A rush to the middle 
Posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Owen at Boots and Sabers points thumbuppingly to Gerald McGlothlin’s Wisconsin State Journal piece Moving left will kill what’s left of GOP.
Unless the GOP “rogue elephants” return to the herd, they may drag the rest of their party to extinction.
If the Republican Party continues its de facto merger with the Democrats, most of the next generation of Americans may not even remember who the Republican Party was or what they stood for. Do we now?
I’d suggest it may be a bit premature for those leaning right to abandon all hope.
We see these shifts on a cyclical basis, and on both sides of political continuum. It’s a function of the American political system to trend toward the middle in pursuit of the voter rich center of the normal curve. This phenom may a bit pronounced this time around as the midterm election has been seen as providing a more clear indication of voter sentiment, but it’s hardly groundbreaking.
It does bring to mind, however, what an interesting and motley crew the GOP really is. Neo-cons, Religious Right, Libertarians, Log Cabineers…it’s as though the party suffers some institutional Dissociative Identity Disorder. Sure, the Dems have their schisms, but hardly those of their opponents.
You’d think these individual factions would be clammoring for electoral change that would favor the advent of a multi-party system; small parties hold disproportionate power when they can make or break a coalition. And oh, what coalitions they’d be.
However, with the institutional barriers (single-member districts, electoral college etc.) in place, and seemingly noone willing to push the idea, it’s something we’ll likely never see in American politics.
Sure would be interesting though.
