Give the GOP a year and try to get them to return to our conservative roots. If they don’t then there should be a mass exodus to either the Constitution or Libertarian parties. We all have to decide where we are going and all go to the same place.
I would say that the time is right for a whole new third party ... one that strongly advocates and defends CONSERVATIVE values ... and does NOT tolerate Rinos (McLame) faggots (Foley) or crooks (Stevens). AND NO MORE LIBERAL LITE
The GOP needs to reform right now. If not this country will go down. New agressive leadership needs to sell the party’s line. It will take young Newt’s and Haley’s to get this going to fight now. And start lining up candidates for 2010.
Since Nov 6, 2008
Yawn...
This is pointless. The base was intact and we were hammered. We lost the middle, end of story. We can run and hide in denial but in the end we need a message that can attract a broad coalition. The mere idea of splitting the party is ludicrous as we’ll never win another election in our life times. You would need the other side to splinter into multiple parties as well so that the 30% of the vote we could bring to the polls would be sufficient. They aren’t that stupid and we lose, again. Conservative values can sell and I do believe have as I think the county is very conservative in their personal lives but in the end you need a message that can sell to the middle. I don’t think this election is one you are forced to reinvent yourself over as we were very very unfortunate with respect to the current events. In other words, the deck was stacked against us.
It will have to be a revived Republican Party because third parties are dead ends.
IB4TZ?
Third party
Conservative Party with a capital “C.” Perhaps we’ll endorse a republican or two.
IMO an important bit of perspective is missing here: it’s very difficult for any political movement to achieve a permanent majority national status in the US – or for that matter anywhere that government has to be to be reasonably responsive to the voters.
The post WWII conservative movement in the US has followed the usual arc of political movements: a trek in the political wilderness, then starting with Ronald Reagan initial success and increasing popularity as it corrected some of the excesses of previous Democratic administrations and introduced some useful new (or at least rediscovered) perspectives of its own, gradual descent into ideological posturing and overshoot, increasing complacency and sometimes actual corruption, further and further drift from focus on the concerns of typical voters, and now a loss of influence as the pendulum swings.
And that’s how electoral politics works: political decay is the eventual fate of any dominate political movement and party.
In this regard I often mention the Conservative party in the UK here because it’s easier to accept the process if you are viewing it from a bit of an emotional distance: the party achieved great popularity and success under Margaret Thatcher, crashed and burned in the name of ideological principle, and emerged rebuilt and reengaged with the voters a decade later not as a party attempting to turn the clock back to 1950 but as a party attempting to look ahead to 2050.
In order to do this the Tories had to accept programs such as national healthcare which were anathema to Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as ‘society’, only individuals and families” worldview but which were demanded by voters unwilling to accept that society lacked the ability to protect individuals and families willing to play by the rules from bad luck - and UK conservatives are making their electoral way back by asking how to make society more efficient without making it more cruel.
IMO, that’s the political challenge of the US conservative movement: how to come to terms with the fact that electoral success at a national level means coming to terms with a portion of the US electorate which does not question that market capitalism is the most efficient engine of economic progress but also increasingly believes that some government interference in the market is necessary if a market economy it to work reasonably well for most participants.
Now, as politics actually works, that’s a complicated process and one that can only be settled by experiment and experience: you try things, some things work out, some things don’t, you embrace and improve what does, you discard or radically redesign what does not - always keeping in mind that what works today may not work tomorrow, if only because human beings have an enormous ability to “game the system”.
So it seems to me that Conservatives - like Democrats since Reagan - really have only two choices to deal with this situation:
1) Opt for sufficient political purity to please the 35-40% of the electorate who reliable vote conservative, and hope that the opposition screws up so spectacularly that the rest of the electorate will repudiated them. (Ex: Democrats playing identity politics, and convincing themselves that surely the next election will be the one where the voters open their eyes to Republican malfeasance – we all know how well that worked out for the Democrats)
Or
2) Compromise your principles to the point where you attract an additional 10-15 % of voters, in which case you win national elections.
Actually, of course, no political movement has much choice: eventually any political movement or party (be it of the left or right) gets tired of losing elections and comes up with a version of itself that can win elections (Ex: The national Democratic party backing pro-life candidates in places where that’s what it takes to win ).
Now, I’m not saying anyone has to like this process.
But as long as the voters retain the ability to elect people to perform the experiments, judge the efforts by their result, and pass their verdict at the ballot box to swing the pendulum one way or the other, I’m pretty optimistic about the eventual outcomes.