The Republican brand failed to sell on what should have been a landslide victory for Republicans. Never before has a president been reelected with such a bad economy since FDR. Even though Democrats were defending 23 senate seats and Republicans were only defending 10, Democrats gained seats in the Senate. Even though redistricting meant several more House seats should have gone Republican, Democrats gained seats in the House too.
Without these Republican tailwinds, just imagine how badly the Democrats would have slaughtered the Republicans in the election yesterday. In 2014 and 2016, none of these strengths will be available to the Republican party. To make matters worse, with each passing year, the demographics of this country grow ever more favorable towards the Democratic party, which has overwhelming support among all minorities -- Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, Amerindians and Asians. A steady headwind is emerging in the face of any future Republican victory. Romney won the presidential vote with around 59% among whites. That's no longer good enough. Next year 60% won't be good enough. And the year after 61% won't be good enough. Pretty soon not even 100% of the white vote will be good enough to deliver a Republican victory in America.
We are approaching a one party state in America. It doesn't look like Republicans will ever be able to win a nation-wide election again. These are just cold, hard realities. If Republicans wish to become relevant again, they cannot just change their candidates, or spin their message in a different manner, or put out more television ads than last campaign -- they have to change their entire platform. The problem is the Republican insistence on the strategy of 'tough love' in all fields.
The Republican idea of how to breed success is to be tough on people until they shape up, after which point they will be able to take care of themselves. They apply this in all fields of thinking, no matter how disparate, because it is at the heart of their idea of virtue and character. They do not look at these subjects as empirical, factual questions but principled, moral questions which allow for zero compromise.
If a foreign government isn't properly freedom loving and peace loving, drop bombs on them until they shape up.
If someone can't get a job, give them no charity until the pangs of hunger force them off their lazy behinds to get work, no matter how low the pay.
If you accidentally get pregnant through irresponsible sex, tough, now you have to take care of the baby for life.
If you get sick and didn't have health insurance, tough, go die for not planning far enough ahead.
Don't let gays have the same benefits as straights so that they renounce their sinful ways and come back to the light.
Require every student learn the hardest possible material, and if they struggle learning it, tough, just give them extra tutoring hours.
The Republican solution to every single problem is make life such a living hell for people that they can't afford to do anything but the RIGHT THING, after which point their lives will improve and society will improve as well, for not having to take care of them anymore. However, this plan has zero possibility of success in a democracy, because there is no reason for the people in living hell to 'toughen up' when they can instead just vote out the tyrants who are making their lives into living hells in the first place. It seems Republicans had a rather glaring oversight, that if you can't keep authority, there's no way to impose 'tough love' on anyone. And if you're 'tough' on over 50% of the population in a democracy, there's no way you'll ever keep authority.
Republicans have alienated too many people by being too tough on them for too long. At this point, all we ever receive from Republicans is toughness, measures specifically designed to harm us, and we never see anything related to the 'love' half of the equation. Is it really true that 36% of the workforce isn't working because they're all lazy? Why did this laziness suddenly surge up at exactly the same time as Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and why has it remained high ever since? Did the same people who previously went to work suddenly wake up on the day on the stock market collapse and think to themselves, "Hey, I think I'll be lazy from here on?"
Is it really true that students can't all learn calculus and become rocket scientists because they're too lazy? Is it really true that all we have to do is assign them more homework and then they'll graduate with honors?
Is it really true that women having casual sex should be sentenced to a 20 year jail term every time they mess up?
Is it really true that persecuting gays will somehow help straights have stronger marriages?
Is it really true that sick people who can't afford health care, people who never chose to get sick and never did anything to deserve illness, should just be left to die in the streets? Is it their fault for not being born lucky like the rest of us who are still healthy?
Is it really true that just by bombing various countries they'll all magically reform into model mini-Americas?
Is it really true that students should have to pay enormous, $100,000 debts just for gaining the right to work in the modern economy? After all, if you make a college degree a necessity to get hired, shouldn't it also be available to all Americans for free? Otherwise, how can you expect everyone to get a job?
