The Grand New Party?

While both our political parties always want to win elections the Republicans wanted this one in the worst way, which is pretty much how they lost it. They had several matters of importance at stake, a large investment in cutting edge voter suppression for one. If this ever passes muster there’s no telling where it would end, possibly in the Third World. Much of the party’s base was hell bent on preventing the reelection of a president of color. Once was bad enough. The campaign was dangling bald faced lies that would have died an instant death if there were a polemic equivalent to the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

But their biggest concern was and is that Barack Obama, absent the pressures of reelection, might lower the boom on the people and institutions responsible for our current problems. The establishment, for whose benefit the party is run, has one consuming motive and that is flexing its “conservative” credentials by conserving Wall Street in at least its present condition.

Republican prospects looked good. The economy was at best shaky, their base appeared more energized than the Democrats’, their usual monetary advantage was magnified by Citizens United and the president was perfectly cast for his part. They even had Donald Trump’s support and yet the people who bet on politics as they would on the Super Bowl always had Obama favored in the neighborhood of 75%.

Beside obvious demographic problems today’s Republican Party consists of a widely disparate establishment and base. They have little in common other than a dislike of Democrats. They don’t seem to have much to say to each other. Safe Senate seats in Indiana and Missouri were lost by candidates expressing unique definitions of rape, which had to have damaged the national ticket. It seems they’d have been warned that loose lips on cultural issues like this make it harder to keep those top end Bush tax cuts.

A plausible equivalence can be made between Republicans today and 1964 when John Birch types bulldozed their way to nominating Barry Goldwater. While they did regain the presidency in the next election a lot had happened in the intervening four years to shake things up; expansion of the Vietnam War, two major assassinations and customary pathetic left wing civil disobedience. Nixon was elected on a “law and order” platform as a perceived moderate, notwithstanding my view of him as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a judgment that was validated by Watergate.

So where will the Republican Party go from here? Will they continue as they have been? I’ll grant that the establishment’s economics are arguable in theory, barely in my opinion. But when encapsulated with the cultural views of the base, for which science is a matter of opinion, the whole narrative evaporates before our very eyes. If I were a marriage counselor I’d recommend divorce ASAP.