I commend to your attention Dan McCarthy’s excellent analysis of the election results, in which he says that we traditionalists, libertarians, and foreign policy realists ought not be deceived about the meaning of the vote. Movement conservatism, he says, shows no signs of having learned from the disastrous George W. Bush presidency. So many of the new GOP faces are less wrinkled versions of the same old same old, he says. Excerpt:

Can these fortyish idols of a party philosophically defined by Fox News—whose median viewer age is 68—win over millennial voters and the electorate of the future? They will if there’s no one organized enough to compete against them. The well-oiled machinery of movement conservatism remains fully in the hands of people who think the only trouble with George W. Bush was that he did not go far enough. Heritage and AEI have lately tried to present softer images on a number of domestic issues—prison reform, policies to help the working class—but they are as single-mindedly hawkish as ever when it comes to foreign policy and just as dedicated as the Bush administration to expanding executive power. Young Republicans like Tom Cotton represent the worst aspects of the movement’s ideology, and none of the new faces appears to represent the best.

On these great issues of war and peace, legislative government or executive prerogative, Republican realists and libertarians have a much weaker infrastructure to begin with, and for most libertarian institutions and their benefactors gutting regulation remains a higher priority than stopping any war. Democrats, meanwhile, are once more terrified of seeming too dovish, as Obama’s botched policies—interventionist but reluctantly so—teach his party anew that McGovernite and Carter-esque weakness is fatal. (This is true: peace in strength is what America’s voters want.) So it’s back to the Democrats’ answer to Bush: Clinton, and the female of the species may soon prove deadlier than the male.

Read the whole thing.