Is it possible for a political party to gain stunning victories while spinning toward death? Ruy Teixeira provides an answer. He is a Senior Fellow with two think tanks and does substantial work at others. He helped direct a huge project that was jointly sponsored by conservatives and liberals (pdf). This is the very beginning of Teixeira’s summary:
The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting. A powerful concatenation of demographic forces is transforming the American electorate and reshaping both major political parties. And, as demographic trends continue, this transformation and reshaping will deepen. The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP.
This won’t help Democrats much this year. Conservative rage is secondary. The economy is paramount, and Senate procedures, by which Republicans try to break the recovery, are an arcane mystery to most. The GOP kills the recovery and voters see a Democratic majority. Who you gonna blame?
Economic ruin is not a permanent condition. As the homeless are housed, working people go back to work, and a sense of rationality prevails, the party that has sponsored that rationality will also prevail. The chances are the recovery will not affect most people by election time this year. Republicans should retake both houses.
One slender reed of hope remains for Democrats in 2010, and certain doom awaits the GOP after 2010. That slim hope and that doom stem from a flaw in Teixeira’s analysis. Republicans will not be forced to move toward the center. In fact, the GOP will be forced to move toward even more extremism. Teixeira, and most analysts, regard the lemming-like ideological march of the GOP to be a strategic decision. In fact, it is a sociological phenomenon. As the party becomes more conservative, extremists move to purge those who are insufficiently extreme. As the impure leave, the purity of surviving conservatives drives the party more to the right. The standard shifts, and even more are considered not extreme enough. The cycle ends in singularity.
Epistemic closure is the tendency of conservatives to close off reality. It was first coined by conservative Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute. Even Sanchez does not name the real culprit. Technology offers conservatives a respite from actual events. If the cold bright light of reality is bothersome, a new light switch is now available, provided by the internet and cable TV.
The GOP will be murdered by technology. The home computer done it.