Post HCR Thoughts

Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes that despite the entertainment value of watching the Republicans "go wild" following the passage of health care reform, the current state of the GOP is bad for our country.

I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.

It is interesting to note that observers on the other side of the political spectrum are saying the same thing. Conservative pundit David Frum wrote what has become a viral blog post with the same message.

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat. There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

The right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute fired Frum within days of his "Waterloo" post. This prompted a similar observation from another disaffected conservative, former Reagan budget head Bruce Bartlett, who was dismissed from another conservative think tank in 2005.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

Echoing a theme expressed by Frum and other critics within the conservative community, Charles M. Blow of The New York Times says that this ideological purge on the right is merely a case of killing the messenger. Irreversible demographic changes do not bode well for the future of the GOP.

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future. You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

UPDATE: Frank Rich agrees in his Sunday New York Times column.

--Ballard Burgher