“In the immediate wake of the election, Republicans felt so stunned — in no small part because they had deluded themselves into expecting victory — that it seemed momentarily possible that the party’s long march to the right may halt or even reverse. But the future of the party is already taking shape, and that future will be, in some form or fashion, a conservative reaction against the Republican leadership that has sold them out. The smarter Republicans have already shaken off the trauma of electoral defeat and begun positioning themselves to capitalize.”
“Any pundit who tries to claim he knows where all of this is going is lying. This schism could be a disaster for Republicans (because it will further alienate the rank-and-file, middle-and-working-class voters from the party establishment, which will now be bashed from the outside by DeMint and the Tea Party), or it could actually be a good thing for the Republicans’ future prospects (there’s a way to look at this as a long-overdue purge of the party’s moron faction).”
“Or it could all be irrelevant. Remember, the Democrats were facing a similarly bitter split not too long ago, when their party’s mainstream unforgivably backed Bush’s idiotic Iraq invasion and then saddled us with a war-waffling presidential candidate in John Kerry. And just like the Republicans after Romney, the Democrats after the Kerry loss felt hopeless, depressed and self-hating – you heard a lot of ‘Screw it, I’m moving to Iceland’ talk. Four years later, the party sold the identical Kerry policy package in an exciting new Obama wrapper, and suddenly people were partying in the streets. You just never know how these things will turn out.”
“But in the meantime, this split in the Republican Party is a crazy and highly entertaining mess.”