I am a Democrat so has some glee in seeing Professor applying some 'sanity' in evaluation of current GOP. But even then, I admire Professor for being honest here and willing to receive stone pelting from Tea Party hacks.

The larger danger is obvious here - American System does not deliver when we have extreme partisan gridlock as like today. Unless this gridlock is broken, nothing worthwhile happens for Americans and they will continue to discount Washington.

President Obama failed miserably in avoiding temptations of Washington Politics in passing of ObamaCare. You cannot play backroom politics for its obvious advantages in legislating a policy and then come around to claim the mantle of 'changing Washington'. That simply does not happen and that is not credible.

The only way he can attempt to burnish his credibility for November 2012 mandate is - to declare full hand his exact policy agenda (including what Medicare cuts, what Tax changes and so on) and then go to Americans as a Parliamentarian Leader to seek full majority in Congress along with White House. There is no point for Obama simply admitting communication failure but not doing to undo the damage - why parliamentary majority is required in Congress to break today's hyper partisan gridlock politics.

Romeny or Gringrich or whosoever GOP nominee is, may be content to gloss over this issue and would portray that defeating Obama in itself is enough. That would be foolishness and it would mean American Politics will have to wait many more years to realize the futility of electing 'divided Congress'.

Divided Congress = further decline and downfall of America. So long as our Politics does not hammer this point in minds of America, more and more will become RINO; but with no positive end result for all of us.

This post is highly misleading. Prof. Drezner is not a Republican, whether "in name only" or in any other manner. Anybody who endorsed and voted for Kerry and Obama, as Prof. Drezner did, is simply not a Republican.

Prof. Drezner is surely free to disagree with the policies of Republican candidates; that alone does not disqualify him from being a Republican. But consistently voting for Democrats over a sustained period of time? That certainly does disqualify him from properly calling himself a Republican. He might have appropriately called himself a Republican a decade ago, but the facts show that he is not now, and has not been for quite some time, a Republican.

Prof. Drezner should correct or remove this highly misleading post.

"the U.S. Constitution (which, of course, is sacred and inviolate, unless conservatives want to amend it)"

This is a patently illogical statement. If you take the Constitution seriously, then if you want to do something that violates it or is questionable you attempt to amend it.

If you don't think that the Constitution means anything at all, or that it means whatever you want it to mean on a different day, then you don't bother trying to amend it, because why bother?

I think that Prohibition was a tragic and stupid mistake, but I give them credit for at least realizing that an amendment was necessary to do it.

Similarly, if idiots are going to try to lock up or kill American citizens without a trial, I'd at least prefer that they have the guts to propose a Constitutional amendment rather than the President just doing it.

*Only* someone who views the Constitution as sacred and inviolable, that must be followed by judges, would propose amendments. People who view the Constitution as merely being whatever judges say (which includes people on both sides) would concentrate, naturally, on simply making sure that the right judges are appointed.

Incidentally, my understanding of the meanings of the words is that you meant something closer to "inviolable" than "inviolate." The latter means "has not been violated" and most of the Constitution obsessed think that it has been repeatedly violated (because they personally don't agree with the SCOTUS rulings.)

As someone who has been reading you since before you jumped to FP, you've drifted further to the left; I haven'tvoted for either party in some time (the last time I voted was for Gore as pres and Clinton for Senate), so that doesn't bother me. However, I have noticed a trend among any intellectuals who have made a similar journey and voted for Obama that instead of analyzing his failures (and by any objective measurement he has been both the most leftist president in some time and an utter failure in his domestic policies), and looking at the assumptions you made in supporting him, you hide behind this sneering contempt for conservatism. This may work at university cocktail parties, but it seems like classic displacement to me.

Anyway, I do wish you'd write more about economics. You and Megan at the Atlantic used to be a great combo read on those issues.

As a Canadian I look at the GOP and I think of what Kissinger had to say about the Jacobins in 'A World Restored'. The GOP now strike me as revolutionaries.

It seems to me, like the Jacobins, they do not accept the legitimacy of the current system. They mean to overthrow it and replace it with one closer to their ideology. An ideology that on the surface appears to include 'Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood', but in actuality it will be a system where 'some animals are more equal than others.'

So it's no surprise that they say little about foreign policy. That isn't their concern at this time. Currently the GOP is most concerned with getting the power they need to remake America into a new country.

Then it will be the rest of the world's turn.

The US needs a centrist third party that accurately represents the views of the majority of Americans. Halfway between the elephant and the donkey- the rhino. I'll be making buttons shortly. I'll also be running in 2020 for president. Just a heads up.

Thanks for an article that confirms exactly how I and my wife feel about what's going on in the GOP now; we voted Democratic for the first time in 2008.....the thought of Palin actually assuming the presidency was too much....we had hoped there would be a strong GOP candidate in 2012 but alas there isn't a one in the current bunch with the exception of Jon Huntsman and it appears he's not acceptable to the extremists running the party. The current President is not nearly as leftist as most extremists claim he is and we can live with his policies until the GOP wakes up to the reality of who actually lives in this country. Keep up the good work and your fine analysis.

Dan, I'd vote for you in 2016 or 2020. In the meantime, try to bring more attention to Huntsman. You mention his low poll numbers but that's because most Americans haven't heard of him. He's building some momentum in New Hampshire, and if he pulls off a good showing he could win.

... always an honor to read you. Mr Frum, quoted here, is the former helot of a president who couldn't name the non-Reiublican party -- he had a three-syllable limit on trying -- and was author of the dramatic, scary and meaningless "axis of evil." Mrs Frum in an excited way was ringing all her friends to tell them it was her David who'd come up with the gem. Frum himself, and some successors as presidential speechwriters seem to have developed mistrust or contempt for the boss: Frum himself says Mr Bush was saying things while never understanding them..

The current Republican campaign seems marked by a most startling innovation: several of the candidates have either formally announced or played cat-and-mouse (as with Mrs Palin) about it. All raise money to help them win. But few seem to have employed and equipped the force they need to win. This causes me to wonder whether they're taking in public money and not spending it as their donors expect.

Whatever happened to the money fed in large amounts into SarahPAC? Why is nobody answering the question publicly? I doubt that all of it was spent on paintring that bus. Are donated funds being used for personal enjoyment or business opportunity?

"The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society."

Puluzee. What's extreme is a President and party determined to pass an enormous entitlement program on a party-line vote, not respecting Senate tradition of 60 votes, despite the fact that a pretty blue state turned Ted Kennedy's seat over to a Republican to stop them from passing Obamacare.

What's extreme is Harry Reid using the nuclear option to prevent a vote on Obama's own jobs bill.

Plenty of blame to go around for dysfunction in DC, but lately it's been due to a massive failure of leadership. Obama is not serious at all about working with the GOP. He invites Paul Ryan who put forth serious entitlement reform proposals to his speech, and then insults him publicly to his face. Where has he been for the Supercommittee negotiations? He's too busy setting up the GOP as a foil for his campaign. That's what this country gets voting for a guy with little executive experience, who's voted present all his adult life.

But whatever, keep up the "those Republicans sure are crazy and extreme" narrative. It gets Frum attention from the MSM.