the party exists to oppose Democratic ideas

This is dead on. Even when they had complete power, the republicans and conservatives and talk radio people worked overtime to kill progressive ideas. And there's one simple reason: there's no money in progressive ideas, at least not for the top one percent.

I think this time around enough people figured out that the republicans aren't offering any solutions--no reasons why conservatives are good. Just more reasons why liberals are bad.

As They Might Be Giants says: "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chips away the lie."

Sarah Palin is reviled by significant factions of the party establishment, and even those conservatives who adore have no idea what she thinks about substantive issues.

I don't recall where I saw this, but someone was talking about the one vetting meeting McCain's people had with Palin. They were most interested in philosophical differences betwen Palin and McCain, but whenever they pointed one out, her response was, "what's the big deal?" In short, princliples don't drive her. She'd be perfectly happy driving a marxist worldview depending on which way the winds are blowing.

As important as the lack of coherent ideas is the fact that the public face of the GOP is dominated by assholes. They alienate a significant slice of potential voters by being the kind of people you don't want to be associated with. And it's not just that they're assholes, but they're so damn proud of it.

Brooks dedicated his life to this train wreck? Gee, I just feel terrible for him.

I think he's an example of what used to be called, on the other side, a "useful idiot."

Do you mean "keeping the tires under inflated and proud of it" ain't going to work?

Or how about, if we have to, we'll lower regulation, drill baby drill and turn on private enterprise to make four earths of one earth in order to perpetuate our unsustainable economic growth. We'll make four more bubbles to get us out of this bubble and we'll make paupers of future generations if it means raising taxes on billionaires. Billionaires unite!

and Bobby Jindal is 37 years old and believes in exorcisms.

I don't see how that is a negative for any of the Republican factions. He'll be 41 in 2012, old enough to become leader of the party but young enough to be forgiven if he loses to Obama the first time he runs for president. Jindal will become their leader for the next decade or so, assuming they can get over their discomfort with brown people.

it's an obvious sign of bankruptcy.

Which is exactly where they are trying to take the country before Jan 20.

Don't forget Jindal's support of "Intelligent Design".

Funny, how Will and Brooks appear to have a grudging respect for the intelligence of President-Elect Obama - They disagree with him, but are upset at the lack of intelligence in their sector.

Let's also not forget that, in addition to not knowing where they want to take the country, where they HAVE taken it has proven to be -- and has been acknowledged electorally and very definitely to have been -- a policy disaster.

Conservatism has run out of steam politically AND it has failed practically, and people know it.

This isn't just the collapse of a political movement; it's the collapse of a philosophy. Brooks is right -- it's not 1964; it's 1932.

Couldn't happen to a nastier, more selfish bunch of assholes...

Is conservatism really more than an opposition force, though? After all, standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!' isn't going to make it actually stop happening... and that's the respectable brand of conservatism. I agree that a principled conservatism is necessary to keep liberalism honest and on task, but as a stand-alone governing philosophy it's pretty useless in a rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world. R

Well, look-- Bush & Co. were a right-wing regime that turned out to be militaristic, corrupt, plutocratic, and tied to a specific revealed-truth religious belief. Why is this a surprise?

... and (not to mention) authoritarian.

The contract with america was the starting point for the creation of Republican incoherence. It was almost entirely negative in content, and included outright lies in key areas like term limits.

Comparisons to 1964 for the Republicans are farcicial. However, comparing the Democrats in 2004 to the Republicans in 1964 has more than a little merit. Kerry's candidacy in '04 legitimized the Democratic party in terms of foreign policy and national security, making the party itself viable in 2006 and 2008. Kerry didn't win, but his platform is essentially Obama's platform, and Obama himself profited from the fact that the Democratic party nominated a veteran instead of a peace activist.

1968 was also not simply Nixon's coming out party. It was the year LBJ decided not to run for a second term because the Vietnam War had become a disaster on his watch. George W. Bush is leaving office after two terms, but the dynamics are the same: the American people are sick of and angry about the war in Iraq, and they took it out on Bush and his party in the two elections subsequent to '04.

It will always be "incoherent" to serve the purposes of corporations and the richest 5% of the population, and yet come up with enough divisive political BS to win popular elections.

