Um post iluminador no Shrill Blog do Brad DeLong:

“Jim Henley: Why the Republican Party Must Be Destroyed

Jim Henley provides the best argument I have seen on why the Republican Party must, for the good of the nation and the world, be destroyed immediately:

The Art of the Possible » Blog Archive » A (Public) Choice, Not an Echo: No matter who wins the election, so-called neoconservatives will probably remain the prime movers of Republican foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

1. They are the energized constituency within the Party. They care more about foreign policy than any other component except a slice of the paleos.
2. Neoconservatives have prominent media platforms that are useful to the GOP as a whole.
3. Neoconservatism is useful to important elements of the GOP coalition. It implies spiraling increases to military spending. It is a coherent nationalism for the nationalist party to embrace. It provides a ready-made critique of the domestic political opposition (”appeasers!”).
4. The “stab-in-the-back” narrative is a perfect example of the kind of magical thinking that explains away failure. The rituals didn’t fail us, we failed the rituals! This has worked for thousands of years. As sure as shooting, bad things will happen around the globe during an Obama administration. An Obama administration may even - gasp! - err in response to a crisis. The beauty of neoconservative ideology is that there is always some war that could, theoretically, have been launched at some point that didn’t get fought, and it will always be possible to claim that “if only” America had had the “will and imagination” to kill just those extra few foreigners, everything would have turned out different and better.
5. Neoconservatives play well with others. Neoconservatives have been willing to accede to or even advocate the fiscal goals of the rent-seeking element of the GOP and the social goals of the evangelicals.
6. It’s important to remember that first-generation neoconservatism was conservatism: the neocons shared the extant right-wing concerns about crime; the relationship of dependency to the welfare state; “bending over backwards” to ameliorate racism; changing family patterns. For every PJ O’Rourke-style Republican Party Reptile who merely wanted to cut taxes and “Give War a Chance,” there was a Norman Podhoretz or Daniel Patrick Moynihan concerned that “the blacks” were literally on their way to becoming a separate species.
7. Evangelicals and paleocons are not an identity. The nationalist self-satisfaction of neoconservatism - American hegemony is morally good - fits mainstream evangelicalism’s view of (Judeo-)Christian America as anointed by God. (And, of course, at war with Islam.)
8. Paleoconservatism does not play well with others. Its foreign policy does not lead to high defense budgets. Its immigration policy does not maximize cheap labor. Its preference for localism can foster hostility to agribusiness and large retailers. It will continue to be at a disadvantage in intra-party disputes on practically any topic, including foreign affairs, war and internal security prerogatives.

Simply put, outside of anti-Semitic fantasies, small groups of mostly Jewish intellectuals don’t bamboozle large Gentile institutions - and the Republican Party is nothing if not a large Gentile institution - into betraying their own perceived best interests. So-called neoconservatism became, by mid-decade, simply Republican foreign policy. The base assumptions of the GOP base and elite just are neoconservative. And that happened because the ideology of neoconservatism served Republican-Party interests and accorded with preexisting Republican-Party proclivities.

The question is whether one possible electoral defeat this year changes those interests significantly. My inclination is, no. Every country is going to have a nationalist party. This particular country’s nationalist party is still going to want to justify massive defense budgets, flatter the nation about its righteousness and paint its opponents as “on the other side.” Paleo-ism cuts against too many of those interests. The so-called Realists don’t inspire passion. Too many other rationales for an American nationalist party - from immigration to homophobia - are demographically doomed. So-called Neoconservatism is much more of a unifying factor than a source of division for the GOP and likely to remain so.“