A Republican Left Turn?

With the Christofascists increasingly viewed negatively by a majority of voters and the country's rapid change in position of gay rights, the Republican Party is facing a day of reckoning.  Much like it is on the issue of immigration reform.  Continuing to hang on the the hate and fear based policies and social views of the aging white racist and homophobic elements of the GOP base simply is courting long term political suicide.  Yet this element of the GOP base has largely taken over the grassroots of the GOP and wields an undue influence on the part nominating process.  The question thus becomes for those who want the GOP to survive is how does the party change yet keep the allegiance of the Christofascists.  It may be a case of mission impossible.  A column in the New York Times looks at this quandary.  Here are excerpts:

If the Republican Party concedes defeat in the culture war, as a number of commentators on the right and the left argue it should, what what will happen to the conservative coalition? Can hard-line stands on social issues be set aside?

On one side of the intraparty battle stands Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has suggested again and again over the past week that party leaders need to reduce the salience of culturally divisive issues. “We don’t have time to divide our party. We’ve got to go back to welcoming anyone who walks through that door,”

Not everyone in the Republican Party was on board. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, counterattacked on March 20:

Reince Priebus has decided that the way for his party to win over voters is to parrot the Left’s policies. The grand strategy, which calls for throwing the party’s social conservatives overboard, demands the G.O.P. be more “welcoming” and “inclusive” to people that are actively working against the conservative principles in the Republican platform.

Rush Limbaugh warned that if party leaders abandoned the right’s social agenda, “they are going to cause their base to stay home and throw their hands up in utter frustration.”

The potential gains from a softening of the party’s hard-right stand on social and cultural issues could be huge: a return to full competitiveness and a reversal of a widespread, sharply negative view of the Republican Party. The pollster Andy Kohut, former president of the Pew Center, described the chasm between Republican Party loyalists and the voting public in a March 22 article in the Washington Post . . . .

Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the Stern School of Business at N.Y.U. and the author of “The Righteous Mind,” wrote in an e-mail to The Times that intraparty Republican divisions go beyond social and cultural issues and that

the left-right divide politically reflects an underlying psychological dimension, related to openness to experience vs. threat sensitivity and preference for order/stability.

The Republican Party has begun to move to the left on social and cultural issues, as well as on immigration. Despite the warnings of mass defections of white evangelical and born-again Christians, these shifts will not be as costly as some people, both inside and outside the party, claim. 

The fact is that on pretty much every noncultural issue – government spending, taxes, the regulatory state and national defense – the Christian right holds orthodox Republican views virtually identical to those of mainstream Republicans. Its members are unlikely to bolt the party.

The non-addressed issue is the fact that the GOP establishment should never encouraged the Christofascists to infiltrate the party.  While the GOP may survive killing off the Frankenstein monster it created, it will be a messy business given the extremism and high levels of hatred within the ranks of the "godly Christian" folk.