Collapse of a Thesis

What marks the difference between a true Crisis election and any other kind is how it is always followed by the collapse of the formerly dominant political thesis.

1. What replaced John Quincy Adams after 1828 was a brand new party — the Whigs — which had not existed when he was in office.
2. What replaced Jacksonian Democracy after 1860 was war. For a generation Democrats were seen by most Republicans as either traitors or fellow-travelers. It's a testament to the depths of Republican corruption that Grover Cleveland ever saw the White House except from a streetcar.
3. What replaced Cleveland-ism after 1896? Nothing. The Democratic Party went into another direction entirely. It became Populist. The word for people like Cleveland by the 20th century was Republicans.
4. What followed Hoover in 1932? Alf Landon (above). As Maine goes so goes Vermont. By 1940 all the Republicans had was a New York lawyer named Wendell Wilkie, who promptly became a Roosevelt ally after being hammered. Then we had Thomas E. Dewey, and a new strain of Republicanism which aimed only to be an anti-thesis to the prevailing attitude. Eisenhower broke through, 20 years after the New Deal, but Democrats would have gladly nominated him as well. He won because of who he was, not what he believed.
5. What followed Johnson in 1968? McGovern. Democrats became a collection of tribes, hyphenated Democrats, for a generation. Carter won only because Ford pardoned Nixon, and Clinton won a three-way race. That's 40 years of failure before the Nixon Thesis collapsed of its own weight and Barack Obama began picking up the pieces.

This is our history. What is happening to the Republican Party today is a natural process. They are not, as Frank Rich writes, acting like Hoover. They're acting like Bush. It's like when kids start ignoring their parents, or you try to argue with a foreigner. Maybe if I just talk louder and more slowly.

It's not an election result they're grieving over. It's an entire worldview which is suddenly, and irrevocably, firmly in the rear-view mirror. So denial will be the first response. It has to be. It always has been before, whichever party had its assumptions blown away by events.

This should be a Clue to everyone in the media. Read some history, see the pattern. Stop pretending that Bush-ism is coming back somehow, or that it can be dressed up in new colors. 

Before Republicans can come back, before they will deserve to come back, they must come up with a completely different approach. They have to accept the legitimacy of the Obama Thesis of Consensus and deliver a coherent response, based on the weaknesses of that Thesis.

Nixon is now, finally, not only truly dead. He's really, most sincerely dead. Until they accept this reality, all Republicans will be Munchkins and Democrats will have a free hand.