Ponnuru, Punditizing

Over at Time, Ramesh Ponnuru takes a look at the future of the GOP and foresees much bloodshed.

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

I agree, though nobody cares what I think. The GOP is becoming increasingly factional, and defeat's only going to speed up that process. The Republican Party's problem is that, ever since the end of the Cold War, there's been no unifying force. There's no glue. There's not even any Scotch tape holding the thing together.

Victory was enough to keep all the different groups in line, if for no other reason than that they relied on one another to push their agenda. But that's gone now. And Ponnuru thinks we'll see the GOP pulled apart on every dimension: foreign policy, economics, immigration, how to deal with Barack Obama, etc., etc., etc.

Before you go suck on a gas pipe, though, listen to what else Ponnuru has to say:

Republicans are counting on the natural tides of politics to lift their numbers in Congress in 2010. The Democrats may overreach, or their supporters may get complacent. But to get back in the driver's seat, to become relevant again, Republicans will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks and where whites are a declining proportion of the electorate.

I agree...sort of. My fear is that cost-of-living issues can only take you so far. Succesful political parties are always built on a BIG IDEA. The GOP of the Reagan Era was founded on the principle of self-reliance. The Democrats' New Deal coalition depended on the people trusting the government to lend them a hand.

Can we really scrape together a winning coalition based on commuting and charter schools? It'd be nice to think so, but those seem like just stopgap measures. The GOP needs its BIG IDEA if it wants to return to relevance.