Larison: Third GOP Loss May Not Be Enough

Daniel Larison is skeptical that even a third straight Presidential campaign loss in 2016 will be enough to inspire GOP policy reform in The American Conservative.

Recent experience suggests that repeated electoral defeats don’t have much of an impact on policy thinking inside the GOP. The 2012 election was supposed to spur a good deal of introspection and policy innovation, but what has been the result so far? To date, there has been a concerted effort by all the usual suspects on the right in favor of an immigration bill that most Republicans can’t and don’t support. This amounts to dusting off and recycling the bad, old, and unpopular ideas of Bush’s second term. One would be hard-pressed to find other major policy reform ideas gaining significant traction.

Republican foreign policy is in dire need of reform, but it hasn’t been happening. The typical responses to the drubbings of 2006 and 2008 have been discouraging. To the extent that they connect those defeats to policy, Republicans usually deny that these losses had anything to do with Bush’s foreign policy record. Many pretend that Bush’s record was generally a successful one, and since 2008 they have indulged many of the worst instincts of the Bush era over the last four years. Finally, instead of grappling with what Bush did wrong, they have spent a lot of their time inventing a mostly fictional Obama record to run against.