It already looks as if as much silly stuff will be said
or written in the aftermath of the election as in the run-up. I have listened to the explanations offered by
Karl Rove, Fox News commentators, and various Republican officials, for GOP losses
in the presidential and senatorial races.
So I have learned that Republicans are not likely to abandon their
alternative reality. I shall try to
avoid the silliness which I have detected in others by sticking with the
original, not to say only, reality.
The two states which tried hardest to suppress the
vote of cohorts inclined to vote Democratic still failed to steal the election
for Romney and down-ticket Republican senatorial candidates. Ohio and Florida became irrelevant to the Electoral
College count providing Obama with his victory.
Without Ohio’s 18 votes, Obama would have 285; without Colorado (9) and
Iowa (6), he would still have the necessary 270 to win. Without Florida’s 29 votes—forget it: they
were unneeded because the national race had been decided two days before the
state race was decided.
The poetic justice of Ohio’s and Florida’s irrelevancy
is that Republican machinations putting party power ahead of democracy and
country roused voters to overwhelm their Republican presidential and senatorial
candidates. This party-defeating misconduct
of Ohio’s corrupt Republican secretary of state and Florida’s criminal
Republican governor not only intensifies contempt for them, but also implicates
their state parties, other party officials, and their party enablers. Meanwhile, Ohio’s and Florida’s Democratic
senatorial candidates beat their challengers.
In these and other states, Republicans made fact-free
claims of virtually non-existent voter fraud to justify legislation to suppress
the vote of hundreds of thousands citizens inclined to vote Democratic. For an example close to home, New Mexico Governