Scrolling through some of my news feeds this morning I came across an article from the Atlantic Wire chronicling the billionaire Koch brothers trying to go through and clean house in an effort to figure out why all their money and all their lobbying failed to secure the 2012 elections for the Republican Party. While this sort of soul searching has been occurring across the board in many Tea Party, Republican and neoconservative groups for the last few months, it's been particularly noteworthy with the richest donors, who have been relying one one tactic to consistently garner results: pumping the millions upon millions of the dollars they are subsidized by Bush era tax cuts and loopholes with and using it to ensure they continue their little tax holidays and shelters that don't apply to the middle class folks who on average pay a larger percentage of income.
While the Koch brothers and Karl Rove try and play damage control, fire entire staffs, and conduct costly audits to figure out why they threw all of that money away, it astonishes me that they fail to see that they have all the answers right at their fingertips if they would just open their eyes to the world that exists outside of their little bubble of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, fundraising dinners with rich old folks and schmoozing inside the Washington beltway.
Within this sheltered neoconservative echo-chamber they have failed to take notice of the drastic changes underway in the United States. The have failed to adapt to their environment, and for a species of political activist born out of the 1980s and 1990s era mindset of pandering almost exclusively to southern white evangelical Christian men or rich Wall Street types and CEOs, they have become obsolete as the environment has changed around them. What 2012 may have told them, had they been paying attention, is that they need to evolve or face extinction.
Well, what could they possibly have failed to notice? It's quite simple really:
1) The constant pandering to extremist Christian groups such as those headed by people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ralph Reed has alienated many moderate and liberal Christians. It has also alienated people of minority faiths and people of no faith , who now are the fastest rising group in the United States and who are no longer content to sit on the sidelines while Christian bigots want to take away reproductive rights, promote discrimination of LGBT people and dumb down America's children by turning our public school systems into cesspools of anti-science garbage and anti-historical fact revisionism.
This tactic of appealing to an increasingly vitriolic and extremist branch of theocratic-leaning Christian activists may have been a great tactic during the 1980s and 1990s, but as each successive generation of voters that comes up becomes more secular, more tolerant of equal rights for LGBT people and less interested in the "us versus them" mentality of the Christian right it's become a tactic doomed to failure on the national level. When your fervor to protect fetuses leads to many political candidates making absurd statements about rape that cost them the race in even some pretty safe-bet districts, you might want to reconsider how much you have sipped of the religious right Kool Aid.
2) People are tired of being lied to. Fox News has seen it's ratings drop consistently as of late, as even many diehard conservatives are seeing the channel's propaganda efforts and attempts at spin as bullshit of the highest caliber. It's been widely known that the radio ratings for neoconservative radio shows has been overinflated. For all the efforts to fool the public, these media sources have seen the internet's rise to proninence hurt their credibility as people now carry always-connected devices in their pockets which they can do a fact-checking search in mere minutes.
3) The hypocrisy of the modern neoconservative movement has alienated many. For a party that talks of fiscal responsibility, they seem to spend as much as the Democrats when they do hold power. They also favor increasing the size of government when it comes to promoting the regulation of morality and in trying to police the world with an over-extended military budget and interventionist foreign policy which is unsustainable financially and which is causing our veterans of overseas policing campaigns to come back riddled with PTSD and committing suicides at a rate equal to the death tolls of the Iraq occupation and conflict.
Don't get me wrong, as someone of Korean-American ethnicity, whose grandparents survived the Korean War in the 1950s, I recognize that without the aid of foreign military power that I would not exist. My grandparents would possibly have been killed by the DPRK and most assuredly they would have never gotten the chance to immigrate to America under the oppressive rule of the totalitarian North Korean government. I recognize that American intervention staved off the slaughter and brutality the North Koreans were inflicting on people in the southern Korean peninsula region, and am thankful that international aid has helped keep South Korea as a peaceful free society. But the United States is now over-extending itself to support an ever increasing war machine, one that equals the size of most of the rest of the UN combined. We spent trillions on a derail in Iraq which threw us off mission in our quest to target Al-Qaeda, and our insistence on continuing military spending programs that even the Pentagon is saying they have no use for should be something of concern for fiscal conservatives.
Additionally as the libertarian wing of the conservative moment grows to prominence, they are increasingly seeing the Republican party and their donors like the Kochs and Rove as a good old boys club who like to abuse the grassroots while giving out government subsidies to powerful lobby interests. Perhaps the dumbest thing the Republican party did for their image amongst the younger demographics was their efforts to shut Ron Paul out of the RNC last fall and force the narrative of solidarity behind Mitt Romney's campaign. For a growing libertarian group who is tired of the battles over social rights issues and wants to focus more on fiscal issues and government size, this action led by the elites who run the GOP was basically a statement of "fuck you" to the future of the conservative movement.
When it's all said and done, the answers that people like the Koch brothers are searching for are in plain sight. Their problem is they are so set in their ways, and so used to doubling down on the same old tactics of the past that they have failed to notice that they are leading their party to extinction. Along the way their sort of activism and support for hypocrites and extremists has helped hurt the country financially and hurt it's image and standing in the global marketplace. The time has come for these people to adapt to the changing climate of American society or die out as a movement and become a relic of history.
