PUNDIT DISEASE….Responding to the Lexington column that I linked to yesterday, Matt Yglesias says it’s absurd to believe the Republican Party is about to shrink into regional irrelevance:
Realistically, I think this is all more-or-less hysteria and nobody is going to become merely regional ? things will just sort of swing back and forth, with the Democrats maintaining a semi-permanent reservoir of strength in the Urban Archipelago and the GOP having a similar bastion in the South.
For the record, I agree completely. My post yesterday was mostly just an excuse to riff on the “Texification” of the GOP and to resurrect my old post about the Texas Republican Party platform, a document that really can’t be linked to often enough.
As for the question, “What the hell is wrong with Lexington?” my guess is that he’s suffering from a variety of pundit disease that doesn’t get much attention because it’s usually overshadowed by other more spectacular disorders: namely that columnists are required to say something provocative every week, even if there’s nothing all that provocative to be said. This is, for example, why the media spent two solid weeks after the election insisting on a wide variety of demographic lessons from the GOP defeat even though the data pretty clearly suggested there were very few specific lessons to be learned. Unfortunately, writing a column saying the GOP got spanked because people were tired of corruption and the war, and that’s pretty much it, just isn’t exciting enough.
