KEVIN STAY writes:

I am uncertain how badly the various election results from yesterday will further erode an already rapidly vanishing traditionalist mindset. But no one should have any doubt this latest blow to conservatism was dealt at the hand of one Juan McStain (aka John McCain) when he reached down to pluck Sarah Palin from relative obscurity and thrust her upon us. Now, as then, no “conservative” with ratings to safeguard will dare say, “Boo.” After yesterday Carly Fiorina is perhaps the best new poster child of this driven “conservative” woman we are all expected to embrace and march forward with to a bright new Republican future. 

Thanks, but no thanks. One of the two company founders (I do not recall which) publicly voiced his serious misgivings when Fiorina was named CEO at HP. Among those considered for the position the only qualification she had over the others turned out to be the only one that mattered: She was a woman. After driving the company backwards for years despite being a darling of the press, shareholders and employees finally had enough and she was shown the golden parachute door. Sorry, but “Carly” is no woman in any sense of the term I recognize or accept and she is likewise no traditional conservative. The exact same can be said of pretty much all the darling women victors from yesterday’s various run-off and run-up contests. Sigh… we certainly appear to be doomed.

                             — Comments —

Jenny writes:

My first thought this morning when my husband turned on the news was, “Where have all the cowboys gone?” I was tempted to despair to my husband but figured I’d just keep quiet, serve my husband his homemade breakfast, and let him start a conversation if he wished. I wondered how he must feel listening to the hosts of Fox’s morning show fawn over these women. I wanted to ask but didn’t. I just went about being his wife and thinking about how I could help him today. As he left for work this morning, all I could think as I waved goodbye was, “There goes my cowboy…”

Brendan writes:

The interesting thing about the Fiorina/Whitman pair of wins is that neither of these people is really “conservative” as most conservatives would use the term. Both are more of a “lite liberal” type — what we used to call “Rockefeller Republicans” or “liberal” Republicans — essentially rather wealthy people who prefer policies that are more or less “pro-business”, but which on social issues are very liberal. This has been a dying species, because, frankly, there aren’t *that* many people who fit that category any longer. I doubt someone like Fiorina can win the general election in a state like California, despite her sex and her socially liberal views. But the return of the Rockefeller Republican is an interesting phenomenon.

It strikes me that the Republican party as a whole is currently undergoing a deep identity crisis. There are so many strands tugging at it right now. You have the populist strand (Tea Party, Palin, Rand Paul), you have the newly emergent liberal wing (Fiorina and Whitman), you have the old guard which is increasingly under attack. There really isn’t a “center” right now in the Republican party, so I expect we’ll see more of this splintering for a time until either one of the groups becomes dominant or a few of them enter into a new coalition akin to the old one among social conservatives, small government conservatives and foreign policy hawks.

One trend that seems durable is the entry of feminism full-scale into GOP politics. The interesting factor there is that being feminist places an absolute “cap” on how conservative you can be — precisely because the very idea of feminism itself is anti-conservative. So someone like Palin can call herself a feminist conservative (and call for a new conservative feminism, as she has done), but in reality what this does is “caps” the ability of conservatism to be anti-feminist — instead it co-opts conservatism to the feminist idea, and “puts that fight behind us” — meaning that conservatives would be forced to accept the “new normal” of our feminist environment as being permanent, more or less. Of course, de facto this has already largely happened. Yet, there is some significance to it being done openly. One has to think that it’s one more step along the road for the Republicans to be moving away from being conservative, and openly toward a position that accepts the post-1970s world as the “new normal”, accepted by both liberals and conservatives alike. When that openly happens, it will be interesting to see where the conservative vote goes.

Laura writes:

That is well said.

The nomination of Sarah Palin was a dramatic turning point. She wasn’t a Jeane Kirkpatrick or a Margaret Thatcher, a woman with masculine style who did not trumpet female empowerment. Palin has boldly insisted you can be feminine and powerful. There is no contradiction between these in her mind and she has moved feminism right into the heart of the conservative party. Only an explicit renunciation of what she has stood for will allow a turning back.

By the way, the power of an elected president is entirely different from the power of a queen. The latter is not required to assert herself  in a masculine way to acquire the throne. That’s why a female president, except in the case of the rare woman who is highly masculine, is a feminist invention while a queen’s authority is consistent with a social fabric that supports and endorses femininity.

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