Is The Grand Old Party Over?

The insanely unstable Nixon-Reagan-Dubya coalition of unbridled capitalists, church-based conservatives, and foreign policy hawks is finally on the brink of falling apart. Today, everyone from Nick Cohen in The Observer to Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday has an article on how angry is now the second of those three, far and away the largest and best-organised of the three, but on whom the Republicans, as Hitchens puts it, always spit from a great height once they are in office.

(Cohen also, and bizarrely for a man with his views and connections, has a go both at the current regime in Turkey and at “Saudi money”. Dissension in the neocon ranks? Indiscipline? If Cohen is found washed up by the Thames in a mailbag, or if he simply never works again before too long, then we shall all know the reason why.)

Two years almost from this very day, the entire House of Representatives will once again be up for election. The time to start working is now, or at least on Wednesday morning. Unlike any entire state (even Texas has Austin, upstate New York is totally different from NYC, and so forth), an individual congressional district is routinely very much of one party or another. In red districts, register as a Republican. In blue districts, register as a Democrat.

But in every district, make sure that there is a candidate – precisely one – on the ballot in 2010 who is known publicly and nationally, and not least from mailings, advertisements and websites for the purpose, to be an economically populist, morally and socially conservative foreign policy realist. And then get those candidates (Republican, Democrat, other party, Independent, whatever) elected to Congress.

Those candidates and Congressmen will be the nucleus of the new party, even if it is formally the continuation of an existing party, most obviously the Democrats.

Another new party, most obviously the formal continuation of the Republicans, will have to sort out the inherent contradiction between fiscal “conservatism” and vastly expensive warmongering.

And perhaps even a third might have to try and come up with some reason for wanting populist (or more probably, and which would make things a lot easier for them, simply unthinking Leftist) economic policies and realist (or more probably, and which would make things a lot easier for them, simply unthinking peacenik) foreign policies, if not for reasons of moral and social conservatism.

But neither of those will be our concern.