David Brooks still doesn't quite grasp that the Republican Party is incoherent by definition.

the party exists to oppose Democratic ideas

The party exists to advocate corporate interests, i.e. weaken federal government oversight, become filthy rich privatizing public assets, etc. Give theocons and values voters Supreme Court appointments to secure their vote. Use the executive power to serve military industrial complex and multinationals.

my favorite part was before he made these remarks, bobo chided the democrats not to do too much too fast, because it will "freak people out."

yeah, i guess getting useful legislation passed quickly instead of scaring the crap out of everyone on a daily basis would freak SOME people out.

is he suggesting that the republican party is hobbled by stupidity and the democrats have an obligation to speak slowly for them?

"because it hasn't addressed the problems of today"

Perhaps its biggest problem is that its policies have CAUSED the problems of today!

Newt.

Contract on America.

They'll welcome him back and it might work.

From wikipedia:
The Contract's actual text was a list of actions the Republicans promised to take if they were in the majority following the election. During the construction of the Contract, Gingrich insisted on "60% issues"[citation needed], intending for the Contract to avoid promises on controversial and divisive matters like abortion and school prayer. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon would characterize the Contract as having taken more than half of its text from Ronald Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address.

[edit] Government reform

On the first day of their majority, the Republicans promised to hold floor votes on eight reforms of government operations:

* require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply to Congress;
* select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
* cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
* limit the terms of all committee chairs;
* ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
* require committee meetings to be open to the public;
* require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
* and implement a zero base-line budgeting process for the annual Federal Budget.

Newt could pretty much dust off this exact same contract, proclaim loudly that Bush strayed from what made them the majority in 1994. Point out that NONE of his policies were religious and yet they won both houses...

Which tenet of the Contract would not sell well?

Go on. Underestimate Newt again.

You've been warned.

My mother was visiting this August, and asked me a question:
"Are you a socialist?"
My parents have been the perfect tools for the kind of scare tactics that the Right likes to pull - where they'll get a lot of people to vote their ticket, while the same people don't notice that they are robbed blind by those they vote into power.

I answered "no" - I'm not a socialist, but I'm filled with admiration for those who have managed, often through considerable struggles, to distribute wealth a little more fairly throughout society.
And I reminded my mother that the health care she was enjoying, the pension they were receiving, the worker's rights that protected her and my father while they were working, the free schooling I received, and numerous other benefits, were all the result of her so-called "socialists."
People who had fought for the world to just get a little bit better. In Obama-speak: community, welfare and union organizers.

What my parents are only now realizing, is that the Right - the conservative movement - has been using them, to gain political power, by pushing a few simple buttons: anti-immigration, limited rights for gays, increased security against terrorism.
While at the same time robbing them blind - cutting down their pension, limiting their health care rights, reducing their benefits -- and shuffling mountains of money in the direction of a very few people ...

There's nothing wrong with Conservatism as an ideology; but there is no conservatism today, only applied Kleptocracy.
I told my mother I belive in progress.

Stifle the dirge, hush the fanfare

On the flip side, I've seen many a blog referencing the new Democratic majority.
Please. It wasn't too long ago the other side was blowing similar Rovian trumpets...

Which is to say: they are not as descendant, nor we as ascendant, as some would think. The great American middle, that ultimately decides elections, doesn't have a coherent philosophy either...

Like it or not it mostly comes down to which way the wind blows leading up to an election.
If it wasn't for a perfect economic storm, McCain might have won...

After all these years, it still boils down to this:
"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:

1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.

2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests.

In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all."

--Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824. ME 16:73

I always thought the nation voted R in '94, then discovered afterwards that what they really were voting on was the Contract on America.

It was that extra little unbargained-for something, like your in-laws having registered into the next cabin during your honeymoon.

Only in the press was it conflated to be the reason they won. Anyone else remember?

Brooks is slippery and odious, but is right about GOP incoherence. They have frittered away their big claim to fame, which was fiscal responsibility and economic know-how, in favor of pandering to a kleptocratic aristocracy of Philistines. In one stroke, they have justified govt intervention (formerly anathema) and forced the Dems to steal GOP thunder on economics. Nice work.

If Obama were to find a capable Republican state Governor and recruit him to the cabinet, that would not just keep his promise of bipartisanship. It would also be smart politics, in that it would exacerbate the division in the Republican party. As David Broder was writing at the weekend, if there's a way back for the GOP, it has to be based on their Governors, who are pragmatists, not the crazed ideologues in the House of Representatives. By co-opting the GOP's pragmatists, he could slow down their recovery.

based on their Governors, who are pragmatists, not the crazed ideologues...

That would be in the lower 48, then?

But Brooks' even more compelling observation is that Republicans lack a "coherent belief system."

Once you get beyond tax cuts, at least.

