What's Next?

[Oli]

Ship of fools

Political parties die from the head down

JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

Time for reflection

How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).

But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.

http://www.economist.com/world/unite...ry_id=12599247

So the question I have is this...Where does the GOP go from here? Do they reconcile the disparate groups and find a coherent message, or are they condemned to flail about for a few election cycles trying to find who they are? Can the social conservatives win back the intellectuals they've lost by their appealing to wedge issues that consolidated the religious base?

[hippifried]

So the question I have is this...Where does the GOP go from here? Do they reconcile the disparate groups and find a coherent message, or are they condemned to flail about for a few election cycles trying to find who they are? Can the social conservatives win back the intellectuals they've lost by their appealing to wedge issues that consolidated the religious base?

What intellectuals? There's never been a coherent message except for the one that appeals to the religious base. Well, not in the last century anyway. As long as the republicans continue to appeal to the lowest common denominator, they're going to stay at the bottom of the heap. They've proven themselves incompetent when in power. I came to the conclusion that they don't know how to lead. They don't know how to be the majority. They never stopped trying to take power after they got it, & that didn't allow them to actually do anything. It's a problem with the mindset. 12 years in power, 6 in total control, & they never actually took control because they were too busy acting like the minority party.

[trish]

Modern American conservatives don't know how to lead government because they don't believe in government. Since Reagan their goal has always been to put incompetents in charge of federal programs, or to put people in charge who don't even believe those programs should exist, to let private concerns write the bills that would regulate those concerns (e.g. Bush's energy policy was written by the oil companies) and to build up unsustainable debts in order to starve federal programs of funds. W has fucked things up royally. We are now finding out that government, like the governor of a engine, has an essential regulatory function which is necessary for the survival of free markets, the sustainability of our resources and our way of life.

[Cuchulain]

trish nails it. Rachel Maddow and Thom Hartmann have been asking for years "how can you govern when you don't believe in government"?
Ronnie Reagan, hero of Repubs, said 'govt is not the answer to the problem, govt is the problem. Radical CON Grover Norquist wants govt small enough so "we can drown it in a bathtub".

Republicans are going to have to at least appear as though they want to help people. They're going to have to moderate their message on tax cuts for the wealthy, the glory of big business and military adventurism. Too many Americans have figured out that Hannity, Rush and O'Reilly are full of shit.

I don't think that will happen quickly. Senate Repub leader Mitch McConnell has already signaled that he plans to continue his obstructionist behavior. Mutt Romney wants us to think the mess the auto industry is in is all because of 'greedy' unions. The Republican Party is a lot further to the right than the Dems are to the left. Dragging them back to the center in even a cosmetic way will require new leadership, and the old leadership will not leave quietly.

In the meantime, we can expect more stories from BillO about what an awful place San Francisco is, and Hannity will continue to whine about Obama being a Marxist.

[chefmike]

The repugs(and repugs in libertarian clothing, you know who you are ) need to face the reality that despite what the vast right wing conspiracy is so fond of saying, we are not a center right nation...so the dinosaurs in question are going to have to suck it up and/or get the fuck out of the way.

[hippifried]

Modern American conservatives don't know how to lead government because they don't believe in government. Since Reagan their goal has always been to put incompetents in charge of federal programs, or to put people in charge who don't even believe those programs should exist, to let private concerns write the bills that would regulate those concerns (e.g. Bush's energy policy was written by the oil companies) and to build up unsustainable debts in order to starve federal programs of funds. W has fucked things up royally. We are now finding out that government, like the governor of a engine, has an essential regulatory function which is necessary for the survival of free markets, the sustainability of our resources and our way of life.

I ain't buying it. If republicans are so against government, why do they expand it every chance they get? The military is part of the government. The various intelligence agencies are part of the government. The police are part of the government. All the things they want to do to screw with people's lives are done through government functions. The Comstock blue laws, the Mann Act, & the war on drugs are all government programs. The private sector doesn't wage war or or enforce dubious morals. They don't care. Republicans do.

Selling out one's ideology to the highest bidder isn't the same as anarchy. The argument is over who gets what % of the revenue. Don't kid yourself. The biggest corporations got as big as they are because of government contracts. The entire weapons, aerospace, & shipbuilding industries, along with a huge chunk of financial, electronics, & construction industries would fold without government spending. Republicans like government. The bigger the better. It's just about priorities in spending.

[trish]

I ain't buying it.

So you’re trying to pick a fight with me, eh hippiefied? Well you do have a point. I was taking republicans at their word when they claim to their base that they’re against big government. I should know better than to take even one of their claims at face value. But what republicans do have in common with their libertarian compatriots is an unwarranted belief in the myth that economic engines are somehow self-regulating; that unlike all other engines, they will seek, without the aid of a governor, a stable dynamic equilibrium where magically all demands are met, everyone’s freedoms are maximized and everyone is as happy as can be. This Panglossian fantasy of totally free markets is supported by a paper thin, non-quantitative, nineteenth century market ideology that amounts to nothing more than a cult religion. Of course when markets fail, it must be the fault of government interference, their ideology will allow no other explanation. If oil companies want to drill on public lands, in their view, we the people shouldn’t have public lands. In their view all lands and all resources should be private. So who do they put in charge of public lands and resources? Who sits down at the table and writes the energy policies? Why, under the Bush administration, do the oil companies no longer pay us royalties for the resources they draw out of the ground?

Modern republicans do not believe in the role of government as a governor of the economic engine. Workers need no protections. No minimum wage, no health care, no regulation of working conditions. People need no protections from the machinery of commerce. There should be no regulation of the commons, no clean air regulations, no clean water regulations, no federal food and drug inspections. Without a shred of quantitative proof we are to believe that without government focus on these issues, these things will all take care of themselves.

[hippifried]

So you’re trying to pick a fight with me, eh hippiefied?

Of course not. I'm just trying to burst the memes.
Well... Maybe a wrestling match...