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.
I'd say that's more likely than most people assume. The wealthy aren't just going to allow the Democrats to waltz in and start redistributing their piles of cash. We're already seeing the champions of cheap labor mobilize to deny the poor the vote again in the South and the periphery regions they control by implementing Voter ID and trying to change the rules that govern the electoral college to make it even less representative than it already is.
That, and they already own the courts. That much is obvious. The United States Constitution is the greatest ally the plutocrats have, as it breaks up and divides power without democratizing it. And they own the media and the universities, contrary to conservative ballyhooing about the "left" owning the media and the academy.
There are a lot of ways that the plutocrats can conspire to limit the impending Democratic majority. They've already gerrymandered the House to be their's for at least until 2020. They're deliberately sabotaging the economy in hopes of taking the Senate in 2014. Should they gain control of the White House in 2016, they'll be ripe to prevent that Democratic majority from ever emerging by passing such awful things like a national right-to-work bill, national voter ID, means-testing everything, and expanding the influence of globalization in the American economy.
tl;dr - Don't get cocky, Democrats. Even with the public scared sh**tless at the moment by the GOP doesn't mean that the GOP will become completely unelectable and unable to win, even while remaining on the far-right. They'll just do as they always have - change the rules to continue the domination of American society by a plutocratic elite.
