"calcified In Its Own Way"

Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, this seems to me very apt.

Liberalism was trapped in the late 1970s and 1980s not by a single ideologically rigid formula, but by a rigid commitment to a thousand different, often unrelated interest group platforms. These platforms were usually expressed in outraged moralistic terms drawn from a common liberal vocabulary even though they often had nothing to do with each other. The Democrats were pinned down like Gulliver by a million tiny commitments: the Teamsters, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, teachers, Jews, feminists, Amtrak, the Sierra Club, opponents of intervention in Nicaragua, the nuclear freeze movement, and on and on — all had their individual planks in the party platform, and all required a ritualistic demonstration of obeisance from every candidate. Democratic political speeches became long, tedious laundry lists of incoherent moralistic vows to deliver comically specific programs to micro-splinters of constituencies. I remember visiting colleges in 1986 and watching a Brown campus improv group, not very funny, do a sketch in which a young woman activist demanded that everyone join her campaign to help get penguins out of Nicaraguan grain elevators, and this seemed a fair lampoon of the tenor of the times on the Left. The Democrats and the Left suffered from a big-tent sort of calcification; they were immobilized by diversity.

In contrast, conservatives and the GOP are calcified in their narrowness. The only things left in their program are cutting taxes and…actually I think that’s it, with a bit of defending torture and fighting gay marriage thrown in. They’re losing everyone but white males, and they’re losing everywhere but the South. They’re trapped because anything they do to reach out threatens to lose them more of the one constituency they’re still winning.