Wherefore Republicans?

The most entertaining parlor game in the media is figuring out where Republicans go from here, because a new Administration facing major challenges at home and abroad just isn't sexy enough, I guess. And so you have some jockeying for power among the leading lights of conservatism. I was a little worried that some of them were catching on after reading this:

Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, poised to ascend to House Republicans' No. 2 leader this week, said the Republican Party in Washington is no longer "relevant" to voters and must stop simply espousing principles. Instead, it must craft real solutions to health care and the economy.

"Where we have really fallen down is, we have lacked the ability to be relevant to people's lives. Let's set aside the last eight years, and our falling down in living up to expectations of what we said we were going to do," Mr. Cantor told The Washington Times in his district office outside of Richmond. "It's the relevancy question."

That's pretty much right, and one could see a new Republican Party with legitimate, free-market solutions on things like health care and the environment. This is how the Tories under David Cameron, waving a green banner, are rising to prominence in England.

Fortunately, far more conservatives are focused on taking the party back into the distant past.

Lee Edwards, a historian of the conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation, said that in meetings with conservative leaders since the election there was an emerging consensus that the Republicans had been hurt by drifting away from conservative principles and that religious conservatives, economic conservatives and strong-military conservatives had seemed to realize the need to unite to regain power.

“It isn’t a question of stressing economic issues or stressing social issues,” Mr. Edwards said. “What we have to do is to go back to what Ronald Reagan did and put together a coalition.” [...]

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, scoffed at calls for the Republicans to move left, which he said had followed Republican defeats in 1964, 1976 and 1992. And he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.

“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.

Whew!

Then there are others who don't think they have much of a problem.

Older party hands pointed to John McCain’s lackluster campaign and the difficult terrain on which Republicans found themselves battling this year, and they eschewed any sky-is-falling rhetoric. The up-and-comers, meanwhile, sounded the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes.

“I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party, and this ain’t it,” assured Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who was RNC chairman in the 1990s. “I’ve seen it a lot worse."

Thank you Haley Barbour!

There's a certain justice to this. Republicans have spent the last decade tossing out apostates and using loyalty oaths and purity tests to make their party monochromatic and completely ideological. Now when they hit hard times, OF COURSE they can't figure out the way back, because they all have the same failed ideas and principles.

I think I'm going to tune out of this "debate" for the next several months and just go back to Matt Stoller's dead-on precis.

The GOP is going to do is futz around for awhile with the fake moderate versus conservative argument and then eventually find a way to tap into the newly emergent overt racism. It may happen in 2010, and it's impossible to predict whether the issues will be framed around 'law and order' as the millions of unemployed young people inevitably do what young people do when they are bored and disempowered in a recession, or some sort of stabbed in the back narrative around Iraq or Afghanistan, or some new set of issues focused on the fallout from this very scary financial crisis. Whatever happens the party will reorganize on the internet and that's going to seem really cool and innovative and counter-intuitive except that it will be perfectly normal for a political party to reorganize using a culture's mainstream medium for organizing, which is the internet. The right already did it once, with Drudge and the Free Republic in the 1990s.

The animus for the new Republicans, though, will not be fake conservative principles like low taxes, a strong military, and family values, because Republicans like taxes on non-rich people, they like hollowing out the military, and the GOP leadership is full of sexually tortured souls. It's going to be racism, as it always has been. There, soul-searching over. And this blog post only took you five minutes to read, which is probably a bit shorter than it will take for the Republicans to find and manufacture millions of new right-wing dog whistles.