Will the GOP Become Even More Extreme?

Even though the general public may be trending away from the culture wars as I posted earlier, should McCain/Palin go down in defeat tomorrow, that does not mean that the Republican Party will get the message that racism, gay-bashing, mindless fetus worship, and hate in general are possibly not going to sell with voters as much as in the past. The right wing of the Party - which now comprise the bulk of those still not embarrassed to call themselves Republicans after the Chimperator's disastrous regime and the rise of Bible Spice Palin - will likely believe that they lost because they were not extreme enough. These folks live in an alternate universe and what to rational people would seem self-evident gets totally lost on them. For these Kool-Aid drinkers and Bible beaters, ideology trumps reason, logic, and objective facts. Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times looks at this likely phenomenon:

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[R]ight now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress. . . . . You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

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Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

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Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

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[T]he Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify. Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain.

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But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat. This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.