Since I’m not a Republican—and, more to the point, since I don’t like Republicans—my concern for the future of the Party is virtually nil. So any “advice” I might give would be of dubious worth. But, still, I don’t mind throwing a few ideas their way.
The first is, any party can come back from a shellacking, as both the Democrats and the Republicans have demonstrated in the past decades. You don’t have to be good when the competition is lousy, and it frequently is. Sooner or later, the Republicans will look good because the Democrats look so bad.
The central collision in the party these days seems to be between, well, the Douthatians and the Ericksonians, the not-47 percenters and the 47 percenters. For the Ericksonians, the task of the Republican Party is to rescue the country from the grasp of the legendary 47 percent who don’t pay federal income taxes but do collect federal benefits. The non-47 percenters, like Ralph, are the ones who know that the 47 percent legend is not merely a legend but a myth, and that a party that sets out to “get” the 47 percent is going to get gotten at the polls four times out of five.
I’m on Ralph’s side, obviously, but I haven’t a clue how he’s going to win. In the 2012 Republican primaries, anyone to the left of Mitt Romney was mown down like tall grass in the Fall, and it was the Mittman who delivered the 47 percent myth in its purest form. The Republicans ought to take another look at the candidates who survived a single primary in 2012. All of them except Mitt would have been ludicrous as general election candidates. Herman Cain was a buffoon before the sexual harassment scandals. Newt Gingrich had more harpoons in him than Moby Dick, and Rick Santorum, who probably could have taken Mitt in a one to one contest in any of the major primary states, said (out loud) that all forms of contraception ought to be banned, which Republicans earnestly pretend no one has ever said since the world began.
The trouble for the Douthatians is that these candidates were popular because they represented what most Republicans think, feel, and believe. The Republican Party today is largely the anti-Democratic Party. They hate the Democrats and will oppose whatever the Democrats advocate. They hate the rest of the world (except for Israel, of course) and long for a new Cold War so that they can continue to accuse Democrats of “treason.” The Douthatians have to build something constructive on a foundation of hate, which is nothing if not unstable.
