Where Is The Republican Party?

I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the ideas suggested towards the end of this conservative blog Power Line post, but the following paragraphs reflect almost to a tee my own thoughts and feelings about where the Republican Party stands right now.

This is the dreariest part of a modern political cycle: the weeks and months after a Republican defeat. It all seems depressingly familiar: Urban conservatives of a certain stripe say that we need to get rid of the social conservatives. Hard-line conservatives say that we got too liberal and we need to toughen up. Moderate Republicans say we got too "extreme" and need to move toward the center. Others point to demographic doom if we don't jettison old-fashioned elements of conservative thought and appeal to the MTV generation, Hispanics, etc. We've been here before, too often.

This year, the intra-conservative sniping seems more listless than usual. There doesn't appear to be much conviction in any corner. My own view is that our political dialectic has reached a dead end. The current constellation of issues, which has been fairly constant for around thirty years, has played itself out. That doesn't mean the issues aren't important; they are. But the political lines that we've drawn and the ways in which we've defined the issues have become sterile and no longer hold much promise of any actual resolution of the problems in question.

We'll be writing a lot about this in the coming months, I think. I think it's pretty obvious that conservatives need to find new ways to address issues, new ways to apply conservative solutions to problems, new ways to shape conservatism to make it more appealing to a broader slice of the population. I haven't figured out what those new ways are, of course. But take the example of Barack Obama. By merely raising the idea of a new kind of politics that would get past the current battle lines and come at issues from new directions, he became one of the most popular figures of our time, even though he had absolutely no clue how to do what he talked about. We should be able to do at least as well as that.

I realize I am one small voice in this dialogue, but I am glad to be able to participate in the discussion. The Republican Party really does need a makeover and maybe this time we can get it mostly right.