This morning on AlterNet, an article about how the Republican fantasyland was shattered on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning made the rounds. Like many of the other articles deconstructing and describing the Republican mass meltdown in reaction to their losses all across the board, it does a good job of summarizing without going on too long about it. (That article can be found here.)
What sparked this diary was the interaction between an interesting point made in the comments to that article (which I'll quote after the fleur-de-Kos), and another article I saw this morning about how evangelicals are slowly realizing that the issue isn't that Americans don't understand their positions, it's that we increasingly don't agree with them. While this has thrown the evangelical right for a loop, they are at least looking for ways to regroup. The Republicans, however, are not - instead, they're doubling down and casting about to find ways to make sure that the reason for their failure is our lack of understanding, rather than the foulness of their agenda.
Come with me over the jump for some discussion.
Here's the comment I found rather interesting from that AlterNet piece:
"The papers today and yesterday report claims by Republican leadership that their message was not the problem [sic] it was just that they didn't have the correct tactics to get that message across to the current demographics of the US."
Compare this to the second article I found, the one about the evangelical shock:
“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.
“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”
So it seems that evangelicals are beginning to get the point of their failure. It's not that we don't
understand their message or their belief system. It's that we
do understand it, and
because we understand it,
WE REJECT IT. As much as they dislike hearing it, they realize that it's not an issue of whether we understand (we do), but that their fundamental message is frankly revolting to us. They may blame it on the secularization of society, but they also realize that that secularization means people aren't going to agree with them on these issues - not now, not ever.
I wonder how much time it will take for the rest of the Rethuglicans to catch up to the evangelicals on this very simple point - that it isn't that we don't understand their agenda or their ideology, it's that we do understand it, and that we will never agree with it.
For example:
We do not agree that women have no right to birth control.
We do not agree that women have no right to control of their own bodies.
We do not agree that there is any such thing as "legitimate rape."
We do not agree that women should remain second-class citizens.
We do not agree that brown people are somehow of less worth than white people.
We do not agree that being brown is an automatic crime.
We do not agree that gays and lesbians are spawn of the devil, or criminal, or making a choice to be gay or lesbian.
We do not agree that abortion is murder, or that a fetus is a human being.
We do not agree that cutting taxes on the rich will make the country's economy grow.
We do not agree that rich people have the right to abuse the poor through "right to work" laws, or anti-labor laws, or anti-union laws, or refusal to provide health care.
We do not agree that bootstraps are the only way to success.
We do not agree with the lack of a social safety net or the deep cuts that are being made in it all the time.
We do not agree that education should only be for those lucky enough to have rich parents they can borrow from, or that science is the spawn of the devil.
We do not agree that the earth is 6,000 years old.
We do not agree that the President is not an American citizen, or that he was born anywhere other than Hawai'i.
We do not agree that their last golden boy, George W, did anything but damage the country.
We do not agree that the rich know how to run the country anywhere but into the ground.
Yes, we understand their positions on every one of these issues. But we do not, and we never will, agree with their positions, because their positions violate the fundamental meaning of what it is to be American.
This is what the Rethuglicans don't yet understand: those of us who voted against them, see through them. Those of us who voted against them are too smart to be taken in by their fantasy-bubble-world ideology. Despite their attacks on education, science, government, the social safety net, the poor, the brown, the female, the young, the queer - we are still not dumb enough to believe their lies.
Their strategy has always been to appeal to the stupid and the angry - heck, one of their representatives actually said they'll never reach the "elite, smart people."
The stupid people can be reached through all the things they're attacking (education and science), which is why they want so desperately to suppress those things. The angry people are dying off, and most of the people who are replacing them in the ranks of voters aren't stupid enough to get that riled up over issues that are this ridiculous. And no matter how much they try to make us "understand" their position, they will never, ever see that we do understand it - and that we have roundly rejected it.
The GOP is becoming as obsolete and irrelevant as the Whigs in 1860 - and good riddance to them. Evolution talks a lot about the survival of the fittest due to best adaptation to current circumstances. The GOP is not adapting. And like any other organism confronted with a hostile environment that doesn't adapt to that environment, it won't survive much longer.
Pass the popcorn and the Raisinets. This should be fun to watch.