Stuffy Old Men: Region, Religion, Race and Class Define and Buffet GOP

 From the Daily Beast courtesy of the Huffington Post:

Increasingly blue New York has become a model for Democrats’ successful formula. Figures like Governor (and 2016 presidential possible) Andrew Cuomo and New York City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn have made themselves national figures with a socially liberal, business-friendly fusion of urban centrism and identity politics. It remains to be seen if this is a roadmap to victory in the rest of America, but their success is unquestionably an indicator of the hurdles that Republicans face, linked as closely as they are, to anti-gay-marriage dead-enders, as they attempt to play political catch-up.

More here.

Click through and read the essay; it's good.  It mostly deals with topics I've hit on here a lot: the Republicans are now weighed down heavily by ultra-conservative weirdos who will for the foreseeable future prevent them from winning any national elections, and, increasingly, statewide elections.

But, like I said, I've talked about that a lot already.  I'm looking to the future.  Because the GOP seems to be hell bent on driving itself into obscurity, all the real political action is destined to be taking place within the Democratic Party, and the excerpt above describes well the frightening future I fear we face: the Democrats are, and will continue to be, liberal only on the social issues, but conservative on economics.  

That is, in many ways, such a situation represents the near total victory of conservatives.

The Southern evangelicals have, since the Reagan era, really been nothing more than shock troops on election day.  Republican rhetoric has been very appealing to them all these years, but they've never gotten much more than a few scraps and bones thrown their way.  Abortion is still legal.  Gay marriage is posed to go national.  Teachers still can't lead their students in Christian prayer.  The drug war hasn't even caused the price of drugs to go up.  And on and on.  Social conservatives have worked their asses off to elect conservative candidates for decades and have gotten nothing in return.

Economics, however, is a completely different story.  All of Washington, Congress, the White House, the elite press, have swallowed, hook line and sinker, the notion of neoliberalism, or Reaganomics, or supply side economics, whatever you want to call it.  I mean, Obama is a friend of the corporations, and he wants to cut Social Security--Obamacare is a corporate joke, and we're the punchline.  Mainstream Democratic thinking on money is all Republican now, or, rather, Republican before the crazies took over.  The point is that, when you throw out the social issues, the Democratic Party is currently pretty damned conservative.

This means that mainstream American politics looks like this: a far right party, a right party, and nothing else.  There is no liberal party left.  It's all conservative, whether we want to admit it or not.  So, as much as I'd like to celebrate the decline and fall of the GOP, it seems that there's a new political battle on the horizon.

We need to start seriously thinking about how to undo the conservative takeover of the Democratic Party.

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