Death Rattle of the Grand Old Party

This morning I'm listening to Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which is appropriate because it dawned on me as I read about the Republican shutdown of the federal government and an approaching default on the federal government's debt that the Grand Old Party is doomed. There is no way forward from this. The party that was hailed 45 years ago in Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority is now a revanchist white minority made up overwhelming of evangelicals and religiously observant voters along with libertarian Tea Party types. They are resentful that a black man occupies the White House. They fear the colored hordes and the gays and the flannel-wearing beard rockers who occupy the metropolitan areas where the future of the country is located. The people who elected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush can no longer do so. Demographically their day is done. And they are pissed. So they are going to fuck shit up.

That's where we're at. Read Thomas Edsall's latest blog post, "Anger Can Be Power." Built around a description of Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg's ongoing study called  "The Republican Party Project," it provides compelling proof that the Republican Party cannot survive. Not only is it knit together by a very limited, paranoid, exclusionary concept of "whiteness," but its two major blocs of supporters -- evangelicals and libertarians -- are at root opposed to one another. A libertarian has no truck with a Bible thumper. What you have is an incredibly unstable situation. You have the popular base of the GOP at war with the organizational elite, and then you have the popular base -- united now because a black man runs the White House -- that is fundamentally divided between evangelicals and Tea Party "stab in the back" conspiracy lovers. This type of volatility is not the stuff of which a stable organization is built.

Get ready for more rough sailing. Jonathan Weisman's story today showcases a solid body of opinion within the GOP that a government default would be no big deal, that it could managed. What can't be denied -- because we went through this once before in the summer of 2011 -- is the negative effect that even the possibility of a default has on the markets. The Dow plummeted and the credit rating of U.S. was downgraded for the first time. So far the Dow has been down around 100 points each day for the last couple of days the market has been open. This is less than one percent. It's going to take more than that for the Tea Party fever to break. If the sides remain dug in through today I would imagine by Thursday and Friday the market drops should pick up.

Republicans don't even know what they want to get out of the shutdown. This is from a story by Jackie Calmes and Ashley Parker:

Earlier, House Republicans left a closed-door caucus with their terms for any negotiations unclear. In recent days, their stated goal has broadened from defunding or delaying the health care law, whose insurance exchanges opened on Oct. 1, to unspecified deficit reductions. One lawmaker after another offered a simple message, which Republicans are counting on to reverse the tide of public condemnation: Republicans want to negotiate, but the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and Mr. Obama will not. 

“I think that Harry Reid and President Obama will recognize that their position of no negotiating is not resonating with the people anymore,” said Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a member of the Tea Party faction that forced Mr. Boehner’s hard-line stand on government financing and the debt-limit increase. 

Especially with new polls showing Republicans in the worst position, Democrats in Congress and the White House seemed undaunted by that line of attack, calling it disingenuous. As Mr. Obama said at his news conference, since last spring Republicans have repeatedly refused to form a conference committee to resolve differences between the separate annual budgets passed by the House and the Senate.

Republicans don't know what they want to get out of the shutdown because even in their fevered dreams of destruction they themselves can't imagine Obama making a time machine appear that would take them back to the 1960s when they were the emerging majority.