This week in Serious Republicanism

All right, let's unpack this. In his opinion-having today, opinion-haver David Brooks says that trying to change the current Republican Party is a lost cause. What's the answer? To build a new "wing" of the party, of course. One with hookers, and blackjack.

It's probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It's smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It's smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton.

The second G.O.P. wouldn't be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis.

Olson argued that nations decline because their aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Murray argues that America is coming apart, dividing into two nations ' one with high education levels, stable families and good opportunities and the other with low education levels, unstable families and bad opportunities.

All right, forget the hookers and the blackjack. Instead, it'll be a new party that abandons its pathological aversion to government, and instead fashions itself after the wisdom of people David Brooks likes, people who may or may not have written books about how certain people are just plain smarter than others. Republicans can ditch their aversion to Medicare, Social Security, minorities, "urban" folks and so on, and instead advocate for all the exact same things, but from a slightly less discredited starting point (and really, if you're going to abandon your movement's race-skeptical, science-butchering recent past, you really can't do better than putting up Charles Murray as your new poster child. I mean really. Golf clap, on that one).

(Keep reading below the fold.)