Who would have thought that conservatives trying to explain why they lost and where they should go from here would be both more tiresome and more deranged than the actual campaign. The typical citizen burns their hand on a hot pan. They understand not to do that again. A typical working American screws up at work, they do not get a raise or the promotion they were in line for. They pledge not to screw up again. They work a little harder and smarter. Conservative Republicans do not follow this obvious chain of cause and consequences. The commie anti-Christ burned their hand, not the hot pan. They screwed up at work. That just means their boss and coworkers are part of a liberal plot to destroy them, keep them from going to their mega-million dollar church and put up statues of Lenin in every public square. Conservatives do not stand for anything, they just believe in a brand of nightmarish brand of nationalism. Republicans at the professional politician level are not our loyal adversaries that have an agenda that has some modicum of merit, they are a group of people with a cult-like mentality which is impervious to ideas that work and respect human dignity. There is the slightest chance the coming year or two will prove me wrong, but there is no crisis of conservatism. There is no Republican civil war (Millionaire Conservative Freak Herman Cain calls for third party). There is going to be no genuine reevaluation of conservatism – a movement that has been inherently antithetical to having a democratic republic since Nixon and Goldwater. This post by the UK site The Spectator provides the core conservative feelings about where the Republican party is headed, The View from the Cocoon of Denial and Epistemic Closure ( Note these excepts are all from the conservative flagship The National Review)
Mary Matalin:
What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division. ( all bold is mine)
Project much there poor Mary. One of the many attributes conservatism shares with every anti-democratic movement of the last hundred years is the bubble of narcissism – they love themselves to the exclusion of all else, especially ideals. Obama is not deserving of any halos but he didn’t tell a stunning 533 lies in 30 days. Democracy 101: If what you stand for in the particulars of beliefs and policies is good and wholesome, you do not need to shroud it in a blanket of lies.
Grover Norquist:
Onward.
Grover has hated humanity since he joined the conservative movement and credit to him for not changing just because of one more loss.
Mark Steyn:
New Hampshire is overwhelmingly white — and the GOP still blew it. The fact is a lot of pasty, Caucasian, non-immigrant Americans have also “shifted,” and are very comfortable with Big Government, entitlements, micro-regulation, Obamacare and all the rest — and not much concerned with how or if it’s paid for.
I was tempted to say that Steyn is about as unhinged as conservatives get and than a flood of names came to mind. he belongs at the top of the pyramid of the dog-eat-dog philosophy of government. You’re living in a truly free nation when you let the disabled, the elderly, the sick and the working poor suffer and die in the street. Any safety net – from Medicare to workers’ compensation – is evil. In Steynworld people who get a $400 million bonus package are deserving of every penny. people who clean that millionaire’s floors can either work or die, to rid the nice people of the surplus population. Regulations that make it safe for Americans to use a bridge or eat a package of food, that is for wussies. No crisis of conservatism here, just the same old straw men dripping in bull. The Steyns and Ann Coulters cannot win a debate with a real liberal because they know they’d lose. This is the reason for the conservative echo chamber. If they exit the chamber they have to deal with facts and logic.
Jeffrey Bell:
It would be surprising if the Obama administration did not interpret its victory as a mandate to complete the Europeanizing of American government.
Romney, Ryan and congressional conservatives just ran on the European model of austerity. The philosophical foundation of conservatism is 17th century European authoritarianism – throw in some eliminationism and a lot of misogyny, equals today’s Republican Party and the one we’ll continue to see for quite a while.
Stanley Kurtz:
The college educated professionals at the heart of Obama’s coalition are products of an academic culture that not only leans far-left, but is dedicated to producing precisely the national political outcome that Obama represents. Obama himself was both a product and a member of the elite leftist university faculty.
Romney and Obama both went to Harvard. Every conservative on the SCOTUS has an Ivy league education. Stanely and conservatives are deeply afraid that knowledge gained through education mostly, though obviously not always, leads to enlightened thinking and conservatives clings to the ideals of base instincts, greed and prejudice.
Peter Kirsanow:
The electorate may well have shifted politically, and perhaps culturally. That will happen when we cede our institutions to the minions of ”progress,” when our media is biased and political elites cowardly. But human nature has not changed and neither have the principles conservatives — Americans — hold dear.
Obama and the Left will be emboldened. They will continue their effort to “fundamentally transform” America. Indeed, now that Obamacare will go into effect in full, the transformation will take several giant, worrisome steps forward.
That’s why we must fight. Harder, smarter, relentlessly. While we must shrewdly assess what went wrong politically, we don’t have time for finger-pointing and recriminations. Those inclined can do so later.There are too many perils at our doorstep.
