Stephanopoulos: If this now declared deadline of Gen. Petraeus of September, if the political goals haven’t been met by then, do you see large scale Republican defections at that point?

Will: Absolutely. They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, “Are you going to vote for Nixon in ’60?” “No, I don’t like Hoover.” The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they’ve had since the ’68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited. ~RCP Blog

And I thought I was pessimistic!

The RCP Blog also points to this Buckley column that has already been widely discussed elsewhere.  The column ends thus:

The general [Petraeus] makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

There is probably a part of me that would cheer at the prospect of either one of the major parties being consigned to the ash-heap, though just a few years ago more than a few people began to think that it would be the other party that would shrivel and weaken unto death, so I don’t accept these forecasts of utter devastation and annihilation.  As things stand, the GOP is going to get shellacked again in 2008, and it will be up to the people in that party to decide whether they will learn their lesson or continue down the path to self-destruction that they are currently on. 

But not even the most soul-crushing electoral defeats normally prove to be the cause for a party’s elimination from the scene.  The Tories have suffered about as many humiliating consecutive defeats as a party can in the space of ten years and they continue to persevere in spite of themselves.  In parliamentary systems, parties may break up or rebrand themselves more often, but in our system the core interests of the Federalist-Whig-GOP continuum have remained surprisingly constant despite some marginal changes here or there.  The heart of their support has shifted geographically, but at bottom it has remained a party of corporations, finance and the Court tradition; it draws its popular support from rural, suburban and exurban America, but it remains the quintessential metropolitan party and now seems intent on forcing its metropolitan candidates down the voters’ throats. 

So long as these interests exist, there will be some party representing it, and it may as well be the same one that represents them now.  The loss of the nearly four-decade edge in national security debates will certainly hurt, since Republicans unfortunately have pinned so much on their reputation for national security and responsible foreign policy that they have allowed it to become a crutch.  For many decades the GOP could always say, “No, you may not like our social or economic policies, but we know how to handle foreign threats and run the ship of state better than those yahoos.”  Now they are “those yahoos” and have nothing left with which they can salvage their position.  In truth, aside from paying their occasional lip service to cultural issues, national security/foreign policy has become the GOP’s single unifying issue, and this has only become more true the worse Republican-managed foreign policy has been.  Iraq has simply shown the perverse lengths to which Republicans will go to maintain unity in the one area where they still command some credibility, at least with their own people.  The one thing that will absolutely ensure that Iraq makes the GOP brand unacceptable for decades is the virtually universal determination of Republican leaders and mainstream conservative pundits to keep defending and supporting the war in Iraq.  There would be appear to be no inclination to move away from these positions.  Will is not yet right about the permanent damage this war will do to the GOP, but before the end he might be.