No doubt the lunatic fringe that controls the Republican Party will foam at the mouth at this Economist op-ed about how they are destroying themselves. Not only can they not refute the obvious facts and conclusions in the article, they wouldn’t know how to. Why? Because they are proudly and defiantly anti-intellectual. Which is precisely one of their primary problems and what The Economist points out.
Political parties die from the head down
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains… John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans.
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world.
Andrew Sullivan echoes many of these themes. A genuine conservative, he wants to take the party back from the deliberately and willfully ignorant who control it now.
One wonders what William Buckley, a genuine intellectual, one of the founders of modern conservatism and someone who relished the debate of ideas, would think of the Republican Party now.