Reply #13: It was the Southern strategy that set up the GOP's current plight

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The GOP conservatives in the 1950's weren't exactly a "rump group" or "burrowing from within." There had always been a strong faction within the Republican Party that was deeply resentful of the East Coast/Wall Street establishment. In the late 40's and 1950's, it was identified with Robert Taft and was rooted among conservative Midwestern manufacturers. In the early 60's, the West Coast Birch Society types and Goldwaterites became more influential, and that was the background that movement conservatism came out of in the late 60's.

There was a rough balance those two factions within the Republican Party for a considerable period -- but it broke down when Nixon started trying to woo disaffected Southern Democrats.. The movement conservatives jumped on the bandwagon and by the early 70's they were making common cause with the Wallacites and the Birchers, even though they often privately mocked them as ignorant yahoos. The domination of the Republican Party by the Reaganites came out of that alliance by the end of the decade, as did the close coordination between the movement conservatives and the religious right.

The movement conservatives never did warm to George H.W. Bush, who they saw as a figure of the East Coast establishment, but they threw their full support behind George W. Bush in 1999 when Grover Norquist told them he was the candidate of their dreams. And that same mixture of anti-government ideologues and the religious right is the group that has control of the Republican Party today.

Along the way, what used to be called Rockefeller Republicans have been squeezed out -- in part, I think, because more educated and suburban voters who had rejected the Democratic Party as long as it was identified with Southern racists and big-city political machines are now rejecting the Republicans out of the same kind of distaste.

There's an element of snobbism there, perhaps, but I suspect it has to do more with the inclinations of a group that votes on issues rather than on the basis of tribalism. There's a definite class division at work -- but it isn't the upper class/middle class economic division that most of us are sensitive to. Instead, it's a cultural class division -- educated vs. low information, urban vs. rural, cosmopolitan vs. parochial, secular vs. religious.

That division is the one that's uppermost in the minds of people who love Sarah Palin. They know perfectly well that they're being squeezed out of the mainstream of society and they're very resentful about it. Of course, it's history that's squeezing them out, not any kind of elite conspiracy -- our society is becoming better educated, more tolerant, and more global-minded simply because the planet is becoming complexly interdependent in ways that require that sort of mindset. But the people who are on the losing end of the shift are never going to be able to see it that way, precisely because the vantage point from which they're observing makes it impossible.

What's likely to happen, though, is that the GOP will be increasingly defined by litmus tests. If you're not ideologically or tribally identifiable as "one of them," you'll be demonized and excluded. And though it might be possible for an "RLC" to successfully field moderate Republican candidates in certain areas, as long as the intolerant minority has control of the national GOP message machine and fund-raising mechanisms, they're not going to get very far.

A massive infusion of corporate cash is one thing I could see recapturing the Republican Party from the ideologues and the tribalists -- but given how discredited the corporations themselves are at the moment, I can't see that translating into broad-based popular appeal either.

The libertarians are the other independent force on the right at the moment -- and given Ron Paul's wide appeal, they might have more of a future than either would-be GOP moderates or corporate fronts. The movement conservatives pretty much blackballed the libertarians back in the late 60's, because they saw them as a bunch of long-haired, pot-smoking hippies -- and though there was a certain degree of reconciliation in the 80's and 90's, when the GOP was at it's peak of success and hoping to become a majority party, that's now fallen apart again.

Not that the libertarians are going to have much interest in pulling the movement conservatives out of the quicksand they've gotten themselves into, either -- but they might be effective as an insurgent movement to take over a crippled GOP.