LETTER FROM
THE EDITOR
and even scheduling posthumous
emails. As Jed Brubaker, a digital
identity scholar at the University
of California-Irvine, puts it: “There
aren’t really any norms around
death and social media yet. People
are kind of making it up as they go
along. But what’s known is that
this Facebook generation will have
more experiences with death than
any generation before it.”
Elsewhere in the issue, Jon
Ward takes us inside the Republican Party in the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. “Every time a party loses a presidential
election, there is a funeral procession that goes on for too long and
that brings out all the Chicken
Littles,” he writes. Ward’s conversations with senior GOP aides,
think tank leaders, and party activists reveal a party grappling with
existential questions: “How will the
Republican Party and the broader
conservative movement it’s meant
to embody fix their problems with
the poor, the disadvantaged, women
and minorities? How will the Republican Party evolve?”
For all the GOP’s problems, Ward
zeroes in on a larger truth — one
with consequences that go far be-
HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
yond left and right. Obama’s victory
over Romney has not exactly put
the plight of struggling Americans
on the front burner. Bob Woodson,
an African-American community
leader who has worked with con-
It’s not quite ancient
Rome, but the existence
of a social media afterlife
is one way we are using the
latest technology to deal
with a timeless fact of life.”
servatives to fight poverty, points
out: “neither party is talking about
poor people,” and polices for the
poor — or even an acknowledgment
of the poor — were conspicuously
absent from Obama’s campaign.
For now, Republicans face an
uphill battle to even be taken seriously as a party interested in solutions. As The Heritage Foundation’s
Jennifer Marshall puts it, “We’ve
lacked the narrative that captures
the moral imagination
of the American public.”
ARIANNA