Oddly, one might ask the same question of the U.S. economy as well. But I digress.
"Death spiral" is Nate Silver's phrase, and he makes the case for it here. He argues that recent incidences of the GOP doubling down on their most conservative positions (monolithic opposition to the stimulus bill, siding with Rush Limbaugh, voting against the...delay of digital television?) are among the signs that moderate elements are no longer influencing the party because they've jumped ship, leaving only the most conservative base behind.
In the electoral sense, this can be measured. Silver provides a graph of how the House of Representatives has changed and in what districts. There you can see that the districts Republicans lost were the ones that fell in the middle of the spectrum (the spectrum being how that District voted in the Presidential election). That ends up meaning that Moderate Republicans have left office, while conservative Republicans are the ones who held their seats in highly conservative districts. This, in theory, leads to minority echo chamber effect in which the Party as a whole drifts rightward, further turning off the remaining moderate voters and prompting them to bail.
In the conservative blogosphere, the argument has been raging over how best to make a comeback, and in the days after the election posters and commentors on blogs like Redstate argued that the real problem for Republicans was that they weren't conservative enough, and in one instance that Republicans who bad-mouthed Sarah Palin should be metaphorically tranquilized, tagged and released back into the wild so that future Republican candidates who hire them can be readily shunned. Formations of circular firing squads are generally not good signs for an organization.
On the other hand, this past week the RNC elected Michael Steele as its new chairman. Although in his bid to become chairman Steele argued in favor of a return to conservative roots, he is generally thought of as a moderate and came across that way on his recent appearance on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, where he signaled that social issues like abortion and gay rights may not be the foundations on which to rebuild the party.
On the other other hand, Steele remains as unapologetic as more rightward leaning Republicans about the state of Conservative ideas. His Blueprint for Tomorrow on which he campaigned maintains that America is a conservative nation and that the Republican party's message failure was one of strategy and packaging, not one of content - essentially saying, "We just need to Twitter more."
My feeling is that the Republican party of the past 20 years had made a deal with the devil by leaning so heavily on social conservatism. Lee Atwater's racial politics has been played out and using gay rights as a wedge issue will eventually go the same way. Abortion may continue to divide Americans, but Democrats have learned to argue not in favor of abortions, but against outlawing them and that blunts the issue's power for conservatives. People whose vote is influenced by conservative social issues are becoming an ever-shrinking minority, and Republicans are flailing because they have relied so heavily on those issues for nearly a generation.
Without the social issues, Republicans are left with Lower Taxes/Smaller Government and...Bueller? Take a peek through the 2008 GOP Party Platform and see what stands out. Without a strong economy the argument that education, health care and environmental issues should be left for the market to resolve are incredibly weak. Everything is basically a variation on the theme that the Government itself is the problem - which is kind of a hard sell when you have been the Government for the past 8 years.
So with time, it is true that Republican ideals can come back into vogue. They can rebuild their 'watchdog' brand through being the dissenting minority party, and can capitalize on any future slip-ups by the Democrat-led government. Then they can return to power on the promise of reform and the shrinking of the Government.
That, I think, is the cycle of partisan politics. Although Democrats have it within their power to blunt the future Republican attack simply by governing well. It is kind of nice that we have a political system that encourages that sort of thing.
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