Post-GOP American Politics?
There’s a lot of talk (particularly within liberal camps, shockingly) that the GOP is getting closer and closer to a slippery slope into third party status. I’m no pundit, so forgive the sweeping generalities here, but philosophically, there are a few things going on:
- Their appeal to minorities is dropping.
- The staunch social conservatives maybe dying faster than they can reproduce.
- Independents appear to have moved away from them.
- Blue dogs are “in the game,” playing some of their principles where they can’t or won’t.
Fun thought experiment. Imagine that for all the reasons above, the GOP becomes a statistical third party. What would happen? One possibility would be that the “blue dogs” split from the rest of the Democratic party and we end up with something that looks like this:
- Democrats
- Blue Dogs
- Independents (a lot of these might actually go Blue Dog, at least vote-wise)
- Republicans
Every debate might be less about religious wedge issues and more about fiscal policy and constitutional concerns as driven by the Republicans and Independents up into the debate between the Blue Dogs and the… Blue Birds?
That would be an interesting world. At least it’s consistent with my long running belief that every generation’s major social issues are the next generation’s awkward national embarrassments. As one of my friends said over the California gay marriage ban this cycle, eh, ten years from now our kids will look at us and say, “Who cares. You guys were retarded.” Or, they will use whatever un-PC slang is popular ten years from now. Maybe they’ll say, “You guys were soooo Limbaugh, dad.”
