Recently, radio host Ed Schultz had Republican direct mail guru Richard Vigurie as a guest on his program. While Vigurie has moved outside the conservative mainstream with his opposition to the Iraq war, he's really only a few millimeters from the center. The Republican party has become extremely narrow in its scope and that mainstream is about as wide as a pencil line -- it's not extremely hard to be outside it. On every other issue, Vigurie sounds typical and on the issue of returning the GOP to power, he sounds typically wrong. Like everyone else on that side of the aisle, he argues that Republicans have to return to their "roots." They need to be about low taxes and free markets and return to fiscal discipline. None of this really caught my attention -- it's like wallpaper in the conservative room. The argument is made so often that you don't even notice it anymore.
But then he said something that showed the reasoning behind that argument. Reagan won twice using that message and Bush sr. won once, Vigurie argued, so we know the message works.
Now maybe Richard Vigurie doesn't have a calendar, but he doesn't seem to notice that it's been more than 16 years since Bush sr. won. Whatever it was that he thinks Dubya wasn't saying -- and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what that was -- that his dad and Reagan won with it isn't all that convincing an argument. Republicans seem to believe that they can stop history, that if they find that perfect message and build that perfect society, history will stop and we'll live in a free market Utopia forever -- Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority."
But, as I've pointed out recently, society evolves. As conservatives look to the past for their big winning message, they don't seem to notice that society moves forward. We're a species destined to live in the future, not the past. Nowhere is this failure to recognize reality more obvious than in social conservatism -- i.e., the religious right.
A new study shows that the number of people who list their religion as "none" has shot through the roof... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
