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Are the Republicans taking their toys and going home?

July 6, 2009 on 2:57 pm | In Politics | 2 Comments

The common joke against the Left is that they try too hard to find consensus. To put it another way, even when they finally win leadership, they still act as if they need the support of the Right to take any action.

On the other side of the coin, because the Right is the party of morality, and because their morality is absolute, it only makes sense that they are less willing to compromise. When you claim that abortion should be illegal, even in instances of rape, there’s not much room for a compromise and bi-partisanship.

That background helps to explain Sarah Palin’s exodus from her office as Governor of Alaska. As Bruce Reed from Slate points out, Palin is only one of many Republican politicians who are jumping ship. He summed it up perfectly:

Palin’s resignation is a symptom of what’s crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.

But this makes sense when you realize that Republicans despise compromise. When you’re a Republican and your party is in charge, you do what you want. But when your party is in the minority, not only are you unable to do what you want, you have to make compromises on the things you don’t want.

Faced with that situation, Republicans are not going to spend their terms “compromising” their absolute morality and extremely narrow view of the world. Heck, they cannot even rely on their old stand by, the economy, as that was destroyed by W. So they’re going to pick up their toys and go home.