Back in June I talked about my general sense of optimism and to a certain extent a bit of complacency with regards to the ascendancy of progressive politics for the foreseeable future.
I wrote: “Republicans on the other hand are faced with somehow completely transforming their party ideologicaly and demographically. The GOP faces a couple of really big hills to climb. One, is that their politics of cultural identity and moral surety is rapidly pushing them into a demographic and geographic box which — unless they drasticaly broaden their reach — they face a future as a purely regional party that is permanently in the minority at the national level.”
There has been a lot of analysis of this lately. A look at the electoral vote distribution over time will be informative. More interestingly is the demographic shift in the overall electorate in the last two decades, with white voters now making up the overwhelming majority of the GOP base. As Nate Silver notes breaking down the statistics of the previous sentence:
Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.
In certain ways, I wonder if the GOP isn’t paying a price for a strategy adopted years ago — namely, the Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy undoubtedly won the GOP many elections over the years, but it was adopted at a time when probably less than 10 percent of the electorate was nonwhite (if minorities were allowed to vote at all), whereas now about a quarter of the electorate is. The steady drumbeat of demographic change, coupled with an inability or unwillingness to adapt to it, has steadily made the Republicans’ job harder and harder.
In looking at the increasingly virulent rhetoric and confrontational and getting-more-violent nature of the opposition from the right not only to health care reform but also to environmental legislation and to the president himself, it is hard not to begin to draw lines between age old prejudices and fears and the prospect of meaningful change.
It’s easy to make fun of the birthers and their supporters such as Glenn Beck and Rep. Michelle Bachman. They are objectively quite crazy from a modern standpoint. But that doesn’t make them irrelevant. They still have a vote and impressively loud voices. And they are well-armed.
Is some of this linked to race? Possibly, though very few would admit it. Atlantic columnist Ta-Hehesi Coates points out:
One thingto keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply “I hate niggers”–it never is. It was “I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy.” Or some such.
Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism–it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.
It seems to me that we are looking at a rather perilous period. These age-old cultural fears are facing their final confrontation with an inexorable shift in the economy and society in the United States that pushes the power and influence these people have traditionally had out of the driver’s seat. These are folks who have traditionally not reacted well towards having their social perquisites threatened.
A reader writes in to Atlantic blogger and British expat, Andrew Sulliavan:
Your obvious shock and dismay at the sheer angry ignorance of the health care teabaggers reiterates my largest problem with your rosy immigrant’s view of America. You have often underestimated just how poisonously dangerous the American populist right is.
I don’t blame you. You came to America after the rise of Reagan. Most of your life in America, you have lived under different Republican presidents who placated these folks with platitudes and campaign rhetoric. The one period when the populist right didn’t feel they had a fellow traveler in charge was when Bill Clinton was elected (thanks to the reactionaries splitting their votes). You remember, no doubt, the level of crazy Clinton had to defuse and dodge, and this was a man who had the advantage of being a Southern bubba who has dealt which such people all his life.
For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush’s failed presidency.
So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.
A political and demographic re-alignment is happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and we love you for it. But you didn’t grow up around these folks, and you don’t realize what a permanent and potent part of the American political landscape they are.
They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land’s original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn’t even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.
These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town’s borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.
I don’t subscribe to all of the above. But the writer is correct that there has always been a very reactionary minority in American politics. For almost four decades, one of the two political parties in this country has harnessed that minority as a major part of its activist base; the engine room of electoral politics, the people who turn out to make phone calls, knock-doors and vote in caucuses and primaries. The rather sad failure of the GOP’s policies in the last decade has temporarily driven most moderates away from the party, leaving it and its elected officials increasingly dependent upon a rump of rather mad (in both senses), scared and paranoid people.
This is good news if you desire the GOP to spend a few years in the political wilderness. This is bad news if you are a member of the new majority party. As mentioned before, these people are mad, scared, paranoid and heavily armed. This is never a good combination. At best, this minority can jam up the process and the dialog in the nation, as they are doing pretty well. At worst, some individuals may do something truly stupid or horrible. In a country that is already pretty edgy security-wise, there is no telling what sort of reaction this would bring from those in power. This would of course just add energy to the paranoia feedback loop of the right.
The Republican Party desperately needs some individuals of courage to start to break out of this cycle not just for their own good but for the greater good as well. No country does well under single-party rule. Good public policy requires a give-and-take between ideas. But right now, the right and the GOP has no ideas, no rational policy alternatives. They exist on fear and opposition. This strategy has a pretty bad track record.
