When was the Republican Party ever proud? You said every recession in American history has been started by the Republicans and fixed by the Democrats. All Republican ideas are historically failed ones. What has the Republican Party ever done well?
Complain about taxes.
Look, historically the GOP has seen some substantial changes in it's coalitions since it's origins. A mere 10 years after Lincoln was elected the GOP went from being the party of radical abolitionist, know nothings (and no, that's not a knock, there was a Republican faction known by that name, it was an anti-immigrant faction.), and former Whig's. It's primary platform was to end slavery, advance free labor, impose an import/export tariff, promote internal improvements and create a homestead act to settle largely unpopulated lands of the interior.
A mere tens years later the GOP had become the party of Plutocrats, Industrialist and east coast establishment conservatives which has been it's dominant coalition for most of it's history.
There have been times when there have been radical changes within the GOP but it has traditionally swung back to that primary coalition.
Teddy Roosevelt led one of the most significant swings when he led the GOP progressive movement which was result of the abuses and failure of a failed laissez-faire economic policy in which a handful of plutocrats rivaled government for power while the vast majority of the nation lived in poverty and periodic economic catastrophes due to the boom and bust cycles of laissez-faire capitalism (which is why it is a historically failed economic system, just like communism). That era ended when Roosevelt and his protégée (a shirt tail relative of mine) William H. Taft had a titanic struggle for the hearts and minds of the GOP in which TR lost and the GOP swung back to its traditional coalition.
Then the Great Depression occurred which drove a stake through the heart of laissez-faire capitalism. That forced the GOP to swing towards the center and adopt Keynesian Capitalist economic policy which it still largely adheres too to this day (though there are still plenty of misguided advocates of laissez-faire capitalism.). It was GOP President Nixon who famously quipped "We're all Keyensians". Even then though the GOP had swung back to it's traditional coalition from the 1950's to the 1980's when Nixon's "Southern Strategy" began to make real gains and swung the party away from it's traditional center right coalitions.
Now the GOP is currently a coalition of Plutocrats, traditional establishment conservatives of the North east and Great lakes metropolitan regions, radical southern reactionaries, rural/agricultural midwesterners, right wing evengelicals, western libertarians and tea party "anti-government" activist.
This coalition has created significant electoral problems for the GOP.
#1. The social, economic and public policy views of the southern reactionaries, right wing evengelicals and tea party activist have alienated vast numbers of people in our major population centers. The north east, great lakes and west coast that represent 2/3rds on the nations populations.
#2. The angry white guy race baiting policies of those parts of the GOP coalition have alienated racial minorities, immigrants (the legal kind), young voters and single women. This is exacerbated by the significant current increase in our racial minority population which has nearly exploded in recent years. Not by immigration so much as by assimilation. The huge recent increase in minority population is due mostly to assimilation. That is white men (and women) like me, have married racial minorities and have had mixed race children. So much of these increase in the racial minority population has been bi-racial children and the GOP has worked proactively to alienate this segment of the population that they should be reaching out too. With the predictable result that there are not enough angry white guys in the south and rural Midwest to create a winning coalition of voters.
The question then is how long will it take for the GOP to realize that this trend towards racial assimilation is not going to stop and that our nation will become a lot more brown and racially and culturally diverse and that the "Southern Strategy" is an electoral lead weight around the GOP's neck?
My guess is that it won't take to terribly long.
