Crisis for compassionate conservatism

More on David Kuo and the attendant paradox between the GOP's ruthless corporatism and their courting of poor, angry southerners.

First, a catch from a right-wing fundamentalist publication called The Church Report (sounds pretty official, doesn't it?). The headline: David Kuo: An Addition to the Axis of Evil.

And that's the rub. The entrenched fundamentalists see the GOP as their meal ticket, so they have to discredit Kuo's obvious statements that the Republicans at the top see fundamentalists as a meal ticket. But as has been noted everywhere from What's the Matter With Kansas? to this blog entry from Ezra Klein, the voters wooed by talk of compassionate conservatism and faith-based initiatives are to be among the first people steamrolled by Republican socioeconomic policy. They've just been sorta lucky so far.

The compassion agenda, however, isn't over: It's on hold. The economic trends in this country simply cannot support a party that seeks to counter excess personal risk and economic loss with more risk and upward redistribution. It's an electoral impossibility. Further, the right's absorption of downwardly mobile, Southern whites has ushered in a massive base that appreciates and relies on the entitlement state, and that will be first and worst affected by the middle class squeeze in the coming years. Bush's original appeal was to these people, who were comforted by his promise of conservatism without cruelty, which he conveyed by calling for a prescription drug benefit, promising he'd protect Social Security, and generally acting sort of like a liberal who went to church a lot (and, of course, also loved tax cuts). (. . .)

However it shakes out and whoever ends up taking the party's mantle, I expect the GOP to enter a wrenching period of soul-searching and transformation, as they try to marry their current corporatism with the needs of their base.