Is it the singer or the song?

Liberals are of course suggesting that what lost the election for the GOP was conservatism, so for the Republicans to have any hope for the future they will have to move to the left.

The conservatives of different stripes will have different diagnoses.

Wall Street will urge a party more welcoming to non-whites in general and Hispanics in particular, urging official sponsorship of a more friendly immigration policy, though that would betray the conservative populists.

Libertarians will urge abandonment of Christian clericalism and social conservatism in flat defiance of the entire Christian right.

Paleocons will urge backing away from globo-interventionism to the inextinguishable ire of the neocons, the Islamophobes, and Zionists of all types and religions.

A cross-section of the more educated will urge dropping rejection of actual science and acceptance of both evolution and global warming, to the outrage of Young Earth Creationists and plutocrats with huge amounts of money tied up in fossil fuel reserves.

None of it will fly.

The Republican Party and conservative movement we have will continue to be the Republican Party and conservative movement we have, for some time into the future.

In the end, they’ll wager on it being the singer and not the song.

It was all Romney's fault.

They have no choice.

Oh.

No one but outsiders will urge that the Republican Party make its peace with the economic side of 20th Century progressivism.

Opposition to that work of 20th Century liberalism is the one big thing that no faction of the conservatives can suggest abandoning since that, and that alone, defines their core identity as conservatives and has done so since the early days of Bozell, Buckley, and Goldwater.

Not only liberalism's Big Government creations but very definitely also its progressive tax schedules.

And that is how you know, by the way, what a Republican moderate is.

He or she is a Republican who is soft on Big Government, regulatory, and welfare state issues, not so terribly opposed to higher tax rates on the rich, and more concerned to limit future progressive accomplishments than to undo the past.

No doubt a little additional softness on immigration, race, war, and the culture wars is to be expected, too.

But the central thing, the defining thing, is - pardon the vulgarity - "the economy, stupid."

Kind words for Obamacare are a hint, for example.

Don't hold you breath.