I started my career in software development. One day, shortly after I started, my team was having a meeting in which we were discussing that period’s workload. There were new items, old items, and really old items. Some of these issues had been present since the software launched years earlier, and no one could seem to crack them. The running joke was that these things had been present in the software so long, they were no longer bugs, but features, and if we removed them we would get approximately a billion support phone calls from users that had been working around it for so long they had no idea what to do once it was finally fixed. They had been a problem for so long, they had gone from being bugs, to being features.
When I look at the current field of GOP Candidates, I feel a very similar way. For forty years, the GOP has been running on a platform that is absolutely toxic to a large portion of Americans. They’ve spent forty years alienating one group after another and driving themselves into a small, ideologically isolated corner of the political spectrum. In the landslide election of 2010, GOP voter turnout topped 70%, which is basically as good as you can hope for under almost any circumstances. On the flip side, Democratic turnout was around 40%. To put that in perspective, if Democratic turnout had topped 70% and GOP turnout remained the same, the GOP would have lost practically every election in 2010, and been thoroughly swept from national office. Republicans are practically extinct in New England, the West Coast, and are rapidly losing the East Coast as well. Over the next twenty years, as the Southwest becomes increasingly Hispanic, it’s possible and even probable the GOP could lose Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Texas, of course, is the key here; Texas has always been the GOP’s answer to California, Illinois, and New York, with the parties splitting Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida. If Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia are now permanently in play as well due to changes in the local demographics, the ability of the GOP to win a Presidential election has been severely diminished. Losing Texas would render it all but impossible, and it’s possible it could happen in the next ten years or less.
So, we have a group of people that have basically maxed out their potential voter turnout, and are facing a demographic avalanche over the next twenty years that threatens to bury the party. And yet, facing a staggeringly vulnerable Democratic president, the GOP can’t produce an electable candidate, and even if they did the GOP voters wouldn’t pick them anyway.
Now, the latest meme to emerge from The Village (also known as the national mainstream political media) is the potential for some mythical GOP candidate to ride in on a white horse (figuratively or literally; it doesn’t matter either way, as both are equally unlikely) during the convention and somehow unite the party under one banner devoted to defeating “that one”. Some names like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, etc. have all been floated, but the fact is all these guys come with baggage, and we’ve seen what happens when you pull a previously unknown candidate that hasn’t been properly vetted out of nowhere and dump them into a national campaign (see: Palin, Sarah).
Going back to my original story, with a few of these long standing errors, we found the problem to be that our customers were throwing data at it that it was never designed to handle or process, but no one had ever built in some kind of error checking to ensure that this data would be rejected as faulty.
When I look at the GOP, I don’t see some fundamental failure of conservatism as an ideology. It’s no better or worse than liberalism. My issue is with the execution. A belief in low taxes, free markets, and personal freedom (all valid beliefs) has been replaced with tax cutting by hacking off the limbs of government, markets completely unfettered by regulation or oversight, and the intrusion of government into the most personal and private aspects of our everyday lives. The fact that the GOP can’t find someone to beat Obama, and is driving down this incredibly self destructive path, is a product of the political system as designed.
The history of political parties in the United States is one of creation and destruction. A lot of people say Darwin’s Law was “Only the strong survive.”, but that’s not the case at all. See, the strongest animals usually don’t survive. That’s why we’re not all descended from Mesozoic era apex predators like Tyrannosaurus Rex and there aren’t sharks like the Megalodon still roaming the open ocean. Rather, the animals that survive are the ones that are most adaptive to changing circumstances. The same is true for politics. Those parties and individuals most adaptable to changing demographics and trends are the ones that prosper as others fail. That’s not to say the Democrats are particularly nimble, but compared to the GOP they’re gymnasts.
Imagine, if you will, that it’s early November 2012. Barack Obama has won a second term as President after soundly defeating a Gingrich-Romney ticket in a landslide that makes Johnson’s 1964 win and Reagan’s 1980 wins both look like squeakers. How does the GOP, as it exists today, survive that? How does the party not fracture into Libertarian and Social Conservative and Business wings, all of whom have competing interests vying for national attention?
At what point do you just shrug your shoulders and say “It’s a feature, not a bug.”?
