The Real Problem with the Demented Republican Party by Charles P, Pierce [View all]

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/republican-problem-14582852

The Republicans, of course, are all in a hilarious tizzy about how it all went sour. Was Romney the wrong candidate? (Of course he was. Nominating G.I. Luvmoney four years after his best pals nearly burned down the world was almost as stupid as nominating one of the other clowns in the clown car would have been. Oops. Paradox! Alert! Alert! Arrrrrooooooooogaaaahhh!!) Was the "message" bad? (Of course it was. It's been bad for 30 years. The country's just been catching up to how godawful it is. Hint: You've lost the official popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, and the one you "won" has an asterisk the size of Alpha Centauri hung on it.) Was the moon in the seventh house? In my capacity as Gracious Winner, let me suggest an alternative general theory.

You lost because your party has become demented.

The first is the economy. Strip away all the anti-science, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant positions, and the Republicans still are wedded to an economic doctrine that's as nutty as is Ted Cruz's opinion on the UN plot to steal our golfs. Five years ago, Jonathan Chait — who, by the way, had a great election season — wrote a book called The Big Con, in which he successfully linked the Republican devotion to supply-side economics to all the other wacky positions into which the conservative "movement" has finessed the Republicans. And that, friends, is the real hill on which they are prepared to die. Even our hypothetical candidate cannot abandon that doctrine even though study after study, suppressed or not, and three decades of practical experience, have all taught us that it is simply destructive moonshine. This is the one thing on which Willard Romney remained constant throughout his entire career. Witness, if you please, the reaction of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to the events of Tuesday night. Fudge and nonsense, and a continued instance that any "compromise" must needs take place on their home ground. How destructive is this enforced orthodoxy on purportedly "moderate" Republicans? Ask Scott Brown, who signed Grover Norquist's idiotic "pledge" not to raise taxes, and then had Elizabeth Warren beat the pink leather shorts off him for it during the campaign.

Party discipline is a thing of the past. The things that all these centers of power agree on are, in the main, incredibly unpopular. The ones on which they disagree are self-defeating. If one problem is that the Republicans are afflicted with competing, self-negating orthodoxies, the other problem is that every one of these competing, self-negating orthodoxies has a powerful constituency within the party. There is no point in finding a charismatic Latino candidate if he's going to alienate women, like Marco Rubio would, or women and scientists, the way "Bobby Jindal" would, or every rational human, the way Ted Cruz would. Every solution is its own problem. Good luck with that.


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