The Democrats' attempt to appeal across party lines has clearly not been the preferred tactic of the Republican Party. Angry over their likely loss of power in the upcoming election, they have become increasingly desperate in their attacks on the Democrats and the legitimacy of the two party state. This is particularly disturbing at a time when it is becoming harder and harder to discern concrete or substantive differences in the economic policies of the two parties. ... The Democratic Party today may be morally bankrupt, spineless, and bland, but none of those are anywhere near as dangerous as the Republican Party's fundamentalist contempt for multi-party elections and bi-partisan politics.
It must be rough to be demoted from Supreme Authority on All Things Moral and Political to Supremely Irrelevant in just a couple of years. We've seen that Republicans will do anything and say anything to remain in (or seize) power. Everything, that is, except govern responsibly.
The Rovian tradition of using polarizing tactics to anger and divide the country, and to win elections by narrow margins, served its purpose, but it always depended on bringing together two groups that had little in common: the religiously intolerant and their anti-intellectual friends on the far right who hate anyone they define as "different," and the wealthy members of the corporate elite who, while often well-educated latte sippers, pretend to be ordinary folk. That coalition has crumbled.
In a column filled with inaccurate statements of fact, David Brooks manages to get one thing right (two things, if you want to count the obvious observation that "Ronald Reagan was no intellectual"): the Republican "disdain for liberal intellectuals" somehow morphed into a disdain for education and intelligence. And for any ideas or behaviors or beverage preferences that aren't associated with the working class.
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Look at the "class-warfare clichés" that recently dominated the Republican convention.
Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. ... But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
The Republican meltdown was inevitable. Nobody with a brain wants to be part of a party that diminishes the value of education and rational debate.
The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
