Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
A useful thought from The American Conservative:

If the GOP is to have any chance of reviving anytime soon, it will be by peeling off disillusioned and dissatisfied Obama supporters. Even if Obama were driving people away (so far, there is little evidence for this), the GOP still has to be able to attract them. At present, the GOP’s powers of repulsion remain far greater. So far, everything the GOP has been doing in Congress and in the media has reinforced all the habits that have pushed so many people into Obama’s arms. Shouting fascism and tyranny in ever-louder voices is not going to change this pattern, but will probably ensure that it keeps getting worse for Republicans.

I don't know if there are similar examples from US political history, but I'm surprised the GOP has not taken on board what happened to the British Conservative party after Tony Blair's win in 1997.

They had developed a belief in the Divine Right of Tory Government and were rather taken aback when the ungrateful peons elected a whippersnapper with no government experience in a landslide. The reaction was to despair of the idiot electorate and embark on a suicidal spiral of pandering to the extremes of the party and electing ever more wingnut leaders to ensure the core vote. It turned out that the core vote was comprised of thirteen ladies of uncertain age in Tunbridge Wells, a couple of retired colonels whose cells had been padded with yellowing copies of the Daily Mail and a dachshund named Colin. Unsurprisingly, they kept being walloped at the polls, even when standing against increasingly vacuous Bliar. Each time they got walloped, they gorged more on crazy flakes. (To steal my currently favourite meme ).

Only when David Cameron got elected to the leadership (rather accidentally, since Colin was chasing rabbits at the time and there was a jumble sale on at the Women's Institute) did the party finally start to realise that out-Blairing Blair was the way to go. Wingnuts safely retired to the hinterlands, and with the electoral gift that is Gordon Brown (and the seemingly inevitable poisonous corruption that afflicts all parties after two terms) Cameron's party is all but indistinguishable from New Labour on policy, but more importantly, says almost nothing meaningful on anything. They watch from the sidelines as the government destroys itself, safely anodyne. Cameron understands that governments lose elections, oppositions do not win them.

Fascinatingly, this is almost exactly the same evolution that the Labour Party went through when Mrs Thatcher crushed them in 1979. Being socialists, their wingnuttery knew no bounds - they got so few votes in one election that it was clear Michael Foot didn't even vote for himself. It's been said that Thatcher's greatest legacy was to disband the Labour Party forever. Tony Blair's great victory was to invent the successor party to Thatcherism, whilst the party that spawned her consumed itself.

Lessons from history. It amazes me to see experienced politicians doing the same thing all over again. Mature democracies are all about the middle ground - get a reputation for extremist lunacy and you can spend a long time in the wilderness shouting at tumbleweed.