Paul Krugman's editorial in today's NYT: "The Republican Rump"
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?
You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.
Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant "Vote McCain, not Hussein!" It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that "the other folks are voting." It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.
Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.
The GOP could continue to marginalize itself as the "know-nothing" party, believing that their loss was not because of a large-scale repudiation of conservatism; rather, they will rationalize their humiliating defeat as an argument that they were not conservative enough! This is clearly Palin's wing(nut) and the Bill Kristol's, Karl Rove's and Pat Buchanan's of the party, that which apologizes for nothing and considers introspection and analysis to be the useless tools of the irresolute. If this is the direction the party takes, it will doom itself to political irrelevance for the next generation or longer.
But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.
This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.
The word "intolerance" to describe the attitudes to which the GOP has come to profess is really quite mild. I prefer the 'purveyors of hate', the 'panderers to ignorance', and 'morally bankrupt'.
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