Thanks for your kind words. Movement or institutional purges are a bit different from the party making entire groups of people turn away from the GOP, but both are the result of a failure of imagination. I think it is possible that writers and scholars in the rising generation and the one after them will be even more discouraged by the climate they find in movement circles and in the GOP as a whole, so there will be something of an ongoing brain drain (or lack of a brain gain, if you like). The GOP’s larger problem is that it is losing blocs of voters without which it cannot be a national party.

The GOP has been accomplishing exactly the opposite of what Ross and Reihan advise them to do, which as I understand it is to develop an agenda that serves both the lower middle class and the mass upper-middle. Palin was always a symbolic pander to working and/or middle classes, but what strikes me about the choice now is that McCain avoids talking about the middle class and lets Palin stand in for his argument that he represents them. Once the crisis was upon us, that substitution no longer worked very well and McCain’s basic neglect of his own middle-class constituents became clear once again.

In this counterfactual, I’m not sure that Kerry necessarily wins the nomination, which could change what happens in this alternative general election. If Iraq were less chaotic in ‘04, Kerry’s ostensible edge of national security among Democrats could have been blunted. Domestic issues might have come to the fore and we might have seen Dean in his more technocratic reformer role or Edwards in his weepy do-gooder role have more success. Dean might never have taken off without being a leading antiwar candidate, so better management in Iraq might have prevented Dean’s candidacy from driving the online activist grassroots movement on the left. That movement would still have happened, especially if Bush had been re-elected, but it might not have been as well-organized as it became.

* Cut taxes without expanding Medicare — still eating into the budget surpluses but not running at such huge deficits

* Fought the war with more troops, possibly restoring order years quicker but paying a higher short-term political price than relying on existing troop levels?

Would he have still defeated Kerry in 2004 without prescription drug benefits, a vanished surplus and a higher-troop level war? Would there be the 2006 Congressional realignment?

I think he had a good shot (and I am a knee-jerk liberal) at winning in 2004, and who knows about 2006? And obviously conservatism would be on stronger footing.

I agree with those who think that where things went wrong was Congress and the rest of the right following Bush down into some serious black holes. Had he maintained conservative principles, there would not be the quite the mess we have. That argues for competence no matter which side of the fence you are on. I hope Obama, if he holds on, and the deep blue Congress (which I do think is inevitable) don’t make the same mistakes (which I would characterize as ‘making decisions as if they had no repercussions’ rather than ‘failing to hew to any political philosophy’).

Of course, the kind of anger we are hearing anecdotally in response to the financial crisis may mean that the question of whether abandoning conservative principles is not only impossible to answer, but moot.

I don’t know why you keep saying two-thirds when I wrote two-fifths.

Someone who opposed the New Deal would want to scrap Social Security entirely, not find a way to privatize part of it. I think I won’t find any real anti-New Deal writing because most magazines have long since abandoned the old grudge against FDR. I haven’t, but I’m not at all representative.

Revolutions involve throwing off an oppressive government. Our country was founded on such a revolution and according to you 2/3rds of the people identify with a party that is opposed to this (while oddly hoping for and expecting one in Iran). Small issue there.
This is why I maintain that the only valid ideaologies in the US are liberalism or libertarianism. Conservatives don’t agree with the foundations of this government. They pretend to and act like Americans are conservative because we’re descendant from a conservative monarchy but it’s crap.

‘Then again, when was the last time you saw anyone in a major conservative magazine railing against the New Deal? ‘

Social security privatization. Welfare is socialism. You won’t find an article titled I Hate The New Deal.

When was it ever my movement? Then again, when was the last time you saw anyone in a major conservative magazine railing against the New Deal? At least if people were railing against the New Deal there would be some sort of argument about the role of government. No, what we’ve been seeing are the people who hate liberals more than they love liberty, as Lukacs has put it, which in the end means that they have nothing to fall back on.

Yeah but it’s because they think it’s the cool team not because they understand the ideology. The right has demonized the word liberal to the point that liberals won’t even call themselves that so why would the low information voter. I don’t know what circles you run in but in mine there are tons of people who will spout off about tax cuts but who can’t even give a high level definition of supply side economics. All they know is what Rush tells them to hate. These are your two thirds. The movement is a myth. It only seems like a movement and not a cabal because of identity politics. Strip away culture war BS and what is your movement? Right wing mags penning essay after essay saying the New Deal must go and blowhards on tv and radio telling the unwashed that liberals are the cause of all the worlds problems. After all you’ve written these past weeks about the collapse of the GOP it’s kind of sad to see this post. It’s not the GOP that’s crashing, it’s your movement. This is not to say that the things you care about are not important, it’s to say that the belief that there were millions who shared in it that’s gone. It was always just a collection of people who cared about their own thing seeming to be moving in the same direction.

‘In another era, these would be the legitimists who would have defended the rights of an imbecile heir rather than a competent claimant on the throne. ‘

Or those who felt we should stay loyal to King George. Conservatives don’t start revolutions, they quash them.