GOPocalypse”and the Future of the Right
Even before Obama won a resounding victory over McCain and Democratic majorities expanded significantly in Congress, declarations that conservatism was finished had been pouring in from the left as they had in 1976 and 1992. The decimation of the Republican Party over the last two election cycles has left the vehicle for conventional conservative political action horribly damaged, broken and smoldering in the ditch into which the Bush administration and its supporters have driven it. Without some significant and fairly dramatic adaptation to new political realities, however, the early obituaries of conservatism as a cohesive political force in the United States may finally prove to be correct. There will continue to be some reduced center-right voting coalition, but soon enough it will lose the ability to renew and reproduce itself in anything like its present form. If nothing is done to counteract it, the generational shift to the political and cultural left among the next generation will reduce conservatives of all kinds to a marginal fraction.
