Moving to the center on social issues won't help the GOP. It'll just send their white working class voters into the hands of the Democrats, who actually would do a better job representing them anyway, at least on pocketbook issues. If the Republicans want to make themselves electable and make inroads with minorities, they don't need to move to the left on social issues. Rather, they need to stop being the elected patrons of plutocratic privilege.
Of course that will never happen. The Republicans have been in plutocracy's grip since 1876, and every time they nominate a reformer (T.R., Ike) they ultimately get outmaneuvered by the bone-headed business elites that want to drag the country back into the Gilded Age. If by some miracle the GOP could move to the center on economics, or even the center-left, they'd have a good shot at rebuilding themselves as a mass party, conservative social positions or not.
Correct, and this, coupled with the possibility that the Democratic party could someday move left due to the browns makes me anticipate some form of (further) anti-democratic alteration of the State - as our own pbrower has often predicted.