Erickson wants to rebuild the Republican Party

Here's his program. If he could make it work it might really turn the Republican Party upside down and create an effective political infrastructure. But Whiskeyfire makes a really good point.

One of the major issues that the GOP has going forward is that its campaign machinery -- the phone trees, voter lists, GOTV operations, that sort of thing -- that all seems to be entangled with the religious/crazy/bigot faction. The Prop 8 Yes thing, for instance, was hateful, sure, but well organized. The McCain campaign? Not so much.

Can the GOP even run a campaign on a practical, logistical, structural level without having to genuflect to its most extreme, Palin-loving wing? It's not like the corporate cons seem to have ever really bothered to build the sort of infrastructure that you need to get folks on the phones and boots on the ground.

The Democratic party, the netroots, the Obama campaign, MoveOn, labor-- these are not really the same groups, but they overlap, and they all have an infrastructure and are able to do, say, GOTV and the other sorts of unglamorous troop-rallying work that you need to win an election. On the GOP side, well, the best voted for Obama, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Can the Republicans build a competitive party that is not largely dominated by the social conservatives?

The big thing that came out of the Reagan era was the coalition of conservatives and the Christian coalition. It made the Republican party dominant in national politics for three decades. But the Christian Coalition itself has declined. Ralph Reed left it in the 90's. Pat Robertson has declined as he aged, and Jerry Falwell has died. No one has replaced them. Karl Rove was able to mobilize the evangelicals for the 2004 Presidential election.

The failure of the Republican party to choose a Presidential candidate that appealed to both money conservatives and social conservatives was the demonstration of what is wrong with the Republican Party. The majority of American voters will not vote for the social conservatives, even if they have the ex-beauty queen Sarah Palin on the ticket as a second banana. The money conservatives and their Libertarian brethren have caused the current really severe economic Recession. The two branches of conservatism don't like each other much, but to succeed they had to work in concert.

That's the basis for the failure of John McCain's presidential dreams. That's why he had to bring on Sarah Palin who because a greater liability than an asset.

I don't think that Eric's efforts to get the Republican Party to effectively use the Internet is going to substitute for the close concert of the social conservatives and the money conservatives that came out of the Reagan era, and I don't think those two groups are going to go into another coalition that subordinates the social conservatives. Nor do I think that extremists of the type that characterize the money conservatives and also the social conservatives will be able to operate in the kind of bottom-up structure that the Internet best creates. Now the Libertarian Republicans can use the Internet as they proved when Ron Paul ran for President, but the Libertarians never got significantly more than 10% of the Republican primary voters.

The result is that Eric Erickson's proposal to rebuild the Republican Party will never work until that party recreates itself as a moderate, bottom up organization. Because of the way that redistricting creates Congressional districts filled with like-minded extremists, the surviving Republicans are the most extreme of the extremist Republicans. That's why the Republican civil wars has already started, and it will last for at least the next two elections.

Maybe after that some of Erickson's plan may become feasible. By then the Republicans will look a lot like the Democrats, though. Erickson will hate that.