Infinite Wisdom: In the Wilderness

After a thumping defeat this past November, the Republicans have been doing some soul searching. The Republicans are now in the political wilderness left to wonder what went wrong for them in the past few years. The road to disaster started in 2006, when both houses of Congress fell under Democratic control. Last year, the Democrats regained control of the White House after Bush's disastrous eight year reign. Any road back to respectability for the Republicans will likely be triggered by failure of the Democrats to govern effectively. In any event, the GOP is now a largely moribund party that has no idea how to be relevant after the recent financial crisis.

I would argue the prospects for a Republican resurgence in the near future is not very likely unless the Democrats govern ineptly. When a political party's chief symbol is a blowhard like Rush Limbaugh, it is not in very good shape. Sure, Limbaugh can stir the faithful, but he has rather limited appeal to moderates. With the defection of Arlen Specter to the Democrats, the Republican contingent in Congress has become even less moderate. The true believers in the right wing agenda are misguided in cheering the defection of Specter. Ideological purists may be overjoyed to see Specter leave the GOP, but such a development is not a good sign for the Republicans. For the Republicans to recover, the party will have to find a way to appeal to moderates and independents. And a party that is chasing away a moderate figure like Specter and appears to be embracing its most reactionary elements, will have a hard time scoring points with moderates.

A key problem for the GOP is after eight years of Bush, it is poorly positioned to offer leadership at a time of economic crisis. Ronald Reagan remains the hero of the Conservative movement, yet the core Reagan views are not terribly relevant amid a major financial crisis. With the unemployment rate soaring, Americans are now compelled to look to government to make things better. Having an overt pro-business stance, Republicans continue to be advocates of deregulation. But at times like this, pushing deregulation is not an easy sell. A strong argument can be made that reckless deregulation of the financial industry paved the way to the Wall Street meltdown, so a party touting deregulation and free market fundamentalism will find it hard to get traction.

The strange thing about the surviving Republicans is how seemingly little they've been influenced by recent disastrous election results. Two successive electoral defeats suggest the Republican Party needs to adapt to stay relevant. Yet, the Republicans remain deluded into believing their recent electoral defeats were primarily caused by a failure of the GOP to adhere to the central tenets of the Reagan revolution. What the Republicans fail to acknowledge is the landscape has changed markedly since Bush was re-elected in 2004, such that the old formula of pushing for deregulation and lower taxes is not what the country needs or is clamoring for currently. Moreover, heaven help the GOP if more people start connecting the dots about the last ten years. The economy never really caught fire under George W. Bush as job creation remained relatively anemic and salaries for most workers stagnated. And under Bush, the wealth gap exploded approaching levels unseen since right before The Great Depression. There would be those who would argue that the economic performance under Bush was pretty good given statistics showing fairly robust economic growth. That argument now rings hollow as we learn that much of that supposed robust economic growth was due to the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the financial industry(spurred by a real estate bubble precipitated by actions by the Fed) that eventually brought the country(and the world) to the precipice of economic ruin. With these things considered, it is hard not to draw the conclusion the Republican policies under Bush did not work, which ultimately means the Republicans should not be allowed to control both the Presidency and Congress anytime in the near future.

Usually when a political party suffers clear defeats, it does some self-examination and realizes it must adapt. So far, the Republicans have drawn the absolutely wrong conclusion that they have fallen out of favor because they were insufficiently ideologically pure, meaning they strayed too much from the Reagan form of Conservatism. Though this allows the Republicans a small degree of comfort, their collective delusion probably means they will spend a protracted period in the political wilderness.