The new Gallup numbers showing an across-the-board Republican loss in all demographic groups are pretty catastrophic. The Bush years were a disaster for the Republicans; Gallup finds that the great decline began in 2005, after Katrina and Harriet Miers (which is what first soured me on Bush and the GOP). As Daniel points out, the GOP is down by 9 points in the Midwest! More Larison:
The Gallup findings are interesting, because they show that conservatives are among the least likely to have stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, yet they remain convinced that pursuing an agenda geared towards appealing to them (and only to them) is the means to win back all the other people who have drifted away since '01.
GOP strategist John Weaver has some stark words for the party. Excerpt:
"If it's 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout," says strategist John Weaver, who advised Huntsman and was for years a close adviser to Sen. John McCain. "That's just the truth."
Clearly, the man is a sellout and a squish, and must be jerrytaylored at the first opportunity. What is jerrytayloring? It's the new borking -- when a pundit or other figure on the right questions the bona fides or effectiveness of certain right-wing icons (Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, et al.), and gets dogpiled as a traitor to conservatism.
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Re: Why do all Americans, Democrat & Republican, left to right, assume that it's just a matter of time that everything will return to normal (whatever that might be)?
There's an old saying: Trees do not grow up to the sky. Mathematicians put it more technically: Regression to the mean.
Re: Now you have a government that has borrowed trillions from the future, probably from the production of people who won't be born until all of us now living are dead.
Back in WWII our government borrowed far more (relative to the size of the economy) than we are likely to borrow now. The 1950s were not a decade of economic calamity and the money was paid back.
Jon @ 6:35 AM writes:
“Re: Now you have a government that has borrowed trillions from the future, probably from the production of people who won't be born until all of us now living are dead.
Back in WWII our government borrowed far more (relative to the size of the economy) than we are likely to borrow now. The 1950s were not a decade of economic calamity and the money was paid back. “
The national economic situation today is quite different from what it was in the 1950s. The most obvious difference, perhaps is that today’s central government is saddling itself--read: us taxpayers-- with unfunded liabilities of some $ 70 trillion dollars, and looking to get some more, thanks to Mr. Obama’s universal health-care scheme. That burden didn’t exist then.
The second major difference is cultural in nature. Simply put, Americans (collectively) have far higher expectations for our standards of living than we did in, say, 1955. For the most part, we expect to live in houses where each child has a separate bedroom, for example, and we expect to have individual television/entertainment centers in each of those rooms. This would not have been the case directly following WW2. 50 years of exposure to visual-media advertising has seen to that.
Third, we expect not only a higher material standard of living for ourselves than we did in the 1950s, but we also expect to have fewer limitations on and consequences for our own personal conduct (sexual and otherwise) than we did back then. This means we are much less likely to engage in future-oriented behavior, such as saving or getting married or not giving birth to illegitimate children. It also means we are much less likely to publicly denounce such behavior in others, even when (as in the case of a rising rate of ba$tardy) we know of the harmful consequences, both individually and socially, of that behavior.
Finally, we demand more from both the central-government and provincial-government apparatus than we did in the 1950s. We expect that they will provide moneyed leisure and “free” medical care for the elderly; we expect that they will provide “free”medical care for the “poor”. (This is in no small part a consequence of our expectations in the two paragraphs directly above.) Naturally, the political classes have responded to these expectations, if not actually encouraged them.
All this has to be paid for. The trouble is, we also expect someone ELSE to pay for it. And we’ve just about run out of Someone Elses to do the paying.
Your servant,
Lord Karth.
I'm getting pretty tired of moderate, open-minded Republicans who wish to change the party whining and taking pot-shots because the prevailing view of the party isn't in harmony with them.
Well, I'm getting even more tired of the "moderate" label being pinned on the REAL conservatives -- i.e., those of us who reject Wilsonian foreign policy, subsidizing the defense budgets of foreign countries, consumer spending-based economics, massive and intentional trade deficits, massive and ever-increasing public entitlement spending, and multiculturist ideology.
The conservative "Movement", to the extent it's defined by the talk radio and National Review gang, has little to say about any of this. Sometimes a little half-hearted rhetoric is directed against multiculturalism or Fedeal deficit spending (usually without any specific recipes for meaningful budget cuts), but these issues aren't what excites the Movement crowd. They are stuck in the stale rhetoric of the 1970s, and with it they are dragging down genuine conservatism as a political force in this country.
Karen W. - while I'm not a Democrat, I agree that Limbaugh has been a longterm, net negative, for both conservatives and Republicans.
The first time I heard him (circa '89) I thought that SURELY he was engaging in some sort of parody.
More recently, his mindless support of stay-the-course in Iraq (and Rumsfeld) reflected how far that the movement conservatives had strayed away from *analytical realism* - which had/has been slandered as representing only the much dreaded 'moderate'.
In a two-party system there needs to be a healthy representation of both realism and idealism, and pragmatism and principle. I'm old enough to remember when the Repubs emphasized realism and pragmatism. Frankly I miss that.
Simon
Well, I'm getting even more tired of the "moderate" label being pinned on the REAL conservatives -- i.e., those of us who reject Wilsonian foreign policy, subsidizing the defense budgets of foreign countries, consumer spending-based economics, massive and intentional trade deficits, massive and ever-increasing public entitlement spending, and multiculturist ideology.
Bingo. As a progressive, I want those conservatives back.
Where we can have policy disagreements about entitlements, and who pays what taxes, but we all knew the budget must average to taxes collected.
And we all knew that invading other countries is the very very last resort and that handing money to other countries pisses off their enemies. (Which is not to say we should never do that, but we need to think long and hard about it.)
And we all knew that trade deficits were dangerous and that American manufacturing is the actual important part of our economy that government policy needs to help, not how much corporate stocks rose for businesses that pay taxes in Aruba and run factories in China. We might disagree about what cut American companies should get vs. American workers, but it was, at least, American either way.
And we all knew that we didn't hold people without charges and torture them to death. Let's not forget when we used to know that. Ah, the good old days.
When are you guys coming back? Cause this health care thing is coming up and you're about to miss it, because the American people stopped electing the wackadoodles who've been posing as conservative, and the right stopped letting sane conservatives win primaries.
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