My advice for the GOP

I'm pretty sure the GOP doesn’t actually want my advice about its failures on the 6th, you know me being a homo and all, but hey I'm a generous guy. I read a really great article that inspired this post (some of which is paraphrased from said article) and I think it really captures my feelings as to what I think is wrong with the GOP and why they lost so badly this election cycle.

1. Recognize your brand isn't selling. You can’t call yourself  the party of fiscal responsibility at this point; your record for the last thirty years makes this laughable. Bush shot your international relations standing in the foot. All you have left is social issues, and — surprise! — on social issues, most people who are not you think you’re intolerant at best and racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted at worst.

Seriously, guys: What does the GOP actually want to be the party of? At this point, and for the last few years, it’s been “The Party of Not Obama.” Running the country seems to have slipped your minds.

2. Deal with your base. Your presidential nominee slate was downright terrifying this year. I know your base was excited about them, but from the outside we were all, like, “seriously, WTF?” The fact that an unrepentant bigot like Rick Santorum managed to pace Mitt Romney for the nomination as far into the process as he did should have sent up enough red flags to rival Beijing on May Day. Then it makes the (relative) moderates who eventually win the nominations spend too much time tending to its issues and selecting awful vice presidential candidates. Sarah Palin terrified the non-base voters she was supposed to attract. That Paul Ryan counts as an “intellectual” in GOP circles speaks to the almost unfathomable poverty of your brain trust at the moment. That these two were brought on to bolster their respective presidential candidates with the party’s base should throw up all sorts of warning signs.

Your base is fine for now with mid-terms, when you’re dealing with house races, and districts that have been gerrymandered to allow for genuinely horrible politicians to be elected (yes, on both sides, but we’re talking about you for now). For presidential elections, when you have to deal with a national electorate? They’re a bad foundation. They’re going to keep making you fail. If you don’t want to believe it, two words for you: Akin, Mourdock. If you think they only lost their races, think again.

3. Accept that the US is browner and more tolerant than you are, and that you need to become more of both. By “tolerant” I mean being okay with gays marrying and women deciding what to do with their own wombs and believing science doesn’t want to shiv Jesus in the night when no one is looking. By “browner,” I mean, well, browner. There are lots of ethnic minorities out there. With more every day. And very few of them want to have anything to do with you. This means that lots of younger white people don’t want to have anything to do with you either, because — again, surprise! — many of the people who they love and grew up with in this browner and more tolerant nation are the folks you spend a lot of time railing against, in code or just straight up. And that’s bullshit.

I'm white and gay. And in my family and close circle of friends I have Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, gay, bisexual and trans people, religious, agnostic and atheist, able-bodied and disabled. You lose me when you classify me or any of them as the other. They’re not the other; they’re us, the national electorate. When you classify me or other minorities as other you aren't just losing my vote. You are losing the votes of everyone in my family and friends and probably more beyond that.

4. Stop letting your media run you. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh don’t actually care about the GOP. They are in the business of terrifying aging white people for money. To the extent that your political agenda conforms to this goal, they’re on your side. But when you step outside of their “terrify aging white people for money” agenda, they’re going to stomp on you. How many GOP politicians have had to grovel at Limbaugh’s feet because they said something he didn’t approve of? Stop it. Tell him to fuck off every once in a while. It’ll be good for you.

And while you’re at it, tell Grover Norquist to fuck off, too. The fact this dude keeps the lot of you from facing economic reality with that damned pledge of his is an embarrassment.

Do I expect the GOP to consider this advice? Not really, no. What I expect them to do is the same thing they’ve been doing for the last twenty years, which is to decide that the problem with the GOP is that it’s not socially conservative or fiscally irresponsible enough, cull anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the new tighter and angrier level of orthodoxy and go from there. If that’s the direction you go, I wish you joy in it, and look forward to years and years of Democratic presidents.