by Primo Encarnación

Whither the GOP?

A past of sub rosa bigotry masquerading as pandering to “values” voters has led to a future of subfusc outlook for the Republican Party. Unable to compete in the marketplace of ideas, especially as it pertains to supply-side economics, the GOP has embarked on a race to the electoral bottom, convincing “real” Americans that all their “worser” angels are, in fact, patriots on their right shoulder. The path that got us here is clear and unambiguous. And while a certain amount of schadenfreude has accompanied the current discomfiture of the Republican elite, now that their darker chickens have come home to roost, I actually view with alarm the impending explosion of the Republican Party.

The concept of America functions best when competing ideologies bring solutions for issues to the table and then work out a compromise that leaves no one satisfied but everyone moving forward in roughly the same direction. This concept results in a fits-and-starts progress which, when it works, is maddeningly slow and unsatisfactory.

But it’s better than the alternative, which is what we now face: entrenched ideological opposition to anything but total victory, with legislators living in fear of being found insufficiently radical. So the Jacobins ousted John Boehner and his lieutenants, going so far as to primary Eric Cantor, merely for appearing to compromise. They stood these fellows against the wall, “pour encourager les autres.”

So what comes next? Here is a phrase I have trouble uttering: I don’t know. I have been trying for weeks to put myself into the tasseled loafers of the GOP elite and figure a way out of this mess. All I’ve come up with is that Reince Priebus has to go. His whole raison d’etre – President Scott Walker – is back licking his wounds under a Wisconsin rock. His singular achievement was a report after the last electoral beat down they took investigating why people don’t like the GOP candidates, because they’re all such nice old white guys. This waaahmbulance was promptly ignored, and the nightmare clown-car scenario it sought to avoid now stalks the earth, fanged and frothing.

So that’s all I’ve got. Reince has to go, and needs to be replaced by someone strong but not crazy, with an impeccable Republican resume and the cojones to match, who can call this whole pack of candidates baying at the moon to heel, and build a successful, loyal opposition invested in governing in harness with the next Democratic president for the next 8 years. Who is this avatar of center-rectitude?

I have no idea. Almost anyone of note that you could name is either too old, too weak, or too tainted by radical pandering and/or dark money and/or being in a Bush Administration. Who does that leave? Seriously, I open this discussion up to you folks; I haven’t got a clue how to save them from themselves.

Assuming we want to.