The GOP of todays deadliest weakness is that if it runs hard on its ideological agenda. This includes the various social issues it uses as window dressing for its economic core mission. It loses out because the majority of Americans have moved beyond the cultural conception of the GOP. Most of America is not as, homogeneous, militaristic, insular, as the GOP would like us to be. If we were, there would only be the GOP, Karl Rove's wet dream of the one-party state would have been in place a long time ago. The GOP alienates most Americans when it runs hardest on its ideological agenda.
The problem the GOP has run into is that it remains mired in a mythical 1950s or perhaps the 1850s, with regard to some of its economic and social issues, or even 1750s, if you take their Unitary Executive Theory as an un-American, pre-democratic conception of unaccountable, concentrated executive power, being a tightly-disciplined ideological engine that does not tolerate dissent within its ranks - this lets it trumpet loudly and with focus, but increasingly the national conversation has moved beyond it. Much in the way the rest of the First World are moving ahead, leaving the USA behind - from unilateralism to multilateralism. The conversations will go on, and the GOP's standard bromides of condemnation, accusation, hysteria, paranoia, purging, and witch-hunting - those leave them largely out of step with most Americans, who increasingly see the need for dialogue instead of diatribes, democracy over demagoguery, diplomacy in place of defensiveness.
In a more tolerant America, a more diverse America, a more democratic America, the Republicans are doomed - their Brimstone Base gulped down the Kool-Aid, believed their party's own lies, and insisted that the GOP follow the agenda their leadership was only cynically invoking to snooker those benighted people into voting against their class interests to begin with. The smart Republicans are abandoning ship, while the majority of them are still clogging drunkenly down in steerage, marveling at their unsinkable ship's intelligent design, ignoring the icy waters pouring in from all corners, confident that God will save them.
Instead in the US, the right wing republican machine has become a horribly shrill echo chamber inhabited by men and women who seem to love nothing more than the lure of easy certainty, and the emotional evacuative thrill of projecting all their inner demons onto 'liberals' in a kind of theological frenzy.
Maybe a thoughtful person drawn to right wing talk radio would find that they weren't quite "cutting' it", rising above all the noise and thus would harm their own career prospects. But thinking of Limbaugh and Hannity, a vicious circle is created. Did they become victims of an entertainment culture that required them to jettison intellectual honesty, fairness and politeness or was their meteoric rise a product of their own flawed characters? either way, they were either corrupted or they themselves corrupted national discourse.
The GOP should take a long, hard look at President Eisenhower and see what made it possible to be a Republican president in an era of Democratic predominance. They should try to conserve a few things, manage the government efficiently with cost-cutting in mind, have a cautious foreign policy which stresses alliances, diplomacy, and the occasional dirty trick over massive armed intervention, and make sure tax income matches federal outlays, and enforce the laws. This might not make the base happy, but if would get them in the White House and keep them in the White House, because it's the kind of center/right policies that, if Peggy N. had a brain, she'd understand that Americans do want.
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