Writing The Week for Bob Shrum comments that he believes that the Republican Party is dooming itself due to its refusal to bail out automakers.

Shrum believes that the GOP’s refusal to agree to aforementioned bailout plan was purely due to an extreme adherence to a free market ideology. Republicans cite polls that show that a majority of Americans opposes bailing out automakers but, Shrum believes, this majority will quickly become the minority once U.S. automakers collapse.

Such a collapse would, according to Shrum, cause the entire U.S. economy to suffer tremendously, resulting in a roller coaster similar to the Great Depression, or even worse.

The Republican Party’s refusal to understand this and deal on this ‘pragmatist’ view will doom the party in the future for its senators and representatives will be seen as free market extremists willing to blow up the economy in order to be able to say that they acted like true believers should. Or so Shrum argues.

Sadly for the man who was once a senior adviser to Al Gore, U.S. automakers can collapse without wrecking the entire U.S. economy. They will certainly cause some trouble, many will be unemployment, but the economy as a whole will recover pretty well, for virtually no business outside the auto sector is dependent on General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Banks had to be bailed out because their collapse would cause many other businesses to follow suit. The reason to bail them out was not that many bank employees would lose their job if their employers collapsed; instead, it was the fear that the collapse of these banks would cause companies in other sectors to go bankrupt as well, truly destroying the entire U.S. economy.

The reason for the above fear is that all businesses are dependent on banks. If banks collapse, these businesses will have a hard time surviving as well.

Automakers, however, can collapse freely. They will cause some pain, but they will most certainly not take the entire economy down with them. Rather, if kept alive artificially as they have been in the past few decades, these automakers will become a huge drain on the economy, hampering its growth potential, flexibility and ability to innovate.

To cut a long story short, opposition to the autobailout is not entirely ideological. Instead, pragmatism plays a profound role in any reasoned opposition to keeping a dying sector artificially alive. The only reason Democrats do not agree is that they are influenced so tremendously by lobbyists (of both automakers and unions) that they are unable to take a step back and look at the problem from a comfortable distance, overseeing the big picture.

Of course there is another possibility namely that Democrats are playing politics: cars are produced in certain states. If they bail automakers out this time around, Democrats may very well believe that they own these states in the coming years, thereby enabling them to expand their majorities in Congress and to win a fairly easy reelection for Barack Obama.

Automakers have done a lot for America in the past century or so. Like railroad companies before them, however, they are now facing extinction simply because they were unable to keep up with the times and to recognize that their line of business had changed considerably. Unions had and continue to have too much power and influence, making it virtually impossible for automakers to cut costs. Since they are unable to do so, U.S. automakers will find themselves without customers pretty soon, whether the government bails them out this year or not.

The bailout will not truly save U.S. automakers, for they cannot be saved. They are a doomed industry. Bailing them out will only cost the U.S. taxpayer dearly and do considerable damage to the U.S. economy in the long run. Opposition is not ideological, it’s pragmatical. The sooner the public realizes this the better.