The Republicans Get Rid of Their Party

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana once said “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” According to that definition, one may characterize the tea party Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives as fanatics. They drove the country to the brink of bankruptcy but completely failed to accomplish their mission with their two-week shutdown of the government. Obamacare, the new health insurance program, is still in effect. Despite that, they seem to want to double down on their bet.

Texas Congressman Joe Barton said on Wednesday evening that withholding funds for Obamacare was the right strategy, saying after the Senate vote to continue funding the government through Jan. 15 and temporarily raising the debt ceiling through Feb. 7 that the game was only at halftime. His compatriot Ted Cruz chose to emulate a televangelist Bible thumper, saying he was proud of the people who rebelled and expressing hope that the Senate would eventually heed the wishes of the American people.

The Tea Party Is out of Favor

But, it appears doubtful that the people want to hear the Republican message. The shutdown farce and the debt limit issue has made the Republican Party more unpopular than ever. According to a Gallup poll, only 28 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the party of Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush. With a 43 percent approval rating, Democrats remain virtually unchanged.

Likewise, the tea party is more unpopular than ever before. The Pew Research Center says only 30 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the tea party, compared to 49 percent who hold an unfavorable view. What began about five years ago as a grass roots movement against Washington elites is, day by day, beginning to look like a marginal phenomenon in U.S. society.

For Republicans, this is an existential problem. In the hope of regaining the White House and the Senate, America’s conservatives have put together a movement whose doctrinaire rigidity has not only failed to attract independent voters, but has frightened off many of its own party members as well.

The Elite Anti-Elitists

No one embodies this Republican dilemma more clearly than Ted Cruz. The 42-year-old Canadian-born son of Cuban exiles, he is the new tea party shining star. Behind his unctuous and deliberately simple anti-Washington tirades lurks a highly intelligent demagogue. One is hardly aware that the senator studied at elite universities like Princeton and Harvard and is married to a Goldman Sachs investment bank executive. Professor Alan Dershowitz recently told CNN that Cruz was among Harvard Law School’s top students, but later said of his calls to shut down the government, “I think you can make a very strong argument that what Ted Cruz is doing is deeply unconstitutional.”

Cruz is roundly disliked inside his own party. Since the budget fight escalated in July, Cruz’s popularity with other tea partiers may have shot up from 47 to 74 percent, but 31 percent of establishment Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of him, twice as many as just three months ago.

The Party of Old White Men

Unlike back in July, more people now hold a more negative opinion of the tea party than a favorable one. That is true for both groups of the population from which the tea party gets most of its support: Those over 65 years of age and males who never completed their formal education. As more and more Americans are migrating toward urban areas and the population grows more ethnically mixed, the Republican Party is increasingly becoming the party of old, white rural residents.

They will consequently be able to continue electing governors in the Southern states, and the House of Representatives may remain in Republican hands after the 2014 mid-term elections. The electoral districts in two dozen or so states are drawn such that incumbents nearly always win. About 80 percent of House Republicans represent constituencies that voted for 2012 Republican loser Mitt Romney by a 55 percent margin.

A party so narrowly aligned has little chance to recapture the White House, nor the Senate, where candidates have to compete in statewide elections and must appeal to a more diverse electorate.