The Culture War

Rod Dreher @ TAC
Wars And Culture Wars

...If younger Americans don’t share culturally conservative views on same sex marriage, abortion, and other hot-button issues of the last 40 years, the collapse of the GOP’s reputation for competent foreign policy management has left them with very little reason to vote Republican. So they don’t.

The Culture War, Part II or The Revolt of the (Republican) Elites by Ross Douthat

...On health care, education, jobs, you name it, the current G.O.P. is simply not equipped to meet that challenge.

So long as that remains the case, a Republican Party that takes the direction its elites seem to want to chart could easily find itself in an extremely perilous political position. It would have sidelined the concerns of many millions of voters, effectively shutting their views out of the political process, without necessarily gaining the kind of support in the center that would make that sidelining a net plus. There are plenty of social conservatives, evangelical and Catholic and Mormon, who would be happy to have an excuse to vote for centrist Democrats on economics or foreign policy, plenty of working class voters who would see a pro-immigration, pro-amnesty G.O.P. as yet another reason to stay home. For Republicans to thrive despite these losses, they would need to make substantial gains with other cohorts … and again, it’s awfully hard to see that happening so long as the party’s economic policy conversation mostly consists of office-holders attacking the Ryan budget from the right.