In those off year elections of '94, very few voted for any of those eight points described above; they simply looked for those who had voted Yea on the Brady Bill in '93, and voted them out of office. The NRA won that election, not Newt.

Linda Smith of Southwest Washington was elected due to the Brady Bill support of her opponent. Smith was opposed to Newt's leadership.

David Brooks' election analysis has been hit or miss...

Brooks' analysis hit or miss analysis is a consequence of the Republican disarray. The GOP Central Office of Talking Points Promulgation collapsed this election cycle and Brooks was on his own while penning his columns.

They will look back longingly to 1952, and call upon a General from CENTCOM I think. The one coherent thing they still agree upon is that the world is scary. And mind you, I predicted the current economic collapse. And the green grid system. And the coming monorail. . . ; )

"Now it's just a circular firing squad, with everybody attacking each other, and no coherent belief system, no leaders. You've got half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come and rescue them. The other half is waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs. "

WTF? How does Brooks keep his job? Does he reaaly think that Jindal and Palin offer remarkably different visions for the right?

The Republican Party does have a coherent belief system, but it can't publicize it. It exists to subvert the government to serve the needs of the wealthy, who rule the private sector. And they came very close to succeeding. Unfortunately, power corrupts, and Bush went off on it, just as Lyndon Johnson did, and he brought the house down.
But they're not done yet. They've succeeded in brainwashing nearly half the country with an insane hatred of all things liberal, and those people are not going to see the light of day, ever.

I don't know why we call ourselves a "democracy." The people have no power at all, other than voting for the greedy rich who rule over us. We might as well be playing student government in high school, for all the say we have in our affairs.

If Repubs had a hard time with Barack Obama, do you think they can handle Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, born to Punjabi Indian immigrants? Really? Yeah... right.

I'm not sold on Brooks' version of history. Commentators after the 1964 election weren't talking about a period in the wilderness for the GOP; they were seriously discussing its extinction, and Republican moderates were furious with the Goldwater faction for the November disaster. The oft-remarked resurgence in the GOP in the 1966 mid-terms was not fueled by conservatives; it was driven mainly by moderate Republicans like Charles Percy. And Nixon, southern strategy aside, was their candidate in 1968. Many owed him debts for the '66 campaign, and most didn't want a repeat of 1964. Reagan's campaign didn't go anywhere that year.

In short, the Republicans of 1964 were as divided as the Republicans were today. The ideological coherence Brooks speaks of didn't come into being until 1980, and only after moderates were purged. I don't see how people with new ideas will emerge in the party when everyone there agrees with everyone else.

The Repubs' best way back is indeed through their governors, someone like Mitch Daniels of Indiana, a non-ideological good government Republican. But to do this, the party would have to set aside decades of ideology -- luckily, I don't see that happening for awhile.

The GOP is a group of three allied subcatagories, as was often discussed here during the repub primaries-neocon hawks, Religious Right social conservatives, and Big Business deregulators/tax cutters. Reagan welded them together and propelled them into power by bribing the electorate with the promise of tax cuts. A "by definition" conservative would be isolationist, cut taxes only after the budget was balanced, and though personally agreeing with the RR would never seek to impose RR beliefs on others through government action.

Since Reagan, the only thing all branches of the GOP have agreed on is tax cuts, and that's just a tool to get elected. They have no coherent belief system because they gave up valuing coherence long ago. All they value is winning, and now they don't know how to do it.

BTW, I always considered the "Contract with America" to be politically brilliant. The individual provisions didn't reek of the radical right, and by getting all their candidates to sign on the GOP, the minority party, seized the initiative. They'll probably try it again, if they can get organized. Thry might not be organized until the 2014 midterms.

Brooks, even though he is a reliable Rethug spear-chucker and someone I don't say nice things about very often, does seem to have a smigeon of intellectual integrity - unlike some of his colleague pundits at arms. However, he is a man without a belief-system hang his hat on at the moment, to use his quasi-religious terminology. The Conservative movement he has "served all his life" no longer wants him. He has been drummed out as a traitor. But the real question is why did he stick with it as long as he did, and accept the lunacy that it descended into in recent years?

Brooks is all over the map. Today he'll write that the Democrats have to move to the right to accomodate the "spirit of bipartisanship" (code for giving the GOP what they want) needed to move the country forward.

Screw him.

Yeah that whole "Let's cut committees" thing really sings!

