CNN.com: "Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says"

Ha! This is hilarious. On The News Hour with Jim Leher, David Brooks has been predicting that his crippled party will likely need to endure ten-to-fifteen years of working out the kinks before it's able to get back on its feet ideologically or politically. A conservative named Tony Perkins is already proving Brooks right:

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.

"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.

Rejecting suggestions that the conservative movement was viewed as being out of touch with the electorate, Perkins says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics.

"It's a return to fundamental conservative principles that Ronald Reagan showed work and that people can be attracted to," Perkins said. (Full article on CNN.com)

This is exactly the kind of dream-world nonsense Brooks is referring to. It's going to be very entertaining to watch from the sidelines as the GOP keeps this up! And as it continues to lose election after election after election....

Resentment is not an idea. Nor is resentment a means by which one achieves intellectual or moral clarity.

This thought, or some variation on it, has been coursing through the nether regions of my mind lately.

I think it has arisen in conjunction with my attempts to think through what exactly it is that fuels the continuing existence of a political party while the remaining traces of its longtime ideology -- the ideology that the party has (so to speak:) bet the bank on -- have frayed themselves into utter incoherence.

Like stray, dead leaves left over from autumn that reemerge with the melting away of blanket-upon-blanket of wet, winter snow, only to shrivel dry and decompose under the hot July sun.

A voter's resentment (conscious or not), when reproduced, amplified, refracted and echoed back to him by men and women seeking political or economic power, is his blindness. A politics that endeavors to flatter a voter for his blindness is a politics that subjugates and -- indeed -- infantilizes the voter.

To the precise extent to which a voter's resentments are flattered, reinforced and catered to, that voter becomes dependant upon the politician, and more importantly, upon the continued ascendancy of a politics that so flatters him.

It is in this respect that observing the decomposition* of Goldwater/Reagan Republicanism calls to mind a condition that could be described in terms that are not dissimilar to those that were used repeatedly by Goldwater/Reagan Republicans** in undertaking to describe the dreaded, feared, much-lambasted and -lampooned relic, the Welfare State:

paternalism.

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* And if you doubt that that's what we're observing, I'm afraid that you flatter yourself. (I know, lame joke.)

** Not to mention the pathetic/embarrassing "Obama's a socialist" antics of John McCain. It's really hard to pin the 'socialism' label on the Democratic Party in an environment in which the sitting Republican Administration has enacted the most sweeping regime of the nationalization of formerly private resources in the history of the United States.