TIME: For Republicans, The Ice Age Cometh

[seafan]

The Ice Age Cometh

By Mike Murphy, Time
Jun. 22, 2009

Despairing Republican friends have been asking me what I think we should do to rebuild the GOP and begin our certain and inevitable comeback. My answer disappoints them: "Build an ark."

I say this because I've made a career out of counting votes, and the numbers tell a clear story; the demographics of America are changing in a way that is deadly for the Republican Party as it exists today. A GOP ice age is on the way.

Demographic change is irritating to politicos, since it works on elections much as rigged dice do on a Las Vegas craps table: it is a game changer. For years, Republicans won elections because the country was chock-full of white middle-class voters who mostly pulled the GOP lever on Election Day. Today, however, that formula is no longer enough.

.....

It was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year. The bigger news was how he did it. Latino voters delivered the state. Exit polls showed that they provided Obama with a margin of more than 58,000 votes in a state he carried by a slim 26,000 votes. That's right, GOP, you've entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you're losing.

.....

Rather than face up to all this, too many in the GOP are stuck in a swoon of nostalgia. Most of our party leaders come from bloodred GOP states or safe districts, so they are far more at home in the tribal politics of Republican primaries than in those of the country as a whole. You could say their radio dials are stuck on AM. The result is we hear a lot about going back to "the winning ways of Ronald Reagan." Well, I love Reagan too. But demographics no longer do.

.....

Much of this is still heresy to the party as it stands now. Many will support an alternative strategy: stand pat, fight it out on fiscal issues on which the GOP has strong support and exploit liberal-Democrat excess. In the short term, that could work, but eventually the demographics will win out. Saving the GOP is not about diluting conservatism but about modernizing it to reflect the country it inhabits instead of an America that no longer exists.

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

----Thomas Jefferson

[Jade Fox]

1. "aping the grim town elders from Footloose"

:rofl:

This article is good, but too bad the author hasn't the guts to take on the "Obama is a Socialist" kooks who are nuking Conservative credibility right now.

If the Republicans don't distance themselves from the Limbaugh/Cheney/Gingrich wing of their party, the only supporters they will have in the future is the Scrooge demographic.

[salguine]

2. I wouldn't count the Republicans out yet, especially if the Democrats

don't get their shit together and start going some things that benefit THE PEOPLE of this country rather than the moneyed interests. If we don't start seeing some action taken on health care, banking reform, the Wars, etc, the Democrats are going to blow it all, and it'll serve them right.

And no, I'm not a whiner who wants a pony and expects "everything to be fixed overnight." It's not the speed things are moving, it's the direction. And the direction is wrong.

[monmouth]

3. Agreed. As much as I love POTUS, he is heading down the "one term" path...n/t

[CrispyQ]

4. Well stated & agreed.

Yes, there's a difference between the repubs & the dems, but more & more the difference is looking less & less. I'm sick of the dems exploiting their liberal base. They count on our votes, knowing we don't want a McCain/Palin in office, & then they get in office & take everything off the table.

[yurbud]

7. Maybe Obama has gauged how far they are on the road to extinction...

and figured out how much he can do and what would incite a violent backlash that could result in a more direct fascism than Bush & Cheney.

Just as on gay rights, for most progressive issues, it's a matter of waiting for a generation to die out so that their racist, greedy, violent hands wither to dust on the levers of power.

During the Bush administration, political change was like trying to disarm a crack-smoking monkey with an uzi--you had to do it very carefully.

Michael Moore describe the increasingly strident and violent tone and actions of the right as the death throes of a dinosaur caught in a tar pit (though I prefer to think of it as a pit of their own excrement). It knows it's going down, but can still reach out and chomp your head off. So you stand back, watch it wail and thrash, and wait for the inevitable.

It might be wishful thinking to believe this is what Obama is doing, but it is going to happen anyway.

In addition to demographics, a generation of white kids have grown up with less opportunity than their parents, and had to work twice as hard just to break even. Just as the racist and homophobic memes aren't working on that generation, neither is their economic snake oil.

[salguine]

9. Well, as far as waiting for a racist generation to die out goes,

that's never going to happen. There will ALWAYS be racists...yes, maybe they'll become more marginalized, but they'll always be there. But even if waiting for them all t die off were a tactic, it's bad tactic, and a morally unacceptable tactic. What are you going to do, tell someone they'll have to wait for a generation of people to die off before they can have their civil rights? If we'd applied that measure to Rosa Parks, she'd still be giving up her seat for Whitey, seeing as she staged her protest in 1955, and yet there's this asshole von Brunn in DC a few days ago. If they aren't gone after 54 years, when are they gone?

And another thing worth noting in regard to your last point...yes, we're entering a period where successive generations aren't doing as well as their parents—and it's going to get a lot worse until our government starts to use people, rather than Wall Street, as the yardstick by which we measure the strength of our economy—but, I'm not sure I agree that this somehow means they won't fall into the "hate trap". If anything, history has shown time and again that extremists like the Nazis and the Klan and other such hate groups thrive most during times of severe economic trouble. It's how the Nazis first came to power in Germany. Economic misery and economic and social marginalization are the best recruiting tools those group have.

[glitch]

5. I'd be happier about this if the Democrats weren't accommodating them

Democrats remaining true to their principles and the Republicans having to adapt to join seems like a much better plan, but that doesn't appear to be the way we're moving.

The Corporatists who took over the Republican Party and drove it into the ground are simply shifting their sights to us, and with very few exceptions we don't appear to be objecting.

[Uncle Joe]

6. Money is hard to turn down. n/t

[Enthusiast]

8. Right you are, Glitch!

Eventually The Democratic Party will be completely ruined and sooner than we think.

[salguine]

10. I don't think the Democratic Party has been anything like its

"friend of the working man" image for quite some time. Both parties' lips are pressed to the same corporate asses. The only difference I can see is, the Republicans do it with a kind of gleeful sadism, whereas the Democrats might feel a pang of guilt—but not so big of a pang that they don't do it anyway.

[glitch]

12. That is certainly true for the higher echelons in the party.

And the progressives in the lower echelons are largely squashed, there is no doubt, but once in a while one sneaks by.

It ain't good.

[MrBig]

11. I think I've seen this article before

Back around 2004 or so when the Republicans were taking over all aspects of the government...the Democrats were the dead party.

Give it time...the winds will shift again. Thus is the nature of politics.

[CLANG]

13. The "patheticity" of the Republican Party knows no bounds.

LOLapaooza! :toast: