Ross Douthat is right (and right again here, in an expansion of his remarks; both posts are well worth reading): if the Republicans want to dig deeper into irrelevance, they should do exactly what Rush Limbaugh is suggesting. Take a look at this craziness from El Rushbo:
We're going to rebuild it even if McCain wins. We're going to have to. These people, these moderates who wanted the big tent, they have taken the party exactly where they said they wanted it to be -- and when it got there, these little cowards jumped the ship! I have lost all respect for these people. And, folks, when I said at the beginning of this that I wanted to turn around and pat myself on the back, it's because I (and so many like me) knew this exact thing was going to happen and tried to warn people about it during the primaries and so forth. I am not happy it's happened except for one reason. We flushed 'em out. We found out they're not really Republicans and they're by no means conservatives, and now they're gone. Now the trick is to keep 'em out.
Yeah, that's the ticket -- to irrelevance. Alex Massie has found another gem of Rush's Custer-like strategery, and snorts. What's interesting about this stuff, aside from it's disconnect from reality, is Limbaugh's deployment of terminology that sounds almost Stalinist in its attempt to identify and purge heretics. For example, when he denounces a deviationist conservative intellectual as a "pseudo-intellectual," Limbaugh indicates that his measure of a person's intellect is the degree to which that person remains faithful to his (Limbaugh's) narrow vision of conservatism. It's hack ideology. It's the ideology of right-wing hacks. As Alex puts it:
Once a party's brand has become contaminated - as was the case with the Tories in the mid-1990s and the GOP now - you cannot simply retreat to first principles and assume that the public will forgive and forget your sins. It doesn't work like that. And, again as the Tories discovered, once the brand has been contaminated the base is no longer enough to win. When the electorate moves, political parties that are truly interested in winning move too.The concept is not, actually, all that difficult to grasp: to win elections you need to persuade people who did not support you last time out to switch their allegiance this time around. Simply presuming that the electorate has taken leave of its senses and will eventually return to the fold is a recipe for years in opposition.
Or, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, a party without the means to change is without the means of its conservation. Then again, what did Burke know? He was no doubt a pseudo-intellectual.
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MBunge / Mike:
They aren't my moronic standards. I was commenting on what is generally understood to be the standard of debate in presidential elections. On both sides. Which we apparently agree is generally moronic.
Hence my assertion that citing the current negative attacks on Obama from the McCain camp as a reason to dump McCain are disingenuous, probably hiding some other reason.
And your assertion that McCain is to Thurmond as Obama is to Ayers is, I will charitably assume, your sly example of what those moronic standards allow.
I am happy to note you register no disagreement on what a conservative movement should look like, though, and look forward to your assistance in the future. It'll be a big tent!
And I happen to think Obama's brand of socialism is a bad idea,
Screaming "socialism" about what amounts to a mainstream American set of policy prescriptions that just happens to be advocated by a Democrat doesn't do anything for your credibility. It makes you seem like a bit of a nutter. Seriously, listen to yourself. You're claiming that a set of policies which are supported by most of America (regardless of the actually outcome of the election) is some kind of "socialist" enterprise. In fact it's a relatively mainstream liberal set of policy prescriptions, which Americans are naturally gravitating to given the resounding failure of the conservative economic agenda.
In 8 years, you'll be saying, "Oh, yeah. Obama, he was a moderate." It's only because you've been whipped up into a demagogic furor that you've suddenly decided that the election of a Democrat is heralding the threat of "socialism." Listen to how crazy you sound, and come down to earth, and maybe you'll be capable of rational discussion. Until then, you're simply screaming stuff out of fear of having to face certain defeat. Perhaps at some point you should be able to deal with the fact that candidates who have policies you don't personally agree with win. It's not heralding a communist revolution. It's merely repudiating the utter failure of a right-wing agenda towards a more mainstream liberal economic policies that are overdue.
