The Incredible Shrinking G.O.P.

Arlen Specter quits the Republican Party. Michelle Bachman stays in it. That's just about all you need to know about the Republican strategy for re-taking a majority in 2010. They're counting on the Extremist Ignoramus Vote.

Steve Benen:

[T]he Republican Party is home to Limbaugh, Tea Baggers, Palin, right-wing blogs, the Rove/Cheney/Gingrich triumvirate -- and no one else. The party that's been shrinking to generational lows just got even smaller.

For three months, the conservative message has been that President Obama, his widespread popularity notwithstanding, is some kind of radical ideologue, far from the American mainstream. Specter's departure from the GOP sends the exact opposite message. Moderate Republicans are teaming up with Obama, and leaving the party that has "moved far to the right" behind.

That said, the Republican Party is unlikely to go the way of the Whigs. While the nation is sharply divided over political, social, religious, economic, environmental, and educational issues, political parties in the United States have a history, even in deeply troubled times, of reforming from within rather than being displaced by wholly new parties. The only exception is the Whig Party, and that quite clearly was due to unbridgeable differences over slavery that ate at the very foundation of the Republic for the entirety of its first eighty years.

Count us among those who want a vibrant, reasonable Republican Party. It's never good when the opposition is peopled principally by religious crazies and know-nothings. We cannot divine how and where the Republican Party will find the reformers with the courage to remake it. If history is any guide, it may take a generation or longer, which means the saviors of the Republican Party, right now, probably are just learning to toddle and eat from their highchairs.

History also strongly suggests -- once again, opposition to slavery being the exception -- that the fortunes of any political party inevitably will decline when it falls into the grip of a great religous awakening, such as the Republicans have experienced since Reagan. Reform requires embracing secular pragmatism over rigid religiosity. Wrenching though it may be, in the end we Americans have always returned to our secular roots, strengthened the wall of separation between church and state, and allowed the revivalists to retreat from the public sphere to their private sanctuaries where they can concentrate on saving themselves and their flock.

In short, history teaches that political party reform is inversely related to dominance by what, in former times, was known as the 'religious faction.' To find its way back to reason and vibrancy, the Republican Party will have to separate from the religious faction, and let each go their respective ways.