The vanishing Republican voter

By GottaLaff

How's that inequality working for you and your 1987105 houses, J Sid?

In a must-read New York Times Magazine piece, former Bush speechwriter David Frum sounds the sirens for the Republican party.

"My fellow conservatives and Republicans have tended not to worry very much about the widening of income inequalities. As long as there exists equality of opportunity -- as long as everybody's income is rising -- who cares if some people get rich faster than others? Societies that try too hard to enforce equality deny important freedoms and inhibit wealth-creating enterprise. Individuals who worry overmuch about inequality can succumb to life-distorting envy and resentment."

"All true! But something else is true, too: As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us."

Obama, as usual, is in touch with the American people. McCain/Palin, on the other hand, are not. They seem to have failed to notice this:

As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000, something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The mood of the country has soured. Conservatives who disregard the mood of unease may forfeit their power to defend the more open and productive American economy they did so much to build. [...]

With wealth comes diversity — and what is inequality but diversity in monetary form?

The Big Question:

When asked, “Are you better off than you were five years ago?” only 41 percent of middle-class Americans say yes, the worst result since pollsters started asking the question half a century ago.

It’s this pervasive economic unease that is capsizing the Republican Party, even as Americans have arrived in recent months at a somewhat more optimistic assessment of the progress of the Iraq war.

Remember-- Republicans create their own reality:

IN SHORT, the trend to inequality is real, it is large and it is transforming American society and the American electoral map. Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and the irrelevant.

Conservatives need to stop denying reality. The stagnation of the incomes of middle-class Americans is a fact. And only by acknowledging facts can we respond effectively to the genuine difficulties of voters in the middle.

And then there's the trust factor:

Republicans have been badly hurt in upper America by the collapse of their onetime reputation for integrity and competence. Upper Americans live in a world in which things work. The packages arrive overnight. The car doors clink seamlessly shut. The prevailing Republican view — “of course government always fails, what do you expect it to do?” — is not what this slice of America expects to hear from the people asking to be entrusted with the government.

Finally, Frum's advice:

Equality in itself never can be or should be a conservative goal. But inequality taken to extremes can overwhelm conservative ideals of self-reliance, limited government and national unity. It can delegitimize commerce and business and invite destructive protectionism and overregulation. Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too. We must develop a positive agenda that integrates the right kind of egalitarianism with our conservative principles of liberty. If we neglect this task and this opportunity, we won’t lose just the northern Virginia suburbs. We will lose America.

There you go. A former Bush speechwriter's p.o.v. Your turn.