Dear Republicans,
Although we are political opponents, I come to you now not as an adversary but as a friend. One of the things that has made this country great is the balance inherent in its unique two party system. There are those who would argue that we would be better off in a parliamentary system with multiple parties and coalitions of various factions into a ruling entity, and who knows perhaps they are right, but for better or worse, our political system is set up as a two party one. And it is within this context that we must all operate.
To that end then, it’s necessary to acknowledge some harsh truths. Not the least of which is that when a political system is based on just two factions, it’s pretty important that both factions be sane and reasonable. We can disagree about what direction we would take the country, or by what methods. That’s really why we have two distinct parties. But our entire system of government falls right off the rails if either party becomes too extreme or worse, divorced from reality.
In recent years, your party has been invaded by some of the worst elements of humanity. Paranoids, delusionals, conspiracy theorists, fundamentalists of many stripes (religious, market, social Darwinists, etc). All have recently not merely been given a seat, but in fact positions of real power and responsibility. In years past such cranks would have quickly been ejected from your party’s ranks and quietly ushered out the back door to prevent their lunacy from tainting the party’s image. But today, they have not merely been embraced, but have gradually begun to replace the seasoned and once respectable party leadership with their own brand of political extremism.
The result has not been pretty, having expelled some the best and most competent leaders within your ranks and replaced them with mindless and uncompromising hacks, your party is becoming viewed more and more as a laughingstock both nationally and globally. The up and coming generation of Americans has almost completely rejected your party as out of step with modern America. Rising minority groups once reasonably friendly to your party are now rejecting it in even greater numbers than the current youth generation demographic.
At this rate, it won’t be long before your party finds itself incapable of achieving public office in any but the most conservative areas. Even once conservative strongholds such as Virginia and North Carolina are now rejecting your message. Indeed we even find that states such as Arizona, Texas, and even Georgia are approaching parity between the major political factions. In short, you are losing, you are losing across the board and across the nation. How much longer can you expect to remain viable when the likes of Rand Paul, Peter King, and Michele Bachman continue to act as standard bearers? What does it say of a party when one of its leading luminaries actually proclaims aloud that “we are not generating enough angry white men”? How long can such a party expect to continue to exist in an environment where their leading demographic is losing more than a percentage point a year as a portion of overall voting population?
Your party is rapidly hurtling toward the abyss of political irrelevance. Within the space of a presidential cycle from now, you will no longer be able to compete on the national stage and will quickly become relegated to the status of a shrinking regional party.
Minority voter demographics in this country have more than doubled from 12% in 2000 to 26% in 2008. Those numbers won’t be getting any smaller either, they are growing every year. At the presidential level, democrats need only capture 38% of the white majority demographic to win the presidency. As a democrat I am heartened by statistics like these, but I am also concerned because it means that we are in effect headed towards one party rule, a system I’m sure no American would like to see.
Even if one disagrees with them, a reasonable and loyal opposition is necessary to maintain the balance of good governance. Failing that, a one party system will eventually corrupt itself and the nation as a whole will ultimately suffer. Such is the brilliance of the two party system, it is supposed to prevent that from ever happening. By concentrating political power in two distinct but relatively equal factions, neither is likely to gain enough of the upper hand to ever rule with impunity.
But you my dear friends are threatening that balance of power by your own approaching political extinction. If your party does not moderate, if it does not expunge the lunatic fringe, if it does not begin to accept and even embrace the realities of modern society it is doomed to extinction. Conserving that which is best about society is the laudable goal that your party has always based itself upon, but rejecting anything and everything that smacks of progress as it seems to do today, is not conservatism, it is regressivism, and no political entity in a free and modern nation can long survive such an ideology.