Saving the GOP

Summary: Charles Krauthammer doesn't get it.
How to Save the Republican Party, Charles Krauthammer, FoxNews.com

Krauthammer says that the Republican Party is divided by tactics, not philosophy. In other words, there's nothing wrong with the party platform, they just need a better delivery. This is close to all that nauseating talk about rebranding the GOP, and it misses the point.

Tactics aren't the problem, because the GOP doesn't have a record to support any tactics. The last time Republicans ran America, we got tax cuts, but we also got increased spending, bigger government, and less freedom. The GOP broke its promise. It was anger over this betrayal that drove the early Tea Party movement.

That's why the current GOP fanaticism about fiscal responsibility is a lie. The party wants credit for dedication to ideals that, based on their real-world performance, they neither believe nor follow.




That's why the party is so weird these days. That's why it spends so much time pointing fingers at everyone else. That's why it encourages ideological loyalty over reason. Without a record, all the Republicans have left is anger and fanaticism.

Krauthammer neatly illustrates the problem in his conclusion: "Want to save the Republic? Win the next election." First, the Republicans, and today's conservatives in general, need to drop this fantasy that they're out to "save the Republic". You're not heroes in a clash between good and evil. You're not Cold warriors. You're not Spirit of '76 revolutionaries. All that nonsense is part of the soap-opera version of reality that flows from the conservative entertainment media.

If you're anything, you're people who supposedly have better ideas about how to run America. Here's the important part. Ideas can only be rationally judged on their merits. How strongly you feel about an idea is irrelevant. That was one of our perennial complaints about the Democrats. They wanted us to consider how they "felt" about things.

Here's an example of feeling-based ideology. What's one of the GOP's fanatic, feeling-based positions these days? It's that you can never raise taxes. Ever. That's a pseudo-principle. It's simplistic, easy to memorize, and easy to be fanatic about because it's an absolutist proposition. A genuine conservative would say that taxes should be as low as possible, which presumes that there might be times where it would be better for the nation to raise taxes and times when it's better to lower taxes. A genuine conservative realizes that you need to make continuing judgments based on circumstances instead of being loyal to a pseudo-principle.

Dedication to pseudo-principles like that is the problem the Republican Party faces. It doesn't need to rebrand. It doesn't need to change tactics. It needs to look at its platform, at its foundational ideas, and its behavior. It needs to drop its drama-queen approach to politics. It needs to drop its daydreams of being revolutionary heroes.  It needs to fix itself first, before it tries to "save the Republic".

If the party can do that, if it can really come up with better ideas instead of stronger feelings, then winning elections would not be such a problem.