I might also note that the raving of various people on the eve of the election muttering about Obama and his marxist socialist communism is based in the premise that, somehow, despite the fact that Obama's historical legislative and public service record reflects the views of your average, every-day middle-of-the-road, cautious, overly earnest good-government liberal intellectual, he's somehow "hiding" has a "closet marxist." It's something that no one would have supposed, were it not for the fact that he's about to win an election. Now that he's going to win, out of fear, those facing defeat are either (a) dishonestly lying to the public in the hopes of whipping up a demagogic furor, or (b) deluding themselves about some decades-long conspiracy theory on the part of Obama to in all ways speak, think, and act like a moderate liberal lawyer/politician while all the while harboring a marxist socialist agenda. Seriously, karlub, listen to what you're saying. It makes no sense. And even worse, you're making claims in defense of what is an immoral, failed ideology being advocated on the part of the party backing McCain and Palin, two people tainted with a history of criminality and corruption while you engage in what are essentially dishonest attacks on a longtime public servant. You don't have to agree with Obama, but you have to be rational about your disagreements, and you can't engage in scurrilous, dishonest smear campaigns simply because you can't get what you want right now. To claim, seriously, that Obama has some sort of connection to terrorism is the domain only of the very hateful, the very ingorant, and the very dishonest. It's why Palin is making claims like that, and it's why she finds such a fertile audience for her claims amongst her most fervent supporters, and it's why those claims don't find a very accepting audience to the general public: because it seems completely and utterly ridiculous. It's the sort of think spouted during the last throes of a dying campaign looking for something, anything to help them avoid the reality of defeat. I suggest you choose to accept reality calmly rather than freak out.
I am happy to note you register no disagreement on what a conservative movement should look like, though, and look forward to your assistance in the future. It'll be a big tent!
It's probably best for the Republicans to actively attempt to keep the right-wing extremists disillusioned or quiet, in the same way they dealt with the John Birchers and others.
Evangelicals did not really start voting in large numbers until the 1970s with Billy Graham's support for Nixon and Jimmy Carter's ability to campaign to evangelicals as "one of you." From a strategic point of view, in terms of preventing Republicans from flying off the rails, it's probably best to re-alienate evangelicals from the political process, start attracting more conservative Catholics as the leaders of the party (Bobby Jindal will help a lot here), and try to get more support from the suburbanites who've been gravitating towards the Democratic party. Meanwhile, keep the neoconservatives at arm's length, and make a deal with the big-money conservatives to accept some financial regulation and universal health coverage in exchange for steady defense of the financial sector and promises of low taxation. To run an entire political party movement on the basis of anti-intellectualism, resentment, hatred of hippies, and the promise of Wall Street deregulation seems like a bad formula. People want good jobs and prosperous, stable lives. Basing your entire argument on the fantasy claim that the other guy is a scary socialist terrorist-lover isn't going to fly. All it results in is having people start to disbelieve everything you say, and then decide, "Well, they say all this stuff about the guy, but all that other stuff over the past 8 years hasn't worked, and those other guys screaming about socialism sound completely nuts." In the absence of a Cold War, in which the spectre of Communism represented a physical threat to believers, it makes you look like a nutter when you start screaming about the socialist threats of Clinton-era upper-level tax brackets.
Tyro, friend, I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. Because it ain't me. I am not making "these statements" in "support" of anyone currently in power. Except for maybe state senator Mike Folmer of Pennsylvania who seems to be a non-knucklhead. To me. A couple of my Borough councilmen seem OK, too.
When I referred to Sen. Obama's socialism I merely had in mind the sort of thing he talked about in that 2001 Chicago public radio interview wherein he indicated that a big part of social justice-- and a tragic failure of the civil rights movement-- was ignoring redistributive amelioration via the legislative branch.
That sort of policy outlook, when the redistribution is done for fairness rather than policy goals, is a recipe for disaster, in my opinion. Then you find yourself in Leninist "Who-Whom" territory. This is much different than, say, raising a marginal tax rate to pay for a particular, narrowly defined social safety net. I do not think my position is far out of the mainstream, and I do not think it makes me sound like a nutter.
You seem to be having this conversation purely through the lens of this presidential election. My only point was Limbaugh was correct, to the extent that I don't think a new conservative movement should take its cues from an existing GOP intelligentsia so weak-kneed that they couldn't bring themselves to even support McCain.
All your commentary about what would or would not make sense for the McCain campaign, which I barely tepidly support, is tactical in nature and overwhelms me with apathy.
Finally, in your last comment you suggest it is a bad idea to run a political party on a "basis of anti-intellectualism, resentment, hatred of hippies, and the promise of Wall Street deregulation." I couldn't agree with you more. And I don't care about the prospects of political parties anyway. That is why I wondered who you were talking to, because it couldn't have been responding to anything I wrote.
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