Do you recall following the 2004 general elections when the "dark executive" Dick Cheney said: "Elections have consequences." Retrospectively he was warning us that this was part of his sweeping justification that he and his team could do whatever the want. Cheney was promoting something altogether new called the "Unitary President" while also saying he was neither part of the executive or legislative branch where he interpreted the Constitution that he was of some "invisible hand" branch of government. Well the 2006 and 2008 elections have also been quite consequential to the level that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is fully admitting that the GOP has grown too addicted to ideology, places politics before policy, and is bereft of ideas.

This is what happens after elections, political parties, movements and even single issue constituencies access and review what worked and what did not. The RNC Chairman went further than merely admitting that his partisans were too addicted to their message ideology (or better described as their marketing brand) that placed political stance above governing policies that were hollow in ways of addressing its citizenry's real problems, he admitted they were plain out of ideas. Their problem is so deep that they are commencing with a new Think Tank called the "Center for Republican Renewal". Now this is a profound development for it emotionally and intellectually denies that the reality that the former self-described party of ideas actually never possessed a new idea, merely an idealogy that any form of government or regulation that did not enrich their true base was bad and should be defiled and discredited. This reaction by the RNC Chairman, a slick platform to get himself re-elected is no different than what the Detroit Automakers did in remarketing and repackaging the same autos and trucks they made since the 1950's.

The reality few political commentators or activists are willing to admit is that actually America has been ruled by an ever concentrating plutocracy---defined as the rule by the wealthy of course. In these post WW II the modern plutocracy is best described as a corporatocracy where in an objective analysis that the Republican ideology never had anything to do with smaller government or marketplace economics for the record simply doesn't indicate these basic tenants in any way. Their real goals were more about increasing the wealth and power of a very small subset of society which they were quite successful over the last 28 years since the Reagan Revolution was exclaimed to begin.

PJ O'Rourke, one of the true believers in the Republican Ideology or better described as a the GOP Mythology stated recently:

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble.

So in review of the corporatocracy where they battled over the financial class things like estate tax, the changes in capital gains and dividend income taxation, investment and trade regulations et cetera it was these many "think tanks" whose jobs it was to provide intellectual and message "cover" for nothing other than class warfare. The "theoretical" marketing or political rhetoric justifications like "trickle down economics", "Laffer curves" or "wealthy entrepreneurship" all were introduced into the marketplace of ideas as something real when it was nothing but another snake oil salesman call to an wanting and ignorant audience. But mythology created Greek-like heros like Alan Greenspan who also was caught completely off guard with the recent stock market crash or in the 21st century venacular, "market meldown".

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

What Greenspan failed to comprehend was that the addiction to unbridled wealth without actual production had warped the entire class of the corporatocracy that there was no accountability or awareness of actual value that the economy served the rest of us like jobs and real income.

So now as the Republican Party, the standard for the corporatocracy is now exposed for what it really is, the mechanism for the wealthy, social bigots, the old Confederacy that was the home of slavetocracy they called the anti-bellum society. Its political voting base are the investor class, the country club set, the corporate and financial executives, those who are its wanna be's, those who vote against their economic class for emotional or social prejudicial reasons---meaning white, often evangelical christian, uneducated, rural, upper class or military and anti democratic. None of the corporatocracy's nostrums was ever been backed up by actual data, just divisive and propaganda. Now it faces a real political dilemma. Its supposed ideology now clearly shown as failing where actual nationalization of the capital markets, the largest industrial market, and realization that deregulation has created a wild west environment to steal other people's money at automated levels. Even the most blind follower of their ideology has come to realize that something is wrong.

Andrew Sullivan the conservative Brit who openly backed Obama made comprehensive conclusion:

The [Republican] crisis is at two levels - the dreadful incompetence and incoherence of the Bush-Cheney administration, which has poisoned the Republican brand for more than one generation, and the emergence of inherent flaws in several strains of conservative thought.

The banking crisis is so close to us and so unresolved it's hard to see it in context, but I fear that Greenspan is right: it's a huge flaw that cannot be explained away by government. The limits of hard power are, in fact, perfectly in line with conservatism's deeper insights into human affairs, with Bush and Cheney acting more as over-reaching utopians than conservative statesmen. And the social conservatism problem has been a function of Christianism: an inability to shape society as it is because their theological doctrine demands adherence to eternal dogma not development of pragmatic policy.

This leaves the Republicans and the corporatocracy with some real problems where they are in a box or rigid high walls. On one side they have hardened their political social base into the mythology of absolute anti-abortion advocacy and institutional homosexual phobia in the name of "old time evangelical religion" fostering a reconstructionist America society and the incompetent economic nationalistic policies propelling the U.S. into a disasterous third-world, two class economy. Both these pathways are political dead ends which is why Colin Powell made this recent observation:

Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh? Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather that our better instincts?

So now the Republican powers are left with two choices:

1. Admit that their philosophical basis was simply unadulterated bull shit

OR

2. Blame individuals as an attempt to preserve the "philosophy".

This is why you may have heard the political cries that the Republicans lost because they, meaning McCain, Bush Administration, the Republican Congress and many others forgot their Republican self. It can't be the mythology of the Republican Philosophy but the persons who are now its high priests. One of those high priests, David Brooks wrote:

Now it's just a circular firing squad with everybody attacking each other and no coherent belief system, no leaders. You got half the party waiting for Sarah Palin to come rescue them. The other half waiting for Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, to come rescue them. But no set of beliefs, really a decayed conservative infrastructure. It's just a world of pain.

Obviously the discredited pundits are trying for option 2~~~ what else do they have left, except to admit their worldview is criminal. Finally Rob Dreher from the Weekly Standard came to admit the following:

There is a conservative Establishment -- a political establishment, yes, but also a think-tank establishment and an opinion-leader establishment -- that has become ossified in its thinking and, over time, more interested in policing its heretics than in thinking creatively about conservatism and its application to the challenges facing our nation and our culture at this particular time. That establishment is dying.

So the political philosophy that masked the corporatocracy's actual establishment is dying because the results on the ground are dyer even to them. How will they respond to the continued socio-economic trends; middle class wage stagnation even falling back, generational social immobility, the inevitable rising of health care and education costs which will assault Reagan-Rovolution model of low-tax government supported capitalism? How will they try to sell their old mythological socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle class that is challenged by the above stratification that rightfully perceives social and economic conservatism as both intolerant and economically ineffective? And finally how do you transform and ever concentrating white party where it benefited from racially-charged issues into a party that can win in an increasingly demographically multiracial America where within the next generation white Americas will be less than 50% of the entire population?

Watching the McCain campaign, you'd barely even know that these problems exist, let alone that conservatives have any idea what to do about them. Conservative commentator Russ Douthat in response to the above dynamic changes in the electorate said:

Watching the McCain campaign, you'd barely even know that these problems exist, let alone that conservatives have any idea what to do about them.

It will be fascinating as the Obama Team deals with the collapsing corporatocracy where it stoled trillions, placed America in a perpetual war over oil and repressed societies and the untended social responsibilies of a middle and lower class in long term stagnation. And through this period a new world order will have to emerge that also addresses the mortal challenges of Global Warming. In this wake we will see the corporatocracy fail and along with it the name of a political party---Republicans though the class will not die but hopefully be made inconsequential the same way the royal class of Europe was made moot following the disasters of World War I.