A leading Republican moderate - George Romney - was concerned about that Barry Goldwater represented to the party and warned:
. . . against European-style polarization. “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation,” Romney wrote. Worse, he added, political parties with fixed ideological programs “lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”
The authors contends that this is where we are today, and further suggest that the lack of moderates within the party makes it impossible for Republicans to rule effectively:
After Bush’s 2004 reelection, Republicans held majorities in the House and the Senate for the fifth straight election, but, Kabaservice observes, “conservatives proved unable to achieve their goals, largely because they lacked the ideas the moderates had once provided and the skill at reaching compromise with the opposition at which moderates had excelled.” The irony of the decline of the moderates is that it made the achievement of conservative goals all but impossible.
Indeed, as conservative rhetoric has
grown increasingly hostile to government since the mid-1960s, the size
of government has continued to expand, even when conservatives have been
in power. Bush himself, having promised to restrain the growth of the government, presided over an increase in federal spending as a share of GDP from 18.2 percent in 2000 to 20.7 percent in 2008, reversing the trend under his Democratic predecessor. And between 1950 and 2009, state and local spending increased as a share of GDP from 7.7 percent to 15.5 percent. Even in states where conservatives have dominated, such as Nevada and Texas, spending has increased at an alarming rate as conservatives have aped their liberal foils, responding to a growing appetite
for public services by increasing spending rather than by improving the
productivity and efficiency of existing institutions. And at the
federal level, conservatives have generally acquiesced to increased
spending while refusing to levy taxes high enough to pay for it. In
effect, this has meant delivering big government while only charging for small government -- a politically attractive proposition that has proved fiscally ruinous.
