Modern Republicanism is stuck in place while America moves on. The GOP is like a grown-up child in tantrum whose parent has no more time to give and has walked on. The GOP is like an aged, whiskered mouse trying to find its way out of a maze of patched together twists and turns it cleverly contrapted a while back to gain access to a now empty cupboard.
The current GOP acts as a stubborn anchor keeping the American scow ship-of-state from leaving the dock while impatient foreign nations (friends and rivals) have grown tired of waiting and have begun the yacht race.
Today's GOP is living in a bad nightmare taken from the tales of 'Brer Rabbit': the Nixon-era GOP grabbed the tar-baby of immediate gratification to take away the southern, DixieCrat voting bloc from the Democrats (southern racism, anti-unionism, anti-education,..) and hasn't been able to let go since. The recent (June 17, 2015) Charleston, South Carolina race-hate shootings (9 Black church goers shot and killed ..in church Bible study) is the latest example of the xxxxx consequences of that strategy.
One could conclude that the GOP was driven to the 'Southern Strategy' because its hold-over, industrial revolution era (1890's to 1945) capitalist-first platform had reached the end of its relevancy to both modern domestic America (racial equality and growth into a multicultural union) and the global rise of new economic blocs, e.g., China, Pacific Rim economy, South America, BRIC. coming from the collapse of global empires, the shrinking of the globe into a mono-culture by modern communication and the removal of past boundaries that prevented the cooperation among workers and racial-national groups in America and around the globe).
a picture of how Nixon's 'Southern strategy' (or more accurately, the A of A,,,) has had a congealing (delaying, dragging) effect on America's attempts to grow into the 21st century is well-stated by Harold Meyerson, the Washington Post Opinion writer in his April 8, 2015 piece:
Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.
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