Nate Silver has a great article about that on fivethirtyeight, where he interviews John Ziegler, a right wing talk show host. Ziegler refuses to defend any of his claims, saying, literally, “I can’t BELIEVE” that anyone didn’t see it his way.
This sort of thing will be found in any political party; a certain percentage of partisans just don’t have the intellectual capacity or moral courage to fathom that decent people might disagree. But sometimes it’s more prevalent in a party than at other times, and it seems to come out strongly when a party is in a bad state.
It’s not so much that all Republicans believe they are the country as it is that they just cannot understand that they need to convince people. They’re convinced they’re right to the extent that they cannot comprehend why people don’t agree with them and so they forget that they have to convince people they’re right.
In Canada we’ve seen this behaviour from both the right AND left, just in the last ten or twelve years; in the 90s the largest conservative party, the Reform Party, had much the same problem; there was a sense that they felt they were right, couldn’t believe anyone would think otherwise, and so couldn’t communicate their message in a way that would convince swing voters. There was a tangible sense of disbelief on their part that anyone would not vote Reform, so their message was essentially, “If you don’t vote for us you must be stupid,” and then after every election there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth and screaming from the Reform Party that somehow the results of the election were wrong, that the people had made a mistake. It reached its nadir in 2000 when (by then styled the Canadian Alliance) the party actually seemed to be hinting that anyone who voted against them supported child molestation. This did not work, predictably enough.
After the conservatives sort of unified under the Conservative Party, in the early part of this decade the Liberal Party started to unravel in a storm of scandals, criminal charges and backstabbing, and lost its way, and now they’ve been doing exactly the same thing the Reform Party used to do, especially in the 2006 election; while the Conservative Party put huge amounts of effort into convincing people to vote for them, the Liberals didn’t really say much more than “If you don’t vote Liberal, you aren’t a real Canadian.” This did not work, predictably enough.
I think the Republican Party is where the Liberal Party of Canada was in 2006; their leadership is disgraced, their party has lost a lot of its workers and money, and they have no message beyond “Vote for us or you’re bad.” Like the Liberals in 2006, they have not really learned their lesson yet, and are probably scheduled for another ass-kicking. Like the Liberals, their second ass kicking will very likely be more painful than the first.
However, they pretty much HAVE to fix it, because politics is Darwinian. If they put some fundamentalist clown like Mike Huckabee up against Obama in 2012 and get stomped, the mucky-mucks who supported the clown will see thier positions in the GOP drop while reform-minded GOP members will fill the gaps. If they’re beaten again in 2016 (and 2014, of course) the fundie clown supporters will be actively losing their jobs, while new, younger GOPers will be scrambling to grab the newly available power positions.
You can’t stay in politics for long if you keep losing, so if the Republicans keep losing, you’ll see different Republicans.