Leave it to a conservative to put the word progress in scare quotes. The USA has had a difficult time living up to its ideals from day one. The architect of the U.S. Constitution said he hated slavery but owned slaves. One of the first things the government did was to try and raise revenue to pay for the Revolution and enforce a tax that some self absorbed whiskey makers did not want to pay because their allegiance was to profit, not country. We were supposed to be a model egalitarian society, but would not let poor whites or women vote. The Democratic Party represents the march toward progress, the ideals of which those with a conservative mindset have always fought. Today that conservative mindset is fighting to make America into a land of the lite and those who should not get uppity and expect a fair share of the wealth produced in the context of a complex society that requires modern infrastructure. To paraphrase senator elect Elizabeth Warren, fine you have a business, take a nice chunk of profits, but remember the social contract and the sum of the parts that allowed you to make those profits.
And, saving the best until last, David Gelernter:
We’ve seen an important (though far from decisive) battle in the slow-motion civil war the nation is undergoing: The blue states want to secede not from America but from Americanism. They reject the American republic of God-fearing individuals in favor of the European ideal, which has only been government by aristocracy: either an aristocracy of birth or, nowadays, of ruling know-it-alls — of post-religious, globalist intellectuals (a.k.a. PORGIs). As I’ve said before — many others have too — you can’t graduate class after class after class of left-indoctrinated ignoramuses without paying the price. Last night was a down payment.
Gelernter seems to be a Zen master of the conservative bubble. Conservatives declared war back in the 1950s on The New Deal and have been trying to return America to the plantation model ever since. he joins the chorus of conservative millionaires and billionaires complaining about how tough they have it. How brazen, arrogant and deranged to claim that God is the personification of Nixon, Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. This God they’ve projected whispers in their ears alone and it says do not regulate the amount of toxins in our drinking water because it would offend my friend Milton Friedman who is sitting right here next to me listening on the extension. Bill Maher: Republicans are screwed up from living in a bubble
Comedian Bill Maher said Wednesday night that Republicans needed to escape the “Republican bubble” if they wanted to win a future presidential election.
“Republicans have to start getting their information from a better source than Fox News,” he told MSNBC host Chris Matthews. “I’m not kidding about this. I think this really screws them up.”
Fox News is evil and part of the problem but it is mostly a projection of what the conservatives next door think. It is part of the bubble, but not the bubble. I can remember before Fox News and getting direct mail newsletters that contained the same urban myths and conspiracy theories. the same historical revisionism. The same voodoo trickle on America economics. Conservatism is zombie-ism. Despite failure after failure it thinks that going mindlessly down the gutter will eventually produce gold and honey. One can understand the Kochs and Romneys thinking that since they profit regardless. Why does the $12 an hour Republican next door think he’ll suddenly get rich if we have fifty years of Republican presidents. They’re mostly the ones who troll the internet blaming the Wall Street meltdown on Fannie May and Barney Frank. Which is like a smoker blaming their lung cancer on peaches. there will be no grand Republican epiphany, no deep soul searching – they’ll just double down on the malevolent crazy ideas they have so deeply invested in.
Call this part of the most equal time. A liberal who sees rays of hope, The Twilight of the GOP Establishment: Who Will Save Republicans, Now? By David Rohde
The time, though, is not for gloating. It is for supporting the Republicans who can rein in their party’s far right and help us all. For me, Fox News, of all places, was a hopeful sign.
While Karl Rove questioned whether Obama had, in fact, won Ohio, Juan Williams and Brit Hume courageously admitted the party had lost touch with a changing nation. They embraced exit polls showing that the surge in Latino, black, female and young voters that aided Obama in 2008 was a permanent demographic change, not a one-time event.
“We’re looking at a new kind of politics,” Williams said.
Hume stood tall as well.
“The demographic factors that Juan referred to are absolutely real,” he said.
And this morning Newt Gingrich, of all people, issued a bold mea culpa.
“We have to recognize that if you’re not going to be competitive with Latinos, with
African-Americans, with Native Americans, with Asian-Americans,” Gingrich said on CBS, “you’re not going to be a successful party.”All of these officials should be applauded. I disagree with them in many ways politically. I also question whether this is the latest of many political pivots for Gingrich. But I praise and respect them for accepting the basic dynamics of the race. Publicly admitting you were wrong is never easy.
The reaction of far-right Republicans to the results, on the other hand, was astonishing. They argued that the vast swathes of female and minority voters who supported Obama would have supported an arch conservative.
Of course President Obama will make the obligatory attempt to yet once again reach compromise. This time he’ll probably be wise enough to wear a glove.
The Long Goodbye 