With President Obama's victory over Mitt Romney, many pundits are already engaging in clichéd talk of "soul-searching" for the GOP. What they mean by this phrase differs depending on who says it: Pundits on the left as well as moderate, reform-oriented Republicans are claiming the party needs to move back to a pragmatist set of policies; tea partiers and others on the right, talk radio, and Fox News are claiming that Mitt Romney, like John McCain before him, was simply too moderate to win, and that only a true, principled conservative can lead the charge to victory.
But what Republicans really need to learn from Romney's defeat is not that their candidate was too weak or too moderate. They need to learn that their candidate was forced to adopt far more extreme policies than he previously held due to a primary process that enslaves pragmatism and electability to a rigid ideology. And at the heart of this rigid ideology is a conservative movement that's become the creature of the right-wing media.
Fox News is often described as little more than a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the reverse is the case, with the Republican Party serving as unwitting puppets of the self-serving right-wing controversy machine. Fox News and the talk radio shock jocks across the country win whether or not conservatives are in power; these purveyors of political entertainment thrive under a Democratic president, perhaps even more so than under their preferred candidates. There's big money in controversy, and controversy is what the Glenn Becks of the world do best.
At some point, Republicans will need to wake up to the current state of affairs and realize they're being held hostage to a powerful, self-sustaining entertainment industry and that the interests of the party and the interests of Fox News are not one and the same.
Indeed, the spinoffs of this conservative movement/media behemoth can be seen far and wide as bloggers like Dean Chambers take up the mantle of "true conservatism" and begin telling Republicans only what they want to hear—even if that means twisting the polling data beyond anything remotely recognizable as the truth.
[Read more in the MoJo blog]
