We live in a center-left country now. Obama was completely sincere during the election and Americans wanted more government, more benefits and look to the state to take care of them from the cradle to grave.
Obama is as transformative and consequential a President as Ronald Reagan. The political coalition he created will last a generation.
In the face of this political climate, conservatives are fighting a losing battle.
Well said, sadly.
There is no way this ‘coalition’ will last a day with the money nearly gone and without Obama as leader.
Maybe, maybe not. The country polls completely different on issues than they voted in 2012. The only real issue that polled well for Obama was to raise taxes on the rich and not the rest. This is human nature, and no one made an effective counter argument.
Your conclusion can be countered with the successful election of conservative governors in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan (more moderate republicans in the later two). These governors all won on decidedly conservative platforms just two years ago in the very states that went for Obama and dem senators just two years later. 2012 was a surprising outcome because it bucked every public trend of the previous three years. I am not convinced it was not the anomaly. The democrats simply ran a massively better campaign.
I think that if you went issue by issue asking people to choose whether they agreed with the conservative stance or the liberal one, a majority would favor conservative stances.
But the one issue that trumps them all is the addiction to entitlements. People will not give up the government cheese even if it means that future generations will be enslaved to big gov. That cheese is a powerful opiate.
There's a huge psychological disconnect between what people say they want collectively and what they vote on personally.
If conservatives can find a way to bridge the disconnect and convincingly show that undermining the collective undermines the personal, they can be winners.