Republican leaders, young and old, are still smoking the same brand

They were pulverized, hurled back, swept aside, compared to dog food by one of their leading (but skedaddling) own, and unmistakably marginalized as the anachronistic voice of America's fastest diminishing minority: dyspeptic white guys.

Yet they still "differ," as the Politico reports this week, "on whether the heavy losses [they] suffered in the past two election cycles were a result of unique circumstances and the ever-swinging political pendulum or structural problems" -- what, that is, they stood for, and stood on.

It's astonishing, but at the rate things are going, the medieval Church's acceptance of the sun's solar-system centrality may someday seem like a snap decision compared to the agonized knuckledragging of the modern Republican Party.

It just got whacked -- but good -- upside the head by virtually every region and demographic in these United States, but "GOP officials and strategists [are offering] sharply contrasting assessments of what went wrong." And what contrasts most sharply, as the Politico observes, are the "generational lines" of disagreement.

But that, in my opinion, is the least of their problems -- the actual greatest of which I'll get to shortly.

The old bulls, such as Gov. Haley Barbour, are saying "I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party, and this ain’t it. I’ve seen it a lot worse." And what he recalls as worse was the post-Watergate era, when as executive director of the Mississippi state party he witnessed the establishment of "a task force … to consider whether Republicans should change their name."

Yep, as bad to worse goes, for the GOP that era was bad. Yet what Barbour's analysis ignores, willfully or not, is that Watergate had nothing to do with the fundamentals of Republican ideology. It was, rather, the unfolding and metastasis of one paranoid criminal's beady-eyed scheming -- the political repercussions of which vanished almost as quickly as his eleventh-hour departure.

What's more, America had not yet suffered the gruesome aftermath of supply-siding inanities. All that educational fun still awaited us. Now the nation knows better; yet RNC chairman Mike Duncan, like Mr. Barbour, still insists it was merely "the mood of the country" that done the GOP wrong. He detects no "rejection of the party’s conservative philosophy."

On the other philosophical side of GOP territory graze the younger bulls, such as Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is "sound[ing] the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes."

They -- the Barbours and Duncans, says Pawlenty -- can rightfully blame the ill-conceived war in Iraq and their president and his collapsing economy and leave it that, if they wish, but their dismission comes up short, and perilously so.

Then, he vaguely tries his best to go bold. "The Republican Party is going to need more than just a comb-over," he asserts. However, as the Politico worded what he follows with, "he doesn’t advocate for a major ideological shift."

And that, not Barbourism, if you will, is the greatest problem within today's GOP: Not even its young "revolutionaries" can see what is so plainly in front of them.

There was a far less complicated time when the simplicity of Republican ideology -- always small government, no matter what; unburdensome taxation, no matter what; laissez-faire federal undersight, no matter what -- was workable, or at least tolerable, in our political society. But that time has long since passed.

The need for a mixed-market front in the face of globalized economic complexities, the regulatory exigencies of multinational corporate behemoths, the internal competitions among an increasingly pluralistic and rapidly mutating postindustrial society -- the sheer, staggering costs of maintaining the health and education of that society -- and so on, and so on, have swamped into irrelevance what the Tim Pawlentys of this world see as workable modern conservatism -- that term itself a Voltarian triad of internal contradictions.

Hence what yesterday was the center-left is today the center, and what the center-right was is now the far right. In thirty years "traditional Republican ideology" will be as dusty a term as "mercantilism."

Marx was most likely wrong about history being a self-directional and inexorable force, but Republicans, bless their little nineteenth-century hearts, are doing their best to prove him right.