After a long six and a half years of watching almost helplessly as the Republican Party loots, rapes and pillages everything from the Constitution to the middle class to non-threatening countries overseas, it’s always satisfying to see rats call a spade a spade and jump off the pirate ship known as the modern GOP.
But rarely has the sense of schadenfreude been more poignant to me than when reading the latest Economist article today about the woes of the Republican Party and American conservative movement in general.
The article, titled The American Right Under the Weather, is but one piece in the new overall issue covering the leftward shift of American politics in recent months. As anyone who has read the magazine knows, the editorial staff of The Economist is certainly no friend to Democrats, favoring a decidedly corporatist agenda valuing "free trade over "fair trade" and a foreign policy usually at odds with progressive values. As a result, however, they find themselves increasingly at odds with the social conservatives who have all but taken over the Republican party’s activist base: in fact, they say so directly in the cover article:
The Economist has never made any secret of its preference for the Republican Party’s individualistic “western” wing rather than the moralistic “southern” one that Mr Bush has come to typify. It is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan sponsoring a federal amendment banning gay marriage or limiting federal funding for stem-cell research. Yet Mr Bush’s departure hardly guarantees a move back to the centre. Social liberals like Mr Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger are in a minority on the right. On the one issue where Mr Bush fought the intolerant wing of his party, immigration, the nativists won—and perhaps lost the Latino vote for a generation.
As a result, The Economist‘s temporary post-mortem on the enthusiasm and dynamism of the American right is a strange mix of joy and tears: it contains equal doses of worried regret, tempered with palpable glee at the overreaching failures of the social conservatives whom they blame for much of popular rejection of Republican ideology. But it’s nothing if not utterly brutal–and well worth the read.
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