Elephant Talk Bloods the Way to the Watering Hole[*]

Former Reason intern and The Elephant in the Room author Ryan Sager talks about his new book on the future of the Republican Party with the Washington Times. A snippet:

Q: What are the ideals versus the practices of the Republican Party?

A: The ideal for the Republican Party would be to stick to an idea called fusionism, where both social conservatives and small-government conservatives, or libertarians, support keeping the government small and the economy unburdened and our social fabric strong. During Bush's administration, what we have seen is a wholesale abandonment of the fusionist bargain. We have slipped into big-government conservatism, with things like the No Child Left Behind Act instead of school choice and the Medicare prescription-drug bill instead of free-market health care reform. We've had costly highway and farm bills instead of controlled spending. We've surrendered on campaign finance reform, which really is the most atrocious infringement on free speech since the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Elsewhere Sager, a columnist for the NY Post and RealClear Politics, notes, "The way the Republican Party is going about becoming a majority party is inextricable from abandoning the principles that made it a majority in the first place…. Becoming a permanent majority requires the abandonment of small government and the alienation of libertarians."

Whole thing here.

A sample from Sager's Reason days (ca. 1999), in which he reports that John McCain wants to re-regulate the airlines, here.

[*]: Obscure headline allusion refers to a line in this godawful movie, which features pulse-pounding pachyderm rampages.