Some ground rules: This is not a 2016 Presidential Election thread. CTOAN has threatened to murder a puppy if we go there, and I strongly believe that we should respect the poor little guy's right to live.
So what we want to do here is stick to generalities - essentially, the "view from height" thing. A lot of us (yours truly perhaps most frequently and loudly) have proclaimed that this is going to be a realignment election, and that whichever way it goes, the political landscape is going to be irrevocably transformed. This is your chance to address that theme: Will defeat for either party cause the current two-party system to come unglued, resulting (perhaps) in a different political balance of power, possibly with different political Parties?
In this thread, we'll talk about what might come to pass if the Republicans lose. If you want to talk about what will happen if the Democrats lose, do it in the other thread.
GRAMMATICAL NOTE: And yes, I recognize that "whither" (as in "which way?") isn't spelled "wither". It's a pun, son.
I'm sure other people have said it before, and it's possible some have said it as often or as loudly; but one of Rachel Maddow's most frequent assertions is that Republicans respond to defeat by moving further to the right.
As Mitt Romney's campaign begins to look more and more like a forlorn hope, the telltale signs are already starting to appear. Romney was not "an authentic conservative"; while he may have tried to look, act, and talk like one, he never quite pulled it off. "Real" conservatives knew that he wasn't the long-hoped-for Second Coming of Reagan, and from time to time he tipped the world off to the fact that he really didn't want to be Reagan Reborn himself: Remember Romney saying that he wasn't going to yank every last vestige of Obamacare out of the ground and burn it with fire?
So come the morning of November 7th, 2012, the GOP will begin its next great forced march to the right; and given how far and how fast it spent the last four years moving that way, we can only imagine where it will end up even by the 2014 mid-terms.
Yet there are real problems with continued movement to the right: Simply put, a very large number of Americans already think the GOP functionally insane; one has to wonder how much farther it can go towards flat-out John Bircherism. More importantly, though, is the prospect of a battle down the road between Paul supporters (who will have to find a new leader going forward, given that their favorite Texas congressman has run his last race) and more traditional conservatives (who still control the Party's microphones).
An objection might be raised on practical grounds: If the November election turns out to be enough of a disaster, won't the Party establishment rebel and demand a more centrist approach? My take is that this will not happen, largely because the GOP's main power centers are now primarily outside the Party.
Think about it: The GOP's principal opinion leaders are all media personalities. Most (like Rush Limbaugh) are independent, and will continue to exert influence regardless of the Party's fate at the ballot box. True, there are media moguls like Rupert Murdoch who have the power to bend a large number of media personalities to their will. Yet much of Murdoch's power is held in check by ratings; even he can't move against the tide of public opinion if it means losing the ear of the Party's grass roots.
Then there are the money men: Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, Bob Perry, Sheldon Adelson, and many, many more. Again, the biggest challenge for the GOP is the fact that these people operate outside the Party, and can't be controlled by it. The GOP establishment might want to move the Party to the middle, but if the people with the money refuse, then that movement is simply never going to happen.
Against this is the simple reality that demographic factors are rapidly making Ronald Reagan's political coalition of Christian fundamentalists, Southern ultra-conservatives, Western libertarians, working-class reactionaries obsolete. Non-whites are becoming a larger and larger segment of the American populace, and their electoral participation rates are rising to boot; these voters have historically favored Democrats by a 3:1 or even 4:1 margin. As this segment grows in voting strength, it's going to be harder and harder for Republicans - who are hard-pressed to win the white vote by a 60-40 margin - to carry the day. In the past, various Republicans - most of whom belonged to the GOP's "Bush wing" - advocated efforts to win support among African-Americans and Latinos; unfortunately, this would require losing the support of right-wing nativists and disaffected whites, who represent a large part of the GOP's voting strength.
It's a painful dilemma for the GOP: Ride their current base down to defeat, or abandon that base and try to build a new one. Historically, Parties usually only make this choice only when all hope of winning with the old coalition is gone; compounding this in the case of the Republican Party, however, is that fact that it's not the office-holding establishment that has the power to make the decision to do this: It has to be done by the media talking heads and by the cash cows, neither of whom is under any particular pressure to make such a change. Is Rush Limbaugh going to turn his listeners off by advocating ethnic outreach so that the GOP can win? Not likely. If there's going to be any impetus to change, it will have to come from the money men, and it will likely be over the protests of the media blowhards, whose vested interest is in continuing to stroke angry white, male egos.
There's another problem facing the GOP: Young voters. It's often said that voters grow more conservative with age, and to some extent that's true. But there's another angle to be considered here: The "brand loyalty" model of political allegiance. This model says that, just as consumers become attached to a brand through their first experiences in the marketplace (the quintessential example being American car owners), voters become attached to the first political Party they vote for. So just as it was a coup for the Japanese to win the compact car market in the 70's (in so far as it produced a generation of Corolla buyers by the time the 90's rolled around), Republicans benefited immensely from the Reagan Revolution, which produced a generation of lifelong Republicans.
The graph shown above makes the implications of this behavior clear in a way that is omnious for Republicans: Young voters are turning to the Democratic Party to an extent not seen since the 60's. Combined with the rising power of non-white voters, it's not hard to see that the GOP is facing annihilation in short order if they can't address these trends.
In theory, Ron Paul's support among younger voters should be the solution to this: If other Republicans adopted Paul's platform, that might help reduce the gap among younger voters. But there are good reasons why Paul got stomped in the GOP primaries: Young Republicans may have loved him, but mainstream Republicans don't. Unless the GOP can develop some big-tent tolerance, the most likely place for Paul supporters to end up is in the arms of the Libertarian Party, as minor Party voters, with an eventual migration from there into the ranks of the permanently disaffected.
The overall picture, then, is a grim one: The GOP seems destined to lurch further to the right; it seems destined to turn off minority voters even as minorties become the new American political kingmakers; it seems destined to turn away young voters who increasingly want to move in a different direction from the Party base; and nobody seems to be in a position to grab control of the Party and steer it back to safety. Between the certainty of continuing defeat and infighting, the GOP seems destined to falter and fade into a regional Party and then nothing at all; down this road lies ultimate fragmentation and replacement by another Party, with several possible candidates looming on the horizon, including the Democratic Party itself.
Which may well make 2012 the GOP's last hurrah; if Obama wins by 5-7% the way he did four years ago (or even by a larger margin), it will be clear that the demographic door has closed on the Republican Party and that we have entered into a new political era, just as we did in 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1980.
tl&dr: I think that Rush Limbaugh, like the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day, is right when he says that if the Romney loses, it's going to be the end of the GOP. It may take a generation, but I just can't see the party surviving the rot.
And with that, it's your turn: What do you think will happen to the Republican Party if it loses this year? Will it veer so far to the right that it never comes back, will it splinter into several fragments, will saner heads take charge, bite the bullet, end the Party's war on minorities and transform it into a moderate conservative movement that can compete amidst the diversity of mid-21st Century America, or will something altogether different happen?
