It's possible, if you spend your waking hours touring websites that feature political commentary, to find Republicans who appear to be in possession of the higher, rational faculties that distinguish our kind from the beasts of the field. David Frum was an example, but his father recently died, and he's gone silent. Myra Adams is another: as this article shows, she can add a column of one- and two-digit numbers and conclude, correctly, that the sum is less than 270. This suggests that she is serious about what is, or ought to be, job # 1 of a political party: winning elections. The GOP, however, has begun to resemble a regional protest party more interested in hootin' and hollerin' than in the hard work of getting elected and then governing.
Adams might have done more in the way of analyzing the symptoms she describes. In theory, politicians are kept from the edge of the cliff by a desire to appeal to a wide range of voters. In our country, however, you don't really have to do that. Even what we call a "national election" for president is really 51 small elections, only a small fraction of which are competetive or matter. You can get trounced in half the states and still win, comfortably--in the last election, for example, President Obama lost 21 states by a double-digit margin but still won 332 electoral votes.
Think about the (Republican) senators and representatives from those 21 states. What reason have they to moderatie their views, or give them less impolitic expression? Recent history shows that they are more apt to lose to a Republican in the primary than to a Democrat in the general election. They don't need to "move to the center"; they need to "protect their right flank." Ask Richard Lugar about this. After serving six terms in the U.S. Senate, he was in 2012 defeated in the Republican primary by a wingnut who, during the general election campaign, could not suppress the impulse to vocalize his unusual views on sexual assault.
Thus ended Lugar's distinguished, 36-year Senate career. And thus the Republicans managed to lose a Senate seat in a state that Romney won, 54-44.
You hear a lot about the polarization in American politics. What's really bad, however, is that the polarization is essentially geographic, and our elections essentially local. Who has to appeal to the broad middle? Among Republicans, no one. Adams writes as if her compatriots who seem to have no realistic plan for winning the Presidency are merely perverse. But the things you have to say and do to protect your right flank alienate voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which is in Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes, which the Republican candidate for president has not won for six elections in a row now.
The problem for Republicans is that it's not just Pennsylvania. The dance I'm describing is danced across the northern tier of states, and it's spreading to places like Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada.
