GOP columnist and consultant David Frum is down but not yet out on his Republican Party.
Three big trends have decisively changed the Republican Party over the past decade, weakening its ability to win presidential elections and gravely inhibiting its ability to govern effectively if it nevertheless somehow were to win. First, Republicans have come to rely more and more on the votes of the elderly, the most government-dependent segment of the population — a serious complication for a party committed to reducing government. Second, the Republican donor class has grown more ideologically extreme, encouraging congressional Republicans to embrace ever more radical tactics. Third, the party’s internal processes have rigidified, in ways that dangerously inhibit its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The GOP can overcome the negative consequences of these changes and, in time, surely will. The ominous question for Republicans is, How much time will the overcoming take?
And yet… he still delusionally believes that a multiethnic, socially tolerant conservatism is ready to take over in the cyclic response to the Liberal Obama years, just as the alleged Compassionate Conservative Bush years followed the Liberal Clinton years, just as the law and order conservative Nixon years (a contradiction in terms) following the chaos of the liberal 1960’s. Just as, more generally, small government Reaganism was in response to New Deal Rooseveltism.
For every action, whether in physics or in politics, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The liberal surge of the Obama years invites a conservative response, and a multiethnic, socially tolerant conservatism is waiting to take form. As the poet T. S. Eliot, a political conservative, once gloomily consoled his readers, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The message reads better when translated into American vernacular: “It ain’t over till it’s over. And it’s never over.”
And he may be right… in the LOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG term. But there is no way the GOP embraces multiethic multiculteralism and social tolerance in time for 2016, 2020, or 2024. A whole generation of angry white conservatives need to die before such an embrace can take place. And the danger for the GOP is that it may too die in the process, only to be replaced by a successor party, much like the Whigs were replaced by the Republicans.