Come to think of it, I already have!
A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote---a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this”---“this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.
This again presumes that the party is safely in the hands of rational actors who see the suicidal path they are on. Would be nice if we had some evidence of this! But alas, if you have ever spent any time visiting one of their favored news sources, you will know that this is not the slightest case. Already the reasons for their defeat---if indeed they lose--have been adjudicated:
1. Actually, we won, but ACORN.
2. We only lost because Romney not true conservative.
3. Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed! RYAN/RUBIO 2016!!!
And when the whistle sounds, off they'll go down the dog track for another four years. Personally, I think you'd have better odds negotiating a nuclear-power agreement with the mullahs in Tehran than trying to convince the Emerging Teabilly Majority that, in fact, they really aren't.
My best guess is, the only thing that's ever going to is some horrendous thrashing at the polls, when they wake up one morning---four years from now or eight years from now, or 12 years from now---to find that they've only garnered 27 percent of the national vote; when any and all signs of their party's influence has evaporated beyond the boundaries of the rural Confederacy and the Mormon West; when they're confronted by Democratic supermajorities in both Houses of Congress and a Democratic President who (this time!) doesn't give a shit about bipartisanship; and when a wiser, smarter national news media that's grown weary of their rantings decides at long last to routinely ignore them. Don't know when, or even if, it will ever happen, but thinking that these people will substantially shift their collective ideological trajectory just because they lose another 52-48 Presidential election---well, it's hard to see that happening.
Put it this way: One of the hallmarks of conservative thought in our time has been the practice of a kind-of Politics of Humiliation, where simply disproving or defeating one's political opponents is not sufficient to consecrate a governing agenda; it's a type of politics that requires the total demonization and denigration of anyone who strays outside the realm of party doctrine to legitimize and uplift the claims of the believer. It takes many forms---much of it sexual---and you can hear examples of it on just about any episode of the Limbaugh show. Think "Sandra Fluke," and you'll see what I'm getting at.
Now there are all sorts of reasons why some people in general, and conservatives in particular, feel the need to humiliate others to establish their superiority, and entire volumes have been written on the subject. Sometimes, this urge originates in actual pain, e.g., abuse suffered in childhood; other times, however, it's just a sign of bratty overindulged narcissism, of privileged white people feeling sorry for themselves because they have to share their toys with the other kids in the sandbox (like, paying taxes and stuff), and the only way to slap a little courtesy and common sense into them is, well, to give them a reminder of what real humiliation looks and feels like. Losing another 53-47 election won't cut it, but losing a 67-27 election and control of 37 state houses just might. Either way, it's difficult to see how Team GOP with its current roster ever decides to veer from the crazy path until it wakes up to the stark realization that everyone, but everyone, in the country---with the singular exception of rural white males---simply despises it and wishes it gone.
---Vitelius
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