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Salon: The GOP’s Right-Wing Music Critics
Feb. 7, 2013
The Republican Party has a problem: It has one wing that is out of touch with the mainstream American electorate, and another wing that ignores the voters entirely. At least that’s what some of the party’s most prominent leaders have been saying lately.
Speaking recently at a dinner sponsored by The Weekly Standard, columnist Mark Steyn discussed the need to move the GOP away from its current status as the party of angry, white, lower- and middle-class voters and toward a more middle-of-the-road, more diverse, more forward-looking brand of conservatism. One of Steyn’s most trenchant observations was the GOP’s continued fixation on the environment.
“The Republican Party is not a conservative party,” Steyn said. “Conservatives believe that they’re the party of freedom, and they’re the party of individual liberty. The Republican Party, as it exists today, is the party of small government, low taxes, individual responsibility, personal freedom, individual liberty, and a lot of things that are not conservative at all.”
As the nation shifts away from its reliance on fossil fuels, Steyn explained, the party that revels in such energy extraction and usage will be left behind. Instead, the GOP should move closer to the European Union, which embraces the concept of sustainability.
While Steyn’s comments weren’t intended to be taken literally, they’ve been taken to heart by a handful of other conservative-leaning media outlets. In a Jan. 29 column, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus echoed Steyn’s theme, citing the GOP’s lack of enthusiasm about cleaning up the environment as evidence of how out of touch its leadership has become.
“If you’re in the Republican Party, why should you care about environmental issues?” be359ba680
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