I called it the Nixon Thesis of Conflict for a reason.
The Republican governing assumptions of the last 40 years, which dominated Americans' thoughts throughout that time, held that Democrats were illegitimate. They were "soft on communism, or "soft on hippies," they were "tax and spend" or they were "Defeatocrats."
As the era ground on Republicans even refused to call the Democratic Party by its right name. They called it the Democrat Party, and they did this deliberately. They did it because they did not respect the legitimacy of anyone calling themselves a Democrat.
So why is anyone surprised that, in the wake of the President's election, Republicans have kept to the same line? In the face of the Obama Thesis of Consensus most Republicans, from the rank-and-file up to party leaders, have not moved an inch in the Democratic Party's direction.
To Republicans, from the hoariest milblogger to the highest-ranking candidate, compromise is akin to surrender. To them politics is war, and war is all hell, and if you didn't know that what are you doing in it?
Despite this, the President's attempts to find compromise are significant and important.
They are important in terms of setting the course of the future. He will find no one to negotiate with in the present Republican Party. That party must change, and change in many painful ways, before it can rejoin the process of governance.
But it will. It will just take time.
In some ways the process is like that of Germany's absorption of the formerly Communist East Germany. East Germans, quickly nicknamed "Ostis," had lived for 40 years under a set of assumptions which, while false, were at least comforting and certain. Voters as well as leaders trained in that system found it impossible to reconcile the past with the present, and almost all simply refused.
There were some exceptions. One such as a woman named Angela Merkel. She chose to make her new home in Germany's conservative party, the Christian Democratic Party. She rose through its ranks, and is now the nation's Prime Minister.
But she is unusual. There is no large cohort of Ostiis behind her, who accept and understand the new order. Just as America has few men like Barack Obama, and no Republicans yet willing to compromise the prejudices they call their principles.
Leadership is the exception. Acceptance of change is the exception. The rule is rejection. It always has been, and probably always will be.
Much the same thing happened with southern Democrats after what I like to call the Recent Unpleasantness. Despite Lincoln's attempts at reconciliation, and despite the Hayes withdrawal of 1877, there was little acommodation to the Union in the South. Until 1881, when a young journalist named Henry W. Grady gave what he called his "New South Speech," which can roughly be paraphrased as "we still hate nigras but we're willing to do bidness."
That's what it will take for the Republican Party to come back. Defeat, and time. They will remain the minority, they will hope the President fails, they will remain in their Confederate redoubts, and it will require a new generation of leaders, as well as a new generation of followers, before Republicans can become relevant again.
