Republicans: The Indulgent Parents
The country is changing. On almost every social issue, American continue to become more tolerant. But on almost every issue, the Republican base is out of step with the rest of the country. Arlen Specter, who's far from a flaming liberal, finally concluded that it was impossible for him to return to the Senate for a sixt term if he had to first win a majority of his state's angry, reactionary Republican base. In the most populous region of the country, Republicans holding federal office are nearly extinct. Yet in their remaining geographic base, sizable minorities of Republicans in Texas and Georgia believe their state should no longer be united with the rest of the United States of America.
A repeated refrain of rightwingers is that the Republican party lacks strong leaders. They're right, but not for the reason they think. It's true that the Republican party doesn't have strong leaders, because if it did, they would be telling the rightwing of their party "knock it off. Stop making a litmus test of your fringe issues. Accept that Americans are more tolerant than you, and you're not able to ram your retrograde views of sexuality and science and families and faith down their throats. We're not going to let you destroy the government, because Americans kinda like having a government that works. You're not allowed to oppose any and every tax increase, and because many of you live in places where you get more money back than you send to Washington, you have to face up to the fact that you benefit from that spending as much or more than people you don't like."
Instead, Republican apparatchiks are talking about the Republicans' problem as one of branding or the effectiveness of the RNC, when in reality it's simply that Americans don't like their ideas of how to run the government or the vision of society they advocate. Unlike many indulgent parents, they haven't stepped back and realized that they're a big part of the problem. Some have started to struggle with it, suggesting that it's ludicrous that the reason Republicans have been decimated in two straight elections is because they've supposedly forsaken their conservative principles. But most Republicans are still in denial. And if they stay in denial, nothing will improve for them. And even if they face up to the reality that they have to start telling their base "no," it may be too late. Their base may reject them, just as they reject modernity, tolerance and the legitimacy of good governance.
How ironic that after all the culture war crap about how liberals are supposedly too permissive, how John Walker Lindh supposedly joined up with the Taliban because of indulgent parents and "California values," that it's permissiveness and indulgence that's destroying the Republican party.
As I mentioned earlier keep pushing Right my friends, keep pushing Right.
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