David Brooks argues that the US Republican Party's populist and anti-intellectual stance has alienated the highly educated regions of America such as the cities and coasts. The republican appeal is now to evangelical and rural sentiment. The problem for the Republican Party is that wealth flows from the cities and from the upper-middle class. It has got to the point where the Democrats receive more in individual funding from professionals. The data below is from Political Contributions; Democrats are in light purple.

Brooks writes:

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions -- Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it's 2-to-1. With tech executives, it's 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

This is my experience of the Republican Party. I consider them a myopic bunch of incompetent crooks that are unable to govern. In Australian politics I have fluently floated across party lines for my voting; from the Liberals, to Labor, to the Democrats and to the Greens when it warranted. This is because, despite the Liberals dabbling with modern conservatism, the Australian political parties are arguments within the framework of democratic liberalism. The US Republican Party has lost this modern basis of their philosophy.

The bottom-line is; governance counts.

I became way more interested in the Labor Party in Australia after the Children Overboard Affair which was bad governance personified. Bad governance is remembered and generally is punished by the electorate. This is why I consider the US Elections as going to be a Presidential and Congressional blood bath. Only 9% of Americans think America is on the right track. That hurts democratically.

We are seeing the end effects of bad governance all strike during the years that the Republican Party has been in power; war, economy, constitutional flagrance, poor policy, poor emergency responses (Katrina); you name it, the Republican Party is wearing it. I should also point out that I experienced bad Republican Party governance at the county level too. So it is not a national thing; it is endemic. The philosophies of the Republican Party and their democratic appeal has left them unable to govern.

I am probably in that group that the US Republican Party would call 'liberal intellectuals' and Brooks is right. They have lost me. Whereas I might be fluid in Australia with my voting, in the US my experiences have left me with no sympathy for the Republican Party. I doubt I am alone.

Radly Balko of Reason magazine writes:

The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending--even on items not related to war or national security--has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

Ironically, David Kuo makes the same argument from the evangelical constituents point of view in his book Tempting Faith:

By 2008, we will have had a good conservative Republican in the Oval Office for twenty of the past twenty-eight years. Republicans have had outright control of both houses of Congress for most of the last twelve years.

Republican Presidents have appointed the vast majority of American judges and seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. In short, we've had almost everything we wanted politically.

But things are hardly better. Social statistics are largely unchanged. Divorces are rampant and more and more children are growing up in a home with one parent. Nearly a million and a half abortions are performed every year. There are more children in poverty today than there were twenty years ago. A great percentage of Americans lack health care than ever before. Educational achievement is hardly soaring. Millions of Americans live in what seems like utterly intractable poverty.

It is hard to find a constituency that the Republican Party has not alienated during their short time in power at the national level. It may be that the factions in the Republican Party lead to incompatible policy, which is true to an extent, but I don't think that is the main issue. Policy has been ad-hoc and the main goal has been re-election through media management. I suspect if governance was not so bad these refrains from the differing factions would not be so public. Yet the demographic for the Republican Party has changed and is non-urban, it may be that the factions that have given it democratic majorities in the past is no longer tenable.

Via David Frum, some data describing how the US Republican Party's appeal to their base has alienated them from the wider electorate.

Not quite the permanent majority Karl Rove had in mind. The Republican Party's woes are wide and long. There is the poor governance of the Bush years clear in everyone's mind leaving 90% of American thinking the country is on the wrong track. That was rammed home again with the recent financial crisis when the incompetence of the Bush Administration was put into full light again. The Republican Party has heavily gone for the vituperative echo-chamber approach, which, while highly Schmittian, has meant that with their decreasing popularity, more and more Americans are now enemies of the nation and treasonous. It makes for a democratically unpalatable political party which will leave them unable to win government.

The US Republican Party has no legitimacy. After the last eight years of horrifically bad governance, they have no political claim to policy, to governance, or even rational politics. They are a broken and illegitimate party that is echoing an ever tighter and smaller constituency.

It is sad to see a party that should have a legitimate view and say in American politics become one that has sabotaged itself so completely that it follows politics which leave it unable to govern or even contribute meaningfully to good governance.

The stimulus bill is rife with political calculations, supposedly the economic ills are sought to be blamed on Obama with cynical calculations of when jobs will kick in from the money; alternatively the Republicans are rediscovering their principles after fourteen years of majority government and cutting back on spending despite their recent history of wild and profligate full speed ahead on the printing press.

But all those are more talking points for a mass media which requires the drama of a political horse race rather than any definition of good government or empirical policy. The problem is far deeper than that though.

Liberal democracies tend to follow the dictum that bad governance has political consequences. The US Republican Party failed to provide good governance and has left itself politically and publicly illegitimate.

Rush Limbaugh was the keynote speaker at gathering for the Conservative Political Action Committee. Here is the transcript of speech. I am curious why they would use an entertainer to expound on the political theories and philosophies of governance that the Republican Party is choosing to follow.

