In the wake of Mitt Romney's loss in 2012, supposedly the Republican Party did a post mortem and concluded that certain things needed to be done to enhance the party's attractiveness to younger voters and those outside of the party's typical base: angry white, far right Christian males. Over a year later, little or nothing has changed in the GOP and more tellingly, the party elected officials continue to prostitute themselves to the same narrow demographic which is literally dying off with each passing year. Can the GOP somehow reinvent itself? As I have indicated before, my vote is a resounding "No!" At least not until more crushing electoral defeats are handed to the GOP. A piece in Salon looks at this apparent inability to change - some might even might call it a death wish. Here are highlights:
The Republican Party’s total failure to make even cosmetic changes to its image and policy agenda last year has at this point become the kind of cliché-cum-running joke that often attaches itself to accepted truisms in American politics.
But the observation of these symptoms is less crucial than the diagnosis. Why are Republicans so stuck?
When it became clear about a year ago that Republican leaders would have a much harder time advancing immigration reform than they realized — that GOP activists and conservatives were livid about the idea that Republicans were going to help illegal immigrants gain citizenship — it started to look like the party had an insoluble problem on its hands.
For a long time now, people have argued that the solution to the GOP’s problems will resemble the slow, painful, but steady moderation process Democrats went through in the 1980s and through the Clinton presidency.
If the theory were correct, you’d think repeated election defeats would have set the process in motion already. Maybe a third defeat, in 2016, will catalyze a more rapid transition. But over time, I think the important differences between the Democrats’ old challenge and the challenge Republicans now face have started to show.
Democrats didn’t have an easy go of it, exactly, but they were able to modify their positions across a range of issues without, for instance, creating a left-wing-primary perpetual motion machine, or giving rise to a permanent population of resentful protest voters. Maybe Republicans can do the same. But the 2013 experience suggests they are so in hock to aging, white, conservative reactionaries that taking on new debts with minorities, gay people, single women and so on entails the risk of defaulting on the old ones.
Another way of saying this is that Republicans have depleted most of their crossover potential.
It’s manifest in the GOP establishment’s pusillanimous relationship with conservatives. They didn’t cry “Hallelujah” when “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson preached a bigoted sermon about gay people and the Jim Crow South, but they also notably didn’t treat his remarks as an opportunity to instigate a Sister Souljah-style confrontation with the right. To the contrary, they rallied to Robertson’s defense and to a defense of conservative revanchism in general. . . . . they haven’t cut the Gordian knot by admitting that these people’s motivating beliefs have failed or been rejected by the public.
Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Republican Party will only change when people begin to leave the party en mass and the party experiences repeated electoral defeats. Given the Christofascist/Tea Party take over of the GOP grassroots, the GOP is incapable of being reformed from inside any time in the near future. Hence, the best way to speed reform is to do everything possible to defeat GOP candidates.
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