How the GOP Got Here: A Symposium (Mark Steyn)

NRO ^ | 11/5/2008 | Mark Steyn and others

[mojito]

I congratulate Senator Obama on a remarkable and decisive victory. It was in many ways the final battle in a war the Republican Party didn’t even bother fighting — the “long march through the institutions.” While the Senator certainly enjoyed the patronage of the Chicago machine, he is not primarily a political figure: Whether “educators” like William Ayers or therapeutic pop-culture types like Oprah, his closest associations are beyond the world of electoral politics. He emerged rather from all the cultural turf the GOP largely abandoned during its 30-year winning streak at the ballot box, and his victory demonstrates the folly of assuming that folks will continue to pull the lever for guys with an R after their name every other November even as all the other institutions in society become de facto liberal one-party states.

Bill Bennett asked me on the air the other day why voters were so hot for this hope’n’change mush, and I suggested that it’s the dominant vernacular of the age. Go into almost any American grade-school and stroll the corridors: you’ll find the walls lined with Sharpie-bright supersized touchy-feely abstractions: “RESPECT,” “DREAM,” “TOGETHER,” “DIVERSITY.” By contrast, Mister Maverick talked of “reaching across the aisle” and ending “earmarks,” which may sound heroic in Washington but ring shriveled and reductive to anyone who’s not obsessed with legislative process. This dead language embodied the narrow sliver of turf on which he was fighting, while Obama was bestriding the broader cultural space. Republicans need to start their own long march back through all the institutions they ceded. Otherwise, the default mode of this society will be liberal, and what’s left of the Republican party will be reduced (as in other parts of the west) to begging the electorate for the occasional opportunity to prove it can run the liberal state just as well as liberals can.

[mojito]

A long march indeed.

[Slapshot68]

The Republican Party isn’t dead...but it’s on life support awaiting a cure.

[Doohickey]

Depressing.

[danmyte]

Well, if the Republicans ever are to regin their status they will need to have spokespersons for the conservative values than the RINO’s. I was at least glad to see Shays get defeated.

[Mamzelle]

I’m picturing McCain back in the Senate...reaching across the aisle...for a handout.

[Christian4Bush]

mark

[alex]

If liberals can run a liberal state, be my guest let them run it, I do not care.

The problem is that brain-dead pinkos are incapable of running anything.

[NormsRevenge]

It took them awhile but the Chicago Machine did it again.

Slowly but steadily the left infiltrated and indoctrinated the masses, melding minds of the young and the ignorant to do their bidding.

Mao and Joe would be proud.

[gargoyle]

...Brain transplant...

[MHT]

Those buzz words are part of character education, a job parents used to do at home but now must be done by "educators"....

Everyone needs to see the movie "Idiocracy" Although vulgar in spots, it's about the people of the future who communicate through advertising slogans. "Branding", "logos", "buzz words"-- How about "retroactive tax increases", "redistribution of wealth", "the fairness doctrine"--I can figure those out in a hurry.

[Revolting cat!]

while Obama was bestriding the broader cultural space

True enough, but the 'broader cultural space' has become a field where halfwits play, and are easily seduced by single syllable words like 'hope' and 'change', incapable of considering their implications.

[aquila48]

Mark gets it.

When you surrender the schools, the media, the bureaucracies, entertainment, etc. to the other side you’re not left with a lot of ammunition with which to mount an attack.

Check this out for a wake up call...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32cxf_yuri-bezmenov

[kabar]

McCain will be back in the senate reaching across the aisle helping Obama enact an amnesty, which will destroy the GOP and the country with the stroke of a pen. Then McCain can go back home with a sense of satisfaction that he paid the Reps back for 2000. Johnny, we hardly knew ya.

[PetroniusMaximus]

“Republicans need to start their own long march back through all the institutions they ceded.”

And when they get done with that long march, they will find an America so radically reshaped by immigration that no one will understand their english.

[donna]

Christopher Shays lost? LOL!

Does his wife still have the job Clinton gave her?

[Major Matt Mason]

Republicans will make a comeback only after they return to their conservative roots. That process starts with the replacement, with principled conservatives, of all of the Republicans’ elected congressional leaders, as well as most members of the Republican National Committee and most state party officials. It’s time for new leaders, from top to bottom.

Agreed.

[mick]

Mark Steyn is a brilliant man. But America become America through trial and struggle not political action. And the American people became the American people not through some kind of long march through the institutions.But in rising to the battle for survival on this continent and against all kinds of ruthless enemies.The fat, soft, whinney people who now apparently represent over 50% of the nation will soon go the way of the goony bird. The institutions like public schools with their feel good pictures on the wall are relics of the past.The liberal,command economy created from the New Deal is dying before our eyes. A sterner, tougher American will be born because the old safety nets are failing. The old certainties are proving false. BO might just likely be an American Gorbachev spending his term trying to save a dying system. And like Gorby he will fail. BO is a loser and a delusional misfit who will go down in history as a fraud and a failure.
As the old saying goes......”Cowards will stay behind, and the weak will die on the way”

[arthurus]

All the spokesmen in the world will not counter the Left control of the education of the children. I think education is a lost cause. This regime will end homeschooling and will require a government curriculum and equal racial, sexual, and other “minority” representation in private and parochial schools .

[arthurus]

Cain will be effectively a Democrat from mow on.