Entertainers tend to be most comfortable within a known audience and don't have to face the mess of disparate voices that democracy often requires from politicians. This is certainly true of American talkback radio in the United States which was one of the first forms of echo-chamber media replete with microphones being turned off, screening and endlessly repetitive demagoguery.

The initial aspects of his speech describing what Conservatives stand for is reasonable, for instance:

Let me tell you who we conservatives are: We love people. [Applause] When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don't see groups. We don't see victims. We don't see people we want to exploit. What we see -- what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government.

That is the philosophy that conservatism accepts social inequity in a social, economic and political system and that it does not see a role in special interest groups, or minority groups having help from the government to achieve equality. That is fine as a philosophy, but recent US Republican governance has not followed that and Limbaugh has been a part of the media message which has broken those principles. A good example is that many of the states that are conservative in the United States accept more money from the government in hand-outs than they send to Washington DC.

We recently had the farce of Republican Governors trying to stick to this principle and only taking 3.7 billion of a 3.8 billion hand out from the federal government. In essence these conservative states are minorities in the federation and are receiving subsidies in order to level the economic playing field with increased government expenditure.

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause] Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you.

Limbaugh mixes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence there, and recent governance by the US Republican executive completely broke the universalism of the enlightenment with the establishment of the 'illegal combatant' doctrine and ignoring FISA. Not even citizenship and nationalism was enough to spare an individual from arbitrary action by the executive. Liberty of travel and association took a pummeling from the TSA under a republican government, secret laws were established that the TSA could use against an individual and that were publicly published or known; which is bad governance.

We don't want to tell anybody how to live. That's up to you. If you want to make the best of yourself, feel free. If you want to ruin your life, we'll try to stop it -- and make -- but it's a waste. We look over the country as it is today, we see so much waste, human potential that's been destroyed by 50 years of a welfare state. By a failed war on poverty. [Applause

Unless it is about abortion, state laws covering marijauna, etc. The hypocrisy here is significant. Again, Limbaugh is a radio host and supported many of those policies from the Bush Administration. While the language in this speech is understandable from a political philosophy point of view, it is difficult to take seriously given the last 14 years under republican governance and the nature of entertainment that Limbaugh and others have provided in support of Republican policies.

The second half of the speech just dissolved into Schmittian style conservatism where the opposing group was demonised and dehumanised;

You know, if you really want to unhinge a liberal it's hard to do because they're so unhinged now anyway, even after -- but all you have to do is say you know what the things you people do, the things you people believe in are cruel. That's the last way they look at themselves. They are the best people on the -- they're the good people. You tell them that their ideas and that their policies are cruel and the eggs start scrambling

Again, that is not useful as a form of governing philosophy. The Bush Administration used Schmittian principles heavily; language in the 2002, 2004 and even 2006 elections were about the treasonous Democrats and how they were 'aiding and abetting' the enemy, wanting the US to fail. It was successful initially, not in policy, but electorally, however, the pursuit of that electoral and governance policy has led to the Democrats currently holding the Executive, the Senate and the House. It is not a sustainable policy. Limbaugh continues:

What do we do as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? Well, the one thing, and there are many, but one thing that we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now.

The Republican Party continues to be broken. The idea that governance is not about policy, but about politics, is not about empiricism but is about perception, has led to one of the worst US Presidents in American history. Having Limbaugh speak at the CPAC convention as a keynote speaker may be good entertainment, and good for raising awareness of the event, even good for Rush Limbaugh's national profile, but it offers nothing settling, comforting, or confidence building that the Republicans have learnt from their errors of the last eight years and why they failed to govern effectively and competently.

Until that is overcome they are unelectable.

Mark Thompson argues that before the Republican Party can provide good governance it must shed a leg from the the three legged stool. The legs are nationalistic conservatism, economic conservatism and social conservatism. Currently Thompson sees that the three strands do not have sufficient cross-sections that they can agree on what constitutes good governance.

Thompson notes that not being able to provide good governance is different to being able to win elections. The Bush Administration was very competent and successful at winning elections. It was woeful at governance. Thomson writes:

Where I think Frum and Douthat, and to a lesser extent Postrel, go wrong is in the assumption that "salvageable" means "capable of winning elections."

The old coalition will remain capable of winning elections, if only because of the inertia of our two-party system. Where it is unsalvageable, however, is in its ability to govern well on a federal level once it is in power unless and until it can chop off one of those legs and replace it with a leg that is currently compatible with the other two.

If a leg must go I hope it is the social conservatives. It is the arm of conservatism I find the most repugnant. Thompson thinks that the Republican Party will be in the wilderness for a considerable time:

[R]ealignments don't happen overnight, and until this one is complete - which will take a good decade or so, I suspect - I don't see movement conservatism being in a position where it is capable of governing competently beyond existing as a possible legislative check against Democratic overreach.

Prior to the Republican party gaining a majority in the House in the early 1990s the Democrats dominated the legislative for nearly forty years. The current back and forth between the two parties in the House and Senate is a very recent thing. The modern history of the legislative in the US has been one of slow oscillations with long periods of party dominance.