Ed Rollins has a perceptive piece on the GOP's attempts to build a "rightroots" to compete with the left-leaning constellation of Kos, HuffPo, etc., as a way to win again. As seems to be their stock in trade these days, the GOP seems to be confusing strategy with tactics. Creating an online presence is a good tactic to mobilize your activists, but it is not a strategy on how to move the party forward, nor will it attract new voters to the Republican Party. Nowhere do you hear young (orthodox) Republicans talking about bringing new voters into the party, nowhere, because doing so would upset the applecart of today's GOP. Bringing in Latinos would force the GOP to stand up to their base and ditch nativism, if it isn't too late. There simply isn't a group out there whose interests align completely with the GOP that isn't already in the Republican coalition--there aren't any Boll Weevils around for the taking. And adding new voters is going to necessitate changing something.
Which can't help but be a good thing. Modern-day conservatism is premised on two big and contradictory ideas: smaller government and a bigger military. This differs from the previous, Taft-era conservatism, which was dovish. There is a good reason for this: wars are expensive and require higher taxes. They bring about a lot of government encroachment into every sphere of life. Conservatives changed their tune largely in response to the enhanced threat of communism--in fact, anticommunism was more or less the driving idea of conservatism. Now communism is dead, but the GOP still follows the path of the hawk, more so than ever. And while social conservatism has always been factored into the equation, the addition of the religious right to the GOP coalition during the 1980s has pretty much eliminated any pretense to individual freedom on the part of the Republican Party. Right now, the GOP is a complete mess: there is simply no ideological thread animating all of these issue stances, and most of them are remnants of long forgotten ideological struggles whose utility has ended--and they now exist as objects to be worshipped rather than as tools of persuasion.
I'm not surprised that today's Republican leadership is desperately avoiding a "what went wrong?" discussion. And ditching the religious right is a recipe for disaster for the GOP. But Rollins is right when he revives the old lipstick on a pig metaphor. Sadly, I think it's going to take a few more tough losses before the GOP learns the right lesson.