The Republican concept of 'tough love,' which may have worked perfectly in a frontier society or when everyone owned their own plot of land, is ridiculously out of place in the modern world. It is not true that simply by making people miserable, they will learn self-reliance and suddenly metamorphose into productive citizens. It is not true that all Americans are ugly ducklings just waiting to become beautiful swans with the right pokes and prods. There are some challenges people can't overcome, no matter how much you torture them into trying to do so. One of them is staying abstinent for life. Another is marrying early and staying married to the same person for life. Another is graduating from college. Another is getting a high paying job that could actually cover their cost of living. Another is being gay instead of straight. Another is learning calculus in high school. Another is setting enough aside for health care and retirement costs. Another is getting out of debt. In fact, at this stage in human development, it is nearly impossible for the vast majority of Americans to 'keep up' in the rat race between highly motivated foreigners working for pennies in overseas factories, endless low-wage immigrants, and relentlessly growing automation and artificial intelligence. At this stage of human development, where economies of scale demand that a few people own endless amounts of capital, while others own nothing, where machines can work harder than humans at anything and therefore manual labor is utterly worthless, how do you expect individuals to succeed in life, no matter how tough on them you are?
Republicans offer no solutions, they just say 'tough' and 'do it yourself.' They think life is so endlessly easy that if anyone just tried they could immediately succeed at anything. Well, maybe in their charmed lives that's so. Maybe for them, who grew up in the 50's or 60's or whenever, life really was a breeze where anything they tried immediately succeeded. But they have absolutely no conception about how hard life is now for the rest of us. They could never succeed, if they were born in the same generation as we are, with the half-assed abilities they possessed in their era. Our generation has a higher college graduation rate than theirs, we are less likely to divorce or abuse drugs than they were, and we're still far behind where they were at their age in their era. They never had to compete with Chinese. They never had a 30 million man wave of Mexican immigrants taking their first job out of high school away from them. They never had to beat Siri or Watson for a job as a secretary or lawyer. They never had to do a single difficult thing in their whole damn lives. With just unskilled labor, they could land a job at a union (something that no longer exists for our generation, and are pure fables, sort of like Pterosaurs), work at the same plant for 30 years, support their entire family with just the father's paycheck, and then retire with a pension. There isn't a single job like that anywhere in America anymore, and they have the gall to say 'tough' to us, and tell us that we could easily succeed in life if we just tried like they did?
Republicans are the party of the rich, the old, and the amoral. They're people who have themselves succeeded and then imagine that they aren't the exception but are somehow instead the norm. They're people who have no clue what life is like for the 90% beneath them, or anyone born after 1970. Or worse, they know exactly what life is like but they just don't give a damn. They pretend that all their 'tough' policies are for the sake of 'love,' but beneath their fake smiles they're just wishing we would all die already. I don't know what proportion of the Republican party is these two forces, complete cluelessness and absolute malice, but they are the only two groups that vote Republican anymore.
The liberal solutions to the problems facing the modern day are no better. Everything a liberal tries to do just makes the situation worse than before. But at least they care. At least they're trying to help. Until the Republican party starts offering solutions of their own, better solutions that actually help Americans achieve a minimum standard of living, they will never win another election again.
Republicans MUST adopt the citizen's dividend if they are ever going to appeal to the majority of the electorate again. They must offer something to the American people, instead of nothing. They must compete with Democrats on how government will help the individual, instead of ceding the field before the contest even begins. They must also abandon all social issues that make them look fussy, old, and bigoted if they wish to ever appeal to the young again. Yes, young people may mess up their lives by taking drugs or having casual sex or getting divorced or dropping out of school, but they'll get over their mistakes and learn from them, so long as they aren't thrown in jail by 'tough love' Republicans for having a bit of weed or condemned to raise a gaggle of children they never even wanted because abortion is suddenly illegal. The freedom to mess up is the same as the freedom to not have too heavy consequences attached to your failures. Republicans, by multiplying the consequences of every little transgression, make it impossible to recover from any imaginable mistake. If social penalties are not multiplied on people's personal lives, and money is always available to live a frugal, self-respecting existence, Republicans could get rid of the 'tough' and concentrate on the 'love' again.
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