A noisy pundit said on television if the economy fails to improve, Romney has a chance to color his business background to become leader of the Republicans. How weak is that?
The Republican Party is a clamor looking to revive a compulsion. Any high ground it has owned for more than thirty years will require a terrific new leadership to restore.
The vigor in the Republican effort to dismantle excess regulation, bureaucracy and overhead is gone. The vigor to ignite partnership in the marketplace is gone. Republican diplomacy plucks new violence and dwindles habeas corpus. Their defense of individual dignity and private domain is gone.
The Republican culture is a graft of plutocrats lifting a basket of opportunists; authoritarians increasingly unable to keep fundamentalists, anarchists or the outright paranoid; not liberty, but a veneer of autocracy over rank.
Richard Posner:
…the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings…