Grand Old Pantywaists

It's 2010, and surveying and evaluating the fortunes of the Republican Party is risky business. The Left has so successfully characterized the GOP as a morbid association of senile reactionariess and special interests that anything you say has to break through the preconceptions. I can associate Republicans with Statler and Waldorf and you'll know what I'm talking about.

The GOP's favorability on generic ballots is rising from the trough, due chiefly to what might be immense contempt and fear of Obama without the mask, and the new cracks underfoot in the social landscape. The GOP seems to thrive on distrust for liberalism, rather than a coherent set of accepted ideas of its own. I don't even know what they stand for myself, although I've registered a protest vote for the Republicans and against the Donks time after time.

Compassionate Conservatism killed my reflexive loyalty forever - mainly because you can't modify "conservatism" with an adjective that suggests a defect in plain old "conservatism" any more than you can modify "liberty" in the same way.

Even today, with radical leftism rolling back, the Republicans lacks the gut instinct to rush to the kill and go for the throat. Their natural adaptation to the present, whether it favors them or not, persists. They're enfeebled, and face the inevitabilities of the enfeebled species. Vital conditions change, and when they do, that big bony sail on your back is a liability for your kind unless you've sired a few robust, smaller individuals with smaller sails. I have yet to see a single Republican change; they haven't clarified a single position distinct from the issues that Democrats have already appropriated as their own.

And why is this so? It isn't very complicated to me. Liberalism is cool and soothing and conservatism isn't. Lindsey Graham Disorder is the most serious reaction to this arrangement, the need to belong and to shmooze with the popular guys. We live in a fantastic age and liberalism is the bridge from reality to fantasy. It still is, whatever Obama has done. As long as this condition exists in a culture governed by easy popularity, the Republicans are toast.