GOP Goodbye?

I stayed home yesterday so Summer and Isaac could recover from their respective colds, and while driving, I caught some talk radio, both Air America style and the right-wing staple; the contrast was fun. Liberals exulted, but did so cautiously, aware that only 8 years ago the Republicans rode a similar wave to control over both the executive and legislative branches, and we all know how well that went.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were wringing their hands, fretting about how they let this happen. For them, this election wasn't about Obama and Democrats winning; it was a watered-down, moderated GOP losing its way. (It was especially fun to hear these folks participate in the sort of self-loathing usually reserved for those of us on the left.) To this theory, I say, "poppycock!" The results of Tuesday's election were due entirely to the self-defeating and short-sighted rightward track of the Republican party since their last huge defeat in 1968. Since then, every major move by the GOP, from Nixon to Palin, has been to move steadily to the reactionary extreme, based on a politics of fear and exclusion and name-calling, and that can only last for so long.

I've been thinking a lot since then about the Republican party, that odd marriage of big business, conservative Christianity, and random libertarianism (gun rights, especially). For years I wondered how that coalition worked, and now, in the wake of 11/4/08, it appears that it didn't really work that well. At the risk of hyperbole, here are some elegiac thoughts on the GOP.

It began with the market meltdown earlier this fall, as the Bush wing of the party called for increased government involvement in the markets, a sort of pragmatic approach, which was torpedoed by the fiscal conservatives, the small government crowd. In some ways this rift may indicate how the house of cards went into foreclosure, as it were. Being the only game in town, government-wise, for 6 years may have made that anti-government aspect of the Reagan-era GOP fade; it's hard to hate yourself (unless you're a liberal).

This was followed by the House republicans falling in line only after getting the requisite pet projects funded in the revised package. To rail against waste and stand for fiscal discipline is fine, but you gotta walk the line too, and hypocrisy has rarely been so evident as with 21st-century congressional Republicans.

After the first bailout plan failed, Timothy Noah of Slate wrote this piece on how this schism might well mark the death of the modern GOP. His argument seems all the more solid after Tuesday's Democratic victories underscored the national discontent with Republican policy toward the economy. It does little good to hate the government when the private sector, left to its own devices, can be so fallible.

A second piece, this one from the new issue of the Alibi, makes a similar case. Ortiz y Pino, who is often a bit of a blowhard, makes the case that, both nationally and here in NM, the GOP fell because it, in his words, "hitched its wagon to a single engine, the Conservatism Express, and rode it close to the top." The idea that the GOP limited its scope to such a narrow ideological range should serve as a warning to Democrats not to let a mandate turn into a suicide run to the left.