GOP lost without a compass following 2008 election
Ed Kilgore expects the Republican Party to pursue a strategy of playing to social conservatives and touting discredited fiscal policies. Such policy brought the GOP into power, but after suffering losses in 2006 & 2008, pursuing the old game plan amounts to “conservative self-deception.” A state of mind, “at least partially attributable to the rise of conservative ideological media networks that enable their consumers and producers alike to live in a parallel universe that is largely impervious to adverse information.”
From TheDemocraticStrategist.org 11 November 2008 post, by Ed Kilgore:
There are, however, two aspects of contemporary conservative self-justification that strike me as somewhat new.
The first is the iron conviction that there is a popular majority for core conservative policies at the very moment when they have been repudiated.[snip]

You two on the left, I'm on the fence about, but the rest of you... How do you sleep at night?
In a parallel development, during both the Reagan and Bush years, public support for conservative efforts to make the tax system more regressive has declined steadily once the free-lunch assumptions of supply-side economics proved to be a fraud.
[snip]
If today’s conservatives succeed in convincing each other to embrace a more forthright message assaulting entitlements, progressive taxation, public education, regulation of corporations and Wall Street, just to cite a few domestic policy examples, they are almost certainly cruising for more electoral bruising…
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