By Ryan McNeely

CAP Action Fund’s Ruy Texiera has published an excellent report titled “Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties” that builds on the analysis in The Emerging Democratic Majority using data from the 2008 election. The bottom line is that the minority vote share is increasing rapidly, and along with other demographic trends, it’s difficult to imagine “the Republican Party as currently constituted” being viable over the long-term.

The report is chock-full of interesting findings, but one item that I believe is under-discussed is that the effort of Republicans to woo Latino voters based on their alleged social conservatism (in the hopes that they will ignore some of the more ugly nativist rhetoric on the Right) seems to be flawed:

Hispanics overall also are not nearly as socially conservative as many believe. A Center for American Progress survey in 2009 showed that Hispanics actually had the highest average score of all racial groups on a 10-item progressive cultural index. Surveys have repeatedly shown that Hispanics are no more conservative on gay marriage than whites are. And younger Hispanics are typically more progressive than their older counterparts on social issues, so generational replacement will make tomorrow’s Hispanic population less socially conservative than today’s.

Another interesting finding is the significant growth rate of key subgroups of women who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. I’ve found that there is a tendency to discuss “women” as if they are like any other interest group or constituency, but women are in fact the majority of voters. So, by definition, if more and more women identify as Democrats, then to cobble together a majority Republicans must lock in an even larger lead among male voters.

Now, it’s important to be skeptical of claims the one of the two major parties is “doomed” or is on the brink of permanent irrelevance. The cyclical nature of things means that the parties will basically alternate in power. But Texiera argues that the Republican party “must, quite simply, become less conservative” in order to adapt to demographic trends. He is careful to note, though, that “if the Democrats fail to produce—whether through ineffective programs, fiscal meltdown, or both—even an unreformed GOP will remain very competitive,” so there’s no reason for liberals to rest on their laurels.

I think Jon Chait’s response to my criticisms of the idea of an in-house critics blog is almost self-refuting. I mean here’s Chait, at his blog at TNR, dialoguing with me at my blog at CAPAF interacting away. And we do it all the time!

But more to the point, I think it reveals old-media non-digital thinking at play. He says the value of having the blogs in-house is “to address a problem of ideological cloistering on the web.” But it only addresses the problem by means of pretending that the portion of the web that occurs on the www.tnr.com domain is actually a magazine. In print what matters is circles of writers whose words come on pieces of paper that are stapled together and put in the mail simultaneously. Online what matters is circles of writers who respect each other’s work enough to link to one another. My “in house” critics are people like Reihan Salam and Glenn Greenwald and Tyler Cowen and Jonathan Chait who I read and link to and vice versa.

At any rate, I don’t want to overly belabor the point here. Michael Kazin and Jim Manzi are both good writers and having them write blog posts for TNR seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. But the conceit is odd and a bit limiting.

In a new column for the Daily Beast, I hope that General David Petraeus can do for America’s policy in Afghanistan what he did for our policy in Iraq, lower expectations, shift goalposts, and pave the way for an orderly exit:

Consider that the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Victory in Iraq outlined an aim of an Iraq that “is peaceful, united, stable, and secure; well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.” To state the obvious, none of that has happened. Iraq remains a divided and insecure state that doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way to whatever the global war on terrorism was supposed to be. Nor does Iraq in any way appear to have achieved Bush’s medium term goal of putting a “fully constitutional government in place.” No time ever came when Bush redefined the nation’s war aims. So if “success” is judged as meaning something so literal as “achieve one’s goals” then the surge, like the war, failed. Indeed, Petraeus failed.

And for a long time, that’s how I saw it, sitting in Washington vaguely furious that the man was winning accolades for a “victory” that was largely a matter of resetting expectations. In retrospect, that was churlish.

Managing expectations is hugely important and Petraeus did the nation a great service by redefining a win in Iraq as something more like “improve the situation in some respects and recognize that the long-term course of things is out of our hands.” Before the surge, after all, the country had been caught in a senseless loop whereby war opponents saw deteriorating conditions as a reason to leave but proponents cited them as a reason to stay and a combination of momentum and national and professional pride ensured that the doves would perennially lose the argument. By combining modest real gains in the situation on the ground in Iraq with an aggressive reframing of the politics of the mission at home, Petraeus set the stage for the orderly withdrawal of American forces that the country needed.

But of course policy in this regard is ultimately set at the top, and it all comes down to what Barack Obama wants to do. His administration has the right principles for the conduct of foreign policy, but there’s considerable tension between those principles and the actual practice in Afghanistan. Some deviation in conduct in terms of a situation you inherited from someone else is understandable and forgivable, but the goal has to be to reduce the tension and bring Afghanistan policy in line with the administration’s overall strategy.