GOP Mammon and Power Contingent to SoCons

Protein Wisdom satirizes the extreme stupidity of the GOP elite as it surveys the wreckage from deep inside the bubble of delusion and concludes in its infinite wisdom that the problem was not with their lousy candidate, but with their need to ditch the social conservatives for a new trophy wife as they tell their most loyal supporters, “You’re losing your looks, honey. Get out.”

Update: I am, by the way, stupid and I apologize to Jeff Goldstein. I misread him as serious, when he was in fact satirizing people like Ann Coulter, who writes to unburden herself of the cry that lives in the breast of every socially liberal/economically chintzy/crony capitalist reptile Republican who thinks Mammon, Moloch and Mars are awesome and who endure prolifers like rube cousins they hope they can ditch and go clubbing:

“The last two weeks of the campaign were consumed with discussions of women’s “reproductive rights,” not because of anything Romney did, but because these two idiots [Mourdock and Akin] decided to come out against abortion in the case of rape and incest. . . . After all the hard work intelligent pro-lifers have done in changing the public’s mind . . . these purist grandstanders came along and announced insane positions with no practical purpose whatsoever, other than showing off.”

A reader comments on Coulter:

Yeah, like those exhibitionist bishops and their unintelligent sheep.

Ann Coulter is Dagny Taggart.

In places like Coulterworld, the extremely electable Mitt Romney was torpedoed, not because we has a moral void without any defining principles except “I want to be president”. He was defeated by sinister social conservatives who, having waited patiently and fallen on their swords times without number for the GOP, could not muscle down this crap sandwich.

That’s the voice of the GOP wise elders to religious voters whose primary interest is and always has been the defense of human life and the family.  You didn’t get on board this time, so 30 years of bending over, going along, believing the promises, trusting the party cared about your issues, was going to–any day now–really act on that platform.  All gone.  All bushwah.  Get out!  You are no longer useful. It’s not the party’s fault for choosing a loser like Mitt Romney.  It’s your fault for being prolife and profamily and making such a *thing* about it.  We’ve never liked you but we put up with you for what we could exploit from you.  Now get lost.

If I may say so, why bother with an outfit like that?  Let”s see what, together with the millions of other voters not served by this corrupt system, we can create that better represents us.  On election night, Mark Gordon wrote on FB:

Mitt Romney has three “home” states: Michigan, Massachusets, and Utah. He lost Michigan and Massachusetts. Paul Ryan only has one home state, Wisconsin, and he couldn’t carry it for Romney. The GOP is caught in a real bind. Election after election their geographic base retreats further and further into the deep South and the barren Plains. At the same time, their demographic base grows whiter, older and wealthier, even as the nation is growing browner, that brown population is getting younger, and the Middle Class is disappearing. Sometime in the 1980′s or 1990′s, the GOP became largely a regional party. It is now poised to become a marginal party, fighting a rearguard action to defend privilege, whiteness, and the prerogatives of a global military, economic and cultural empire that is, frankly, collapsing. If it is to survive, the GOP must come to represent a conservatism that hews closer to the vision of Burke, Kirk, Fleming, Oakeshott, Burnham, Weaver, Scruton, Berry and Blond; a conservatism that stands opposed to the corrosive cultural influence of laissez-faire capitalism and the mass consumer society; opposed to the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of private interests or the state; opposed to empire and the militarization of foreign policy; a conservatism focused on the care of creation, including the land and sea, as well as the small human ecologies of family, congregation, town, and small business; a conservatism that privileges the farmer, the industrial worker, the teacher and the Main Street merchant over the financial baron, the defense contractor, the big box retailer and the Washington lobbyist; a conservatism of the town hall meeting, not of slick ad campaigns; a conservatism of communities, not corporations. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends the unborn, but also one that supports and honors their mothers, both before they give birth and long after. And yes, it must be a conservatism that defends marriage, but not by demonizing or marginalizing families that don’t fit a certain mold. Yes, it must be a conservatism of limited government, but within limits defined by justice, equality before the law, peaceableness, and the care of the aged, the infirm, the poor, and the unemployed. A friend of mine tweeted that the big loser tonight was Ayn Rand. Thanks be to God. In the years ahead, may Republicans come to see this as the night when they began to fashion a different kind of conservatism. If they don’t they have no future.

I remarked when I read this that it sounded an awful lot like Chesterton, which it does.  He can help point the way forward for a different engagement of Christians with the political.  Whenever you say, “The GOP needs to change or die” one of the things you immediately hear back is, “Oh so we need to embrace abortion and the destruction of the family?”

Um no. The reason I spent month arguing against Romney was because he obviously cared nothing about abortion and, functionally, very little for the family.  For him the giant corporation and that state were at the center of his calculations, like Obama.  Now that Ann Coulter has made clear where social conservatives really stand with the GOP, I think moving in a direction like the one articulated like Mr. Gordon and GKC is much wiser than trying to hang with a party that loathes those who place God first. Dems who are disaffected from their party should make the same call.  Why stick with a machine that only means to grind you up and harvest you? In this country state and party work for you.  When they stop, blow ’em off and invent something new.