There is a real danger that the GOP will become “the party of AARP.”

This means that while the energy of activists may be pushing the Republicans to the right on size-of-government issues, the concerns of their central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements. (There’s a reason that even South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, in the midst of a CPAC stemwinder, paused to allow that one of the things government “has” to do is “keep our promises to our seniors.”)
This wouldn’t be a terrible things if Social Security and (especially) Medicare accounted for, say, ten percent of the federal budget. But where the size of government — and if we ever want to cut the deficit, the burden of taxation — is concerned, they’ll be the whole ballgame soon enough. And if the Republican Party depends too heavily on over-65 voters for its political viability, we could easily end up with a straightforwardly big-government party in the Democrats, and a G.O.P. that wins election by being “small government” on the small stuff (earmarks, etc.) while refusing to even consider entitlement reform. That’s a recipe for one of two things: Either the highest taxes in American history and a federal government that climbs inexorably toward 30 percent of G.D.P., or a Greece or California-style disaster.

This is the main reason why I’ve argued that a premature Republican comeback might actually be a bad thing for conservatives — if the party wins a war of inches by outpromising Democrats on Medicare, it’ll prove a Pyrrhic victory.

One irony is that Republicans are in a sense doing what Ross and I recommended in Grand New Party: we wanted the party to pursue policies that reflected the economic interests of their working and middle class base. Rather than a program centered on reforms designed to make the welfare state transparent and sustainable, this has meant something very different in practice.