I've long said that the GOP's deadliest weakness is that if it runs hard on its ideological agenda (this includes the various social issues it uses as window dressing for its economic core mission), it loses out because the majority of Americans have moved beyond the cultural conception of the GOP -- most of America is not as racist, homogeneous, militaristic, insular, and ignorant as the GOP would like us to be. If we were, there would only be the GOP, Karl Rove's wet dream of the one-party state would have been in place a long time ago. The GOP alienates most Americans when it runs hardest on its ideological agenda.

The problem the GOP has run into is that it remains mired in a mythical 1950s (or perhaps the 1850s, with regard to some of its economic and social issues, or even 1750s, if you take their Unitary Executive Theory as an un-American, pre-democratic conception of unaccountable, concentrated executive power), being a tightly-disciplined ideological engine that does not tolerate dissent within its ranks -- this lets it trumpet loudly and with focus, but increasingly the national conversation has moved beyond it. Much in the way the rest of the First World (and even some parts of the Third World) are moving ahead, leaving the USA behind -- from unilateralism to multilateralism. The conversations will go on, and the GOP's standard bromides of condemnation, accusation, hysteria, paranoia, purging, and witch-hunting -- well, those leave them largely out of step with most Americans, who increasingly see the need for dialogue instead of diatribes, democracy over demagoguery, diplomacy in place of defensiveness.

In a more tolerant America, a more diverse America, a more democratic America, the Republicans are doomed -- their Brimstone Base gulped down the Kool-Aid, believed their party's own lies, and insisted that the GOP follow the agenda their leadership was only cynically invoking to snooker those benighted people into voting against their class interests to begin with. The smart Republicans are abandoning ship, while the majority of them are still clogging drunkenly down in steerage, marveling at their unsinkable ship's intelligent design, ignoring the icy waters pouring in from all corners, confident that God will save them.

The emptiness of these arguments reveals that American conservatism no longer has any purpose except perpetuating its own power and concentrating as much wealth as possible in the hands of the already wealthy.

As if it ever had more of a purpose than that? Particularly from the 20th Century onward, the GOP's hard little heart concentrated on those issues, with varying degrees of success. Most of the last century was a Republican century, after all, so how can we honestly take their rhetoric seriously, when contrasted with their praxis?

The challenge they have always faced is they can't simply come out and say "We are for concentrating as much wealth as possible in the hands of the already wealthy" -- one doesn't win elections that way, alas.

The rest of their program was created to camouflage that core ideological principal -- other issues to distract and seduce voters into acting against their actual class interests. It wasn't a conspiracy so much as the cynical recognition that if you mobilized people against blacks, immigrants, anarchists, communists, pacifists, internationalists, unions, gays, intellectuals, secularists -- you could get them to swallow the rest of your agenda, pitting the "real" Americans (e.g., white, native-born, capitalist, militaristic, jingoistic, middle-class, straight, anti-intellectual, religious) against the "unreal" Americans. It still smells like fascism to me, unfortunately, the ideological borders of the Republican ideology, and that's going to not bode well for their future as a party, or the rest of the country, forced to deal with them, or their ideological successors.

I think "conservatives" have not been honest conservatives in this country for a very, very long time. The decline has deeper roots than the last eight years. My hope is that if people are awakening to the false conservatism of the Republican Party, perhaps they'll also awaken to the false liberalism of the Democratic Party, and push for real reform, real change, and move us into this century in some position other than prone.