Daniel Larison argues:
If one expects modern-day neoconservatives to be the source of Republican self-renewal, I submit that this would be like expecting Jesse Jackson to lead the Democrats out of the wilderness in the 1980s. Effectively, they are now in the position in the GOP that the opponents of the neoliberals were in the Democratic Party almost thirty years ago.
I think that the problem for the Republicans is that they feel that the American people, on a fundamental level, are Goldwater-Reagan conservatives. This is way off, and I don't think it was ever true. The public, in the past century, has voted inerringly for the party that addressed its issues more convincingly. In the 1980s those issues were taxes and crime, and the Republican stances on those issues were more convincing than the Democrats' answers. But it is arrogance and folly to assume that this meant a mandate for true Goldwaterism, and Reagan was savvy enough to realize that, just as we liberals need to realize that strong support now doesn't necessarily mean a generational mandate for progressive change. We can't take anything for granted.
Larison uses Jesse Jackson as a parallel, but I want to use a thought experiment: let's say that, in an alternate 2008, the Democrats ran primarily on strong stances of eliminating capital punishment, legalizing drugs, and massive military spending cuts, while Republicans proposed tepid nonapproaches to health care, the environment and economic regulation (okay, that last part was the real world). The Republicans would obviously have won in my example. Does anyone really dispute this? I would guess not. Electing a party dedicated (largely) to liberalism doesn't mean a commitment to all the tenets of liberalism, no matter how related they might seem. The public is largely uninterested in matters of ideology, which is why it elected Bush and Obama within a span of four years, but rather in what works. Reagan knew this, as does Obama. There is no permanent majority. The only possibility is to do what you can right now to make the world a better place.
