NP - The Democrats' Duty: Bring the GOP Back from Crazy by Esquire's Charles Pierce

[David Morris]

Pierce writes fine political commentary.  His blog at Esquire is worth visiting.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/republican-party-0512

[...]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and
branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become
completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of
winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the
statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of
politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public
policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to
survive what we wrought upon ourselves. [...]

In Washington, there is no leadership anymore, no "Republican
establishment" to which anyone can appeal. The ferocious strength of
faith-based know-nothingism in the party's base has resulted in a
stubborn refusal to adopt even those ideas — like an individual
mandate for health care, or cap-and-trade as an energy policy — that
began as Republican ideas. [...]

This was a development long in the making, and one of which we may
well never see the end. It began with the vicious, truthless campaigns
run by the National Conservative Political Action Committee in the
late 1970s. This initiated the creation of a conservative network that
was outside the formal party structure. To this was added
independently financed think tanks, Christian colleges and (later)
Christian academies and organized home schooling, and conservative
boot camps that produced young people, and young candidates, whose
primary allegiance was to conservative ideology and not to the
Republican party. Eventually, as was proven by the failed candidacies
of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, which helped lose the
Republicans a golden chance at controlling the Senate as well in 2010,
these people cared less about whether the party succeeded than they
did that their ideology was kept pure and their private universe
invulnerable. In trying to control the uncontrollable and to appease
the insatiable, forcibly locked in with itself, like the Beales in
Grey Gardens, the party gradually lost its mind.

Since we have determined through the years that we shall have two and
only two political parties in this country, the irrationality of one
of them is such a grave threat to good governance that the other party
has an affirmative obligation to the country to make the irrational
party pay such a fearsome price for its indulgent eccentricity that it
must reform itself or risk permanent irrelevance. Unfortunately, that
task falls to the other creaky vehicle, the Democratic party, which
has proven spectacularly ill suited to it.

As conservatism was developing its powerful infrastructure, the
Democratic party was still sucking its thumb over what happened to
George McGovern in 1972. While conservative millionaires were pouring
money into the construction of the network of institutions on the
right, the Democrats were throwing themselves, through the creation of
the Democratic Leadership Council, in the general direction of the
same money. Nothing arose on the left, or around the Democratic party,
that remotely resembled the formidable arsenal of opinion that
developed on the right, and of which the Republicans took full
advantage, not realizing at the time that all of that success was
hollowing out their party's essential intellect until all that is left
today is raw, overwhelming id.  [...]

The Democratic party has an obligation to beat the Republican party so
badly, over and over again, that rationality once again becomes a
quality to be desired. It must be done by persuading the country of
this simple fact. It cannot be done by reasoning with the Republicans,
because the next two generations of them are too far gone. The state
legislators now passing all manner of crazy laws represent the next
generation of national Republican leaders. They are proudly unknowing.
They are certain, because it is impossible.