“The Commonsense Center”

John Avalon from PajamasMedia:

The Republican Party can re‑emerge as a force by reconnecting with independents, centrists, and libertarians in the future.  Great parties have to be willing to grow, and in the GOP’s case, become more diverse.  But if socially conservative activists and cynical play-to-the-base politicians continue to impose rigid social conservative ideological litmus tests, the Republicans will be in the wilderness for a very long time.  For the Republican Party to revive itself and reconnect with independents, the Republican Party needs to look more like John McCain in his prime, and less like Tom DeLay.

A rhetorical placeholder for Reaganism, “the center” as we know it faces extinction because the category can’t comprehend what some call the demographic shifts of race and age, but which might be more usefully thought of as an ideological shift. The election of 2008 was in part a break in the way Americans think about ourselves in relation to the scary world beyond our shores.

America’s humbled position doesn’t get much discussed anymore, though it was on everybody’s lips in September 2001. The election of someone by the name of Hussein only seven years later is not so much a referendum on which white Southerner will flatter the most Americans. It’s an unexpected geopolitical saviness on the part of the American electorate. The Right’s Islamophobic attacks guaranteed that Obama would come off as even handed in the face of an extremist opposition. Sound like a quality you’d like in your leader? Me, too.