The Republican Party is going into exile and the wilderness as the Children of Israel did after the destruction of the Temple in 586 BC. They had broken their covenant with the Lord and were punished. The GOP also has forsaken its principles and succumbed to media pressure to enact big spending programs, alienating its base and its reason to exist. Whether or not the Republicans ever come back, or disappear as did the Whigs, is not clear. It will take more than tired exhortations to conjure up the long-dead Ronald Reagan. The last time I went to a GOP breakfast, I talked about the necessity of an online presence. I told of the online communities and bloggers our opponents have. I told about how Republican candidates were being trashed on the Internet with the "assassination by search engine" technique. All I got from the elderly party leaders was glazed eyes. They moved on to speaking of "getting the next mailing out" and the necessity of "working the precincts and hanging brochures on doorknobs".
Thus, the GOP is hopelessly out of date and being left in the dust, at least at the local level. And is not "all politics local"?
I'm not sure what mechanism remains to regenerate the situation. One wakeup call might be Wahhabist Islam finally showing its face in its vicious way. Or as the progressives hammer into place more and more European social democratic welfare dependencies, the toll on the economy will begin to manifest itself. But it may take more time than anyone foresees.
Was Keynes right, "In the long run, we're all dead"? Or was Moses, in his confidence that eventually the Jordan would be crossed, even if he didn't live to see it?