Although I've hardly blogged on the topic, I've done a good deal of thinking about the November election and what it portends for the Republican Party and conservatism (and they are two different things).

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled writing prescriptions for the GOP's recovery, so I don't see the need to add to the pile of punditry. Suffice it to say I don't think the GOP needs to gin up a new set of principles, or even that the election constituted a rebuke of the center-right physiology of the Republican Party. No political party can win every election, and the GOP has done much to merit back-to-back defeats for reasons that have been amply commentated on.

There is one particular argument for restoring the Republican Party that merits some scornful attention, however: the idea that religious conservative, or cultural conservatives, are to blame for the GOP's woes. I have seen this argument made by some Beltway conservatives like Kathleen Parker, and locally by libertarian editorialist Steve Greenhut.
I'm not certain what drives this analysis, but it certainly can't be familiarity with politics or history. It ignores the verity that elections are won by addition, not subtraction. The trick is attracting enough voters to your coalition (which is what American parties are) while not getting too big to hold the coalition together. And religious conservatives are an indispensable pillar of the Republican center-right coalition.

The attitude of the secularizers ignore also the lengths to which national Democratic candidates to make themselves palatable to voters with a traditional view of religion -- an strong indication of the power of this voting bloc. Barack Obama and Joe Biden were conscientios in letting swing state voters know they opposed gay marriage and regularly attended church.

I've yet to hear how those with the urge to purge cultural conservatives from the GOP plan to replace them, or how they propose to win elections without what has been the most loyal constituency of the GOP coalition? Perhaps they believe there is a huge, secret army of right-wing secularists hiding in the political mists, who would join the conservative cause were it not for the presence of those religious conservatives and their refusal to keep their beliefs to themselves!

This is not a new argument. The same tune was being played in 1992. Fortunately, that advice was ignored and we were able to bounce back and take over the Congress two years later.

NRO's Jonah Goldberg wrote an insightful post on this phenomenon today. Among other things, he points to the prevalence of secularist thinking among some precincts of conservatism and most precincts of libertarianism as a factor in this antipathy toward religious conservatives. Personally, I'd go further on the subject of libertarians, who increasingly have adopted an almost atheistic contempt for religion as hokum reserved for the intellectually feeble.