A pretty good diagnosis from Pat Buchanan

Who Killed the New Majority?

But he hides or misses the key point.

As I commented at his post,

The conservatives have killed the New Majority, if by that you mean the folks who voted that year in that gigantic landslide for Nixon.

I was among them, myself.

Nixon got my vote in 1972 over McGovern because the latter was an incompetent tool of the unnecessarily radical left of the Democratic Party of that time, while Nixon was no conservative at all and was never thought by anyone to be incompetent - until it all went to hell with the Watergate break-in.

Since them, Democrats have been more competent and less lefty while the GOP has been totally taken over by the kinds of right-wing extremists who hated Nixon when he was in office and have lately been volubly denouncing him at conservative outlets.

This whole race thing is baloney, both when liberals pretend it's the core issue between the parties and when conservatives do, each for reasons of ideological self-interest.

The key to it all is that the GOP has been taken over by fiscal conservatives IKE and Nixon and all the moderate and liberal Republicans of their time would have thought completely bonkers.

When the conservatives give up their stranglehold on the party it will do a heck of a lot better in elections, no matter what the skin color of the voters.

Hence the liberals never point to this as the key problem for today's GOP.

The last thing they want is a more effective GOP opposition.

And you certainly didn't expect the conservatives to confess they are the GOP's problem, did you?

If the Republican Party offered candidates who accepted American social democracy and Big Government but differed from their Democratic opponents in other ways that perhaps simply varied not so much by party as by individual they would do a lot better, over time.