The Republican Party Needs a Reality Check

In a surprising column in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson - who is typically an apologist for the Republicans - argues that the GOP needs  a transformation and that the party needs to come out of embracing the past and move towards the future.  Obviously, it is not the message that the Christofascists in the GOP base want to hear as they endeavor feverishly to move the country back into the 1950's if not the Medieval period.  No doubt Gerson - like Jon Huntsman - will be viewed as a heretic or a RINO, but sometimes the truth isn't what one wants to hear.  The GOP needs to stop living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist and start to embrace objective reality. Here are some column highlights:

It is the nature of resilient institutions to take stock of new realities and adjust accordingly. In a new cover essay for Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner and I detail the examples of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak by emphasizing middle-class values, advocating the end of “welfare as we know it” and standing up to extreme elements within his coalition (thereby creating the “Sister Souljah moment”). In Britain, Blair went after the “moral chaos” that led to youth crime, abandoned his party’s official commitment to public ownership of the means of production and launched New Labor.

The Republican Party now needs similar transformation. Out of the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113. 

This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.

Mitt Romney, lost by 5 million votes to a beatable incumbent presiding over an anemic economy. The explanation is not purely technical or personality oriented. At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.  In retrospect, last year’s Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party.

A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors. First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is necessary, particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia. 

Second, Republican primary voters, party activists and party leaders have a choice to make, ruthlessly clarified by recent events. They can take the path of Democrats in 1988, doubling down on a faltering ideology. Or they can follow the model of Democrats in 1992 and their own party in 2000, giving their nominee the leeway needed to oppose outworn or extreme ideas and to produce an agenda relevant to our time. 

As I have noted over and over again, I do not anticipate any meaningful change in the GOP until the Christofascists are driven from having any serious role in the GOP nominating process.  They are fanatics who by definition want to move the country backwards and who ignore a changing reality.