Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan have been posting over at the Atlantic about their hopes for a new and improved Republican Party after this election. I have to concur with this, even if it makes the Republican Party more competitive.

I'm sick of our political discourse being centered around bullshit issues--who loves terrorists, and who is a Real American? I don't want to have to constantly defend the right of queer people and women to live their lives free of pointless, bigoted government meddling in their life decisions. I'm tired of a Republican Party which believes it's own spin, and lives in a world where Saddam planned 9-11 and Obama was secretly born in Indonesia or Kenya. I'm tired of dealing with a Republican Party which sees rigorous study and consideration of policy as the 8th deadly sin.

It would be a lot harder to argue against someone making an honest defense of a flat tax than this bizarre Red Scare nonsense. It would be more difficult to defend a candidate against actual arguments than conspiracy theories. But we'd get better policies out of it.

I'm not, however, nearly as optimistic as Coates and Sullivan are about this. This Real America business is failing not because America has changed, but because of the places they are talking about. If the Republicans had stuck to bashing New York and San Francisco and Washington D.C., no one would have noticed. The problem is that they started applying this same language to the newly expanded map. Richmond, Virginia is a hotbed of commie-liberal elitists? Really? No one is buying that.

After the election, assuming McCain loses, the Republican base is not going to enter the period of self-reflection and questioning needed to move towards sanity. They have been taught over the past 8 years that those self-doubt and intellectual consideration are unmanly sins of the left. They are going to go into conspiracy land--it's going to be the Clinton years all over again, but now with the full force of racism and xenophobia behind the madness. We will hear no end of the right's parallel universe Obama, complete with forged birth certificates and secret, anti-American views that he's waiting to deploy until... who knows.