I have been watching the rightward swing of the Republican Party with some confusion.
On the one hand, they lost the popular vote to the Democrats. That surely suggests that the Republicans are further to the “right” than the American people as a whole, and that they should be developing more centrist policies, right?
But the Fall 2009 elections have shown the party shifting to the right, not towards the centre.
This has been striking me as a suicidal move, that the Republicans are headed in a direction that will make them less and less relevant, less and less capable of offering meaningful opposition to the Democrats. No doubt Democrats would be rather pleased at that, but it seems a bad thing to me not to have a loyal opposition. (I suspect the major parties in Canada and the US are getting less and less keen about considering opposition to have merits: another story…)
Possibilities seem to include:
1. The Republicans essentially need to crash and burn before something new appears.
It is possible that this is so, but it seems unlikely that the players would be just letting things burn. Thus, it is plausible that this is happening, but as result, not intent.
2. They can’t get a new policy direction until they have new leadership.
Unfortunately, the Liberal implosion in Canada shows the problem in this – they have spent the last couple years desperately trying to tell Canadians that the New Conservative Party is bad and that we should give power back to the Liberals. Unfortunately, without explaining their policy proposals, people have little concrete reason to imagine them a good choice… And this is not unlike the Republican’s challenge…
Perhaps what needs to happen is for the GOP to elect new leadership, who having shown they know how to “speak (to the) right,” may then be trusted by the party to make the compromises required to win an election. Which happen to mandate a bit of a swing to the left…