Can someone explain to me what David Sirota is doing? Oliver Willis caught him making a poor analogy on this NARAL thing -- David compared it to Club for Growth, Oliver pointed out that Club for Growth doesn't endorse Democrats -- and Sirota just spluttered out a long string of historical misreads and beltway hatred, all of it liberally doused in populist condescension. So two quick things here, and then it's time to begin my Friday night:
1) The post-Goldwater Republican party did not pull off some sort of magic trick. Some folks seem to believe they just built so many institutions that, one morning, the country woke up conservative. Wrong. Lyndon Johnson slammed the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress and, immediately after, Goldwater, despite his historic drubbing, won four deep-South states that hadn't gone Republican since 1876. When Johnson signed the bill, he told his advisors he'd just lost the South for the Democratic party. He was right. Southern Democrats were conservative (and, indeed, their senators were the New Deal's most effective opponents) but they were still tribally Democratic. Johnson ended that. Nixon and his Southern strategy codified it. It was the realignment of a country that had long been conservative but defaulted Democrat because of FDR and the Great Depression, not some spectacular illusion carried out by CATO.
Look, institutions are great and I like them very much, but they're not what separates the revitalized, dominant Republican majority from its shrunken, pre-Reagan cousin. The Goldwaterites helped the party create a more Western-centric ideology which was electorally smart and formed enough of an ideological superstructure that the newly lost Democrats could be effectively absorbed. Also, Nixon was canny and craven and rocked the crypto-rascist appeals. Also, Carter made Democrats look weak on foreign policy, which destroyed us until the end of the Soviet Union. Pretending this was the work of three think tanks and Bill Kristol is just silly.
