same thing. And in this election, moderates decisively rejected the Republicans’ arguments.
Moderates rejected the GOP for two reasons: because Bush’s presidency was a disaster, and because they didn’t like the GOP’s harsh, ugly tone. That tone is the result of the fact that the party was taken over long ago by “movement conservatives,” true believers who bitterly oppose secular modernism and everything associated with it. Their hard-line Jacobinism, imbued with an inchoate sense of angry resentment, drives the right’s culture war and animates the movement’s base. It has become synonymous with modern conservatism, which is why McCain’s ugly campaign was no accident.
The problem is that moderates are completely turned off both by the GOP’s performance and by its extreme, demonizing worldview and rhetoric. And the reason they’re turned off is that the country’s demographics have fundamentally changed—and changed in a way that makes it impossible for the GOP in its current form to survive....
