It seems that everyone is piling on the Republican Party as of late. On Sunday, Newt Gingrich was asked whether Sarah Palin was the future of the GOP. He replied that she was in a group of 20 or 30 others. It’s pretty devastating that someone of Gingrich’s caliber would identify his party’s VP nominee - and, arguably, rising star - as one of thirty key party influencers. Doesn’t that tell us something about the troubled state of the Republican Party?

But beyond this, there is troubling news over at The National Review.

As I noted here earlier this year, Christopher Buckley, son of the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama for president, and was quickly shown the door. Today, The New York Times reports that David Frum, a prominent conservative writer, is leaving to launch a Web venture. Over at The Corner, the National Review’s influential blog, you can read comments by a few of the magazine’s contributors.

Yes, like all people, magazine writers move around. But Frum isn’t just any magazine writer, and NR isn’t just any magazine. Or maybe it is now that Mr. Buckley is gone. It’s hard to imagine Mr. Buckley fawning over Palin the way many of the editors and writers there did (one of Frum’s concerns was with the backlash he received after writing negatively about her), but we’ll never know.

But I cannot be unfair to the magazine. After all, I’m hardly a regular reader. I pay attention to Frum and Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer because they’re smart guys even if we disagree consistently (as an aside, Krauthammer wrote this piercing editorial about John Edwards, and I agreed with every word of it.) Peggy Noonan and David Brooks don’t write for NR, but I rarely miss a word (they were both critics of Mrs. Palin; Mr. Brooks described her as “cancer to the Republican Party.”)

In late October, E.J. Dionne, writing in The New Republic, observed, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity–and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.”

Like everywhere else in life, it’s easy to pile on the defeated in politics. Aside from the score-keeping, one thing the GOP has always been good at is idea generation. After all, that’s the primary reason Buckley founded NR, and it served as adequate justification for rarely turning a profit.

Which brings me to a larger question. In the Times‘ article Mr. Frum notes, “I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.” I’ve been pondering this for past few weeks. Exit polling demonstrates that young people and the well-educated voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama. For the first time in eight years, the Democratic Party proved to be the party of ideas.

President George W. Bush will leave office with the lowest approval rating in history, and the comparisons to Herbert Hoover are becoming more accurate as this troubled economy sinks further towards a depression. Barring a Clinton-esque transition gaffe(s), president-elect Obama will enter The White House with approval ratings nearing seventy percent, and substantial majorities in both houses of Congress.

If Mr. Dionne is right, and the GOP think tank is being led by propoganda mongers Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mrs. Palin, I am saddened. That may sound strange coming from me (after all, it’s about winning, isn’t it?), but let’s be honest. With our economic future in jeopardy; two concurrent wars being fought thousands of miles away; and an energy crisis like nothing we’ve ever seen, it’s time to populate the marketplace with ideas.

But the GOP is polarized. Former presidential candidates are taking swipes at each other, and no one, not even NR, seems to know which way is up. As good as it has proven to be for Democrats in the short-term, how will Americans fare in the long term?