It's The Economy, Stupid??

Here's blogger Matthew Yglesias looking at the economy-related reasons for the GOP's recent bad fortunes, while reviewing a review (how meta!) of Paul Krugman's book-

"[W]hat makes America weird isn't that we have a conservative political party (they have 'em everywhere) or that the conservative political party succeeds at winning elections (happens in England, Canada, France, Italy, etc. all the time) but that the conservative political party is so unreconciled to the modern welfare state. That's what's weird. It isn't true of major political parties outside the United States, and for a while it wasn't true of the United States either.

In other words, we could have a politics where the parties disagreed about a lot of stuff -- abortion, gay rights, tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth, foreign policy, crime control, paternalistic public health measures, etc. -- while operating from within a broad consensus about the need for a robust public sector commitment to universal social insurance programs and basic public services...

...[T]he initial analysis [about modern GOP electoral strategy] that this wouldn't be adequate over the long-run was, of course, correct -- the white Christian share of the electorate is shrinking -- and the post-9/11 boom in nationalist sentiment wasn't bound to last forever. And it turns out that traditionalism alone isn't good enough to make non-whites want to vote Republican. To succeed over the long run, they'll probably need to moderate their economic agenda."

^What he said.

Not getting into specific policy disagreements and limitations, it seems the core difference recently has been (on the war, on climate change, etc) who accepts basic reality. On economic issues, Republicans say 'Everything is great, the system works fine. Just keeping working hard and you'll get there.' Democrats say 'We understand your concerns, and we are proposing some solutions.' Given a simple choice between those two attitudes, it's understandable why so many would gravitate toward the latter.

I've just started reading the book. Focused on the domestic side of things, but very good.