For some godforsaken reason, TPM management has decided to invite Ross Douthat to talk about his book here.  I wrote some of this in a comment yesterday, but I wanted to take a minute to expand on it. 

The problems that the Republican party has is not that they have gotten off track.  It's that they're liars.  Douthat wants you to believe that conservative government has actually been good for this country despite all the evidence to the contrary.  His argument?  Well, wages are stagnating, the dollar's in the crapper, gas prices are sky fucking high, the income gap is growing, and banks are failing, but compared to the 1970s, poor people have access to cheap goods from China and are therefore better off.  Oh, by the way, the Republicans want to privatize social security, privilege drug and insurance companies for health care, and lower taxes on the richest people in the country.

There are two problems with Douthat's thesis.  The first is that the Republicans never advanced this as policy.  They never stood up and honestly said that they intended to create policies that would incentivize wage stagnation while encouraging the importation of cheap goods.  There's a reason they didn't make that policy proposal--no one would have gone for it.  This is just one more right wing attempt to justify otherwise terrible policies.  In other words, it's a lie. 

The second problem with Douthat's argument is that the Republican policies over the past 30 years <i>haven't helped anyone</i>.  The Republicans have been an ideological bunch since Goldwater came on the scene in 1964, and they have been running his playbook ever since.  They have a set of facially appealing policies that they have been able to sell to the American public because they tried hard as hell to make their policies appear internally consistent.  In doing so, the Republicans created a--shock--narrative that explained the countries problems such that the only solutions were the ones they provided. 

But all this talk of "narratives" in Douthat's post is just pomo bullshit.  There is a reality out there and no amount of narrative is going to make Republican ideological policies practical solutions for this country.  The ultimate difference between Republicans and Democrats is that when Republicans sit down to design a policy, they ask, "What do we believe is the right response to this situation," while Democrats ask, "What can we do to help people?"

If Douthat wants to reinvigorate the Republican party, he will have to force it to shake off it's ideological chains.  He will have to force it to face reality.  He will have to give up his post-modern pretensions and find policies that actually make a difference in people's lives. 

But if he did that, he'd be a Democrat.