Ross Douthat Is Depressed

TW: Douthat is a conservative writer for the Atlantic. He is not a right-wingnut just a conservative. He is apparently already going into depression but then his side deserves some angst given the ditch into which they have run our country.

From Douthat:
" I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that's almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the "whither conservatism" battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that's widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course - none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch...

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I've been trying to figure out why I don't - why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered...and more dispirited than liberated. I didn't have particularly high hopes for a McCain-led ticket in the first place...

I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with...the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I'd like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I'd even figured out exactly what they were...

Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America?... find myself stuck thinking about the lost opportunities of the last eight years, and the possibility that they may not come round again."
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/lost_horizons.php