Fear the Newt -- someone once thought of by credulous idiots in the media and assorted demented freaks on the Right as a "leader" and "visionary". Of course, in the time after 1994, he was unmasked by and large as a corrupt opportunist, who bathed in hypocrisy, had thin skin and made Clinton look like a disciplined leader. All of his henchmen and enforcers on the hill (notably Tom DeLay, who was the real power anyway) hated his fucking guts.

Worrying about Gingrich because of his "brilliance" has the same kind of logic as the mystifying Cult of Rove that popped up on the Democratic side. We give these guys too much credit for their cruelty while thinking it's intelligence, and become defensive.

Quite simply, every time he ever says anything, someone should tell him he had his chance and he decided to Impeach a President instead of doing anything. Moreover, his system failed. Each and every time.

The commenter above comparing the Dems in 2004 to the Republicans in 1964 has a point, but the Goldwater of 2004 was Dean, not Kerry. His candidacy was judged a colossal failure by the oundits and centrists within his own party. Like Goldwater, he was accused of violating the coventional wisdom of moderation. However, his defeat provided the blueprint but future electoral victories: opposition to the Iraq War, populist rhetoric, and use of new technology to build a superior ground game and rally volunteers from the base.

In 1964, the Republicans had their ideology and plan of attack, what they needed was an opening. LBJ's failure in Vietnam in rising white resentment over fair housing policies gave it to them.I would argue that the Iraq War, Katrina, and the financial crisis have done the same for the Dems. Because of Bush's failures, the country has become receptive to ideas outside the pale just 4 years ago. The trick is how to capitialize on it.

Just say it (over and over). Conservatism is not about "new ideas." It's about new justfications and marketing strategies for its one idea --concentration of wealth and power in a ruling elite. I understand that establishment authorities and their mouthpieces have to pretend not to know this, but no one on the outside needs to play along.

The best policy ever demonstrated by the Republican Party was that of providing a "rest period" after the Democratic Party introduced needed reforms. It allowed the reforms to work, or not, and, if successful, become part of the social fabric (see Social Security).
The Republicans will continually fail if they attempt to drag the country back into some imagined perfect period of US history. Been there, done that.

TPM has a video of the Sunday talk shows and Chris Wallace I think as some Republican hack who is the leader/Congressional leader of the GOP and the hack came out with a list. Wallace was like no who is the leader.

If the GOP is looking to they guys that they have in Congress now they are in serious trouble. They are all party aparatchiks not big thinkers. Newt as much as he irks me and as much as I disagreed with almost 100% of his plans/ideas, had more than just tactics.

We might as well be playing student government in high school, for all the say we have in our affairs. Posted by: hark on November 10, 2008

Electing Obama helps us to get away from the crazy idea that the President of our country can pick up anyone anywhere in the world, label them an 'enemy combatant', torture them endlessly and maybe finally kill them without having to explain to anybody or be restrained by anybody.

I liked having a say in the election which bore absolutely NO resemblance to high school.

A party that looks to Sarah Palin, who most Republicans never even heard of 90 days ago, to rescue it is a party in deep trouble. Good.

The problem may really be decadence of a worn out democracy. To be elected, a politician must offer enormous benefits combined with tax breaks, which leads to fiscal disaster, which is our present situation. With no effective borders or patriotism, one must as if the US is even a country anymore.

The Republican party has been for a third of a century a coalition of not merely incompatible but antagonistic forces. Libertarians want limited government to promote more freedom. The religious right wants theocratic government to constrain freedom. The klepto-neo-liberals want to buy and sell government to promote unconstrained freedom for themselves and to constrain it for everyone else.

If there is a "philosophy" in that. it will take a better philosopher than me to figure out what it might be.

The Lincoln republicans, the Theodore Roosevelt republicans, the Eisenhower republicans, the Colin Powell republicans none of them still exist. Even the Buckley republicans. The cast of ex republicans endorsing Obama was the all star cast. If it weren't for family ties, it would have included George Herbert Walker Bush. These folks are all RINOS now, all dead meat in the republican party.

However, they are the only contingent that can begin to piece together a party leadership. The other wings, are their own, have only marginal or regional appeal.

They can only do that by promising each of the other wings -- the libertarians, wingnuts and kleptos -- a lot less. Only then can they once again mount a campaign to win the adult independents and Reagan democrats.

This will take two steps: marginalizing the three remaining wings, and then building a coalition philosophy out of giving each of them something without alienating the vital center.

I don't know if anyone has the power, the stomach, and the enthusiasm needed to take the first step. If that succeeds, many idea people will immediately gravitate back to the republican party.