A combination of lucky breaks and Democratic mistakes could still avert disaster for the GOP. But don’t count on the Republicans’ magical power. It doesn’t exist. ~John Pitney, National Review

Here is the trouble for the ostensibly conservative party: their one winning issue in the last five years, beyond the obvious one of national security (which, frankly, only a supremely idiotic ruling party could have lost in the wake of 9/11), that the GOP has successfully exploited has been gay “marriage.”  Instead of successfully fighting on immigration, they have punted due to internal disagreements about how to proceed.  Here the “big tent” approach has been the ruin of the party, since the GOP’s bread and butter is to be the nationalist party and there is no issue more powerful for a nationalist party than immigration.  In failing to understand this or take full advantage of the great opportunity it presented, they show themselves to be worse than failures.  Their great victory has been to insist upon the codification of marriage as a heterosexual, monogamous union (something largely achieved, by the way, by the grassroots and activists, and scarcely helped at all by the national party that reaps the benefits at the polls).  (Even here they have not always opposed the virtually indistinguishable “civil unions,” but let’s let them have some credit for their meager accomplishment.)   In other words, the one thing they have “succeeded” at in the national debate was to confirm what almost everyone knew or assumed to be true just 10 or 15 years ago on the most fundamental social institution there is.  How many more “victories” of this kind can we endure?  To have succeeded at something like this means that conservatives have been losing the broader culture war so badly that conservatives are supposed to be grateful that the generals were able to protect one of the main citadels that was nowhere near the frontier and should never have been threatened.  To get excited about this kind of success would be like having a triumph for the emperor after he successfully recaptured Ostia from a rabble of freed slaves.  On other fronts, such as affirmative action or reducing government, the generals are dilatory and often interested in saving their own skins rather than repelling attacks and launching counterattacks.  If the Republicans are the conservatives’ main battle army in the culture wars, then conservatives are roughly in the position of Iraqis facing overwhelming U.S. force with an army that does not fight or gives up easily.  For the same reason the average Arab has not wanted to fight on behalf of his political leadership in most wars, so, too, do many conservatives no longer want to fight for this party: it means nothing to them and has no connection to them.  All year long the election-year message has been: “Ignore all our failures and our abuses of your trust–the invader is coming!”  But, like an arbitrary despot, the party cannot rouse the people to its defense with such lame appeals.  The people know how badly the despot has ruled them.  For a moment they allow themselves to think, in spite of everything they know to be true about the invader, that perhaps the Mongols coming over the hill are not destructive pagan barbarians but actually Prester John come to deliver them from the threat of the Saracens.  This is, of course, a terrible delusion, and the Mongol yoke will weigh heavily on many of them.  Soon will come the lament of the half-hearted critic of the despot, “Where have you gone, O Master?”  For those who truly desire the defeat of the despot, however, there can be no such second-guessing and kvetching after the deed is done.  The invader will be cruel, but then we should also remember that the despot who will be overthrown this year is only a satrap, who was himself beholden to the shahanshah in the White House.  The invader will serve as bulwark against the depredations of the shahanshah, perhaps like Agesilaos’ Spartans fighting to throw down Persian rule in Ionia.  More likely, it will be more like Timur overthrowing the power of Bayezid and dragging him off in a cage: the Byzantines are spared the final blow for a brief time, but at terrible cost to others.   

Many of the people are only too aware of the danger, but in a fine tradition of subject Near Eastern peoples we await the comeuppance of the brutal master, even though we know that the next master may be even worse.  We have come to understand that there are no good masters, only more or less obnoxious ones, though it has taken us long enough to learn what we should always have known.  But the despot has betrayed them so often that they say to themselves, if only once, “Come, O Great Khan, and free us.”