Permanent Republican Majority

For a while there you saw a number of Republicans arguing that we were entering a time of permanent Republican majority. They aren't doing that as much these days, probably because the idea doesn't sound as believable as it once did. But there are still some Republicans supporting it, like Horace Cooper in his latest article.

He notes that Republicans do have some structural benefits (i.e. they have more safe districts than Democrats), and trots out the old argument that if Democrats want to be successful they should copy Republicans.

If the party is primarily coastal and urban, the party's activists are disproportionately so. Ceding much of the heartland is a strategic failing for Democrats. The party's insularity makes it unable to fairly evaluate the public's misgivings about gay marriage, aggressive secularism, anti-Americanism, gun control and related social schemes as anything other than uninformed bigotry. Soliciting the votes of people you believe to be ignorant bigots requires a degree of cynicism difficult to mask from the voter. And such a task is impossible if it turns out the voters are neither ignorant nor bigoted.

There are Democrats who fit this parody, but they aren't the majority, or even a significant minority.

But let's look at how this deep thinker characterizes the Democratic view they have a hard time explaining to middle America. Gay Marriage, I get. The Democratic Party and middle America do seem to have different opinions on that issue. Aggressive secularism? Again there is some differences here - but obviously Cooper hasn't heard of the Dominionists if he thinks that Democrats are the only ones being "aggressive" on this issue.

And then we get to Anti-Americanism. One of the policies of America that we have a hard time explaining to our friends in middle America. Not hard to see why that would be a tough sell. If it were true. I mean if we Democrats were really consumed with Anti Americanism, I frankly think that Americans would be right to be suspicious of us. But we aren't. And the cynical Cooper presumably knows this.

Democrats are pro America and pro American - we want our country to be both just and successful. We believe that our country has the potential for greatness, a potential being squandered by a shortsighted Republican Party who sees belligerence as strength.

I think the American people can see what the Republicanoids have brought us, and I think they are smart enough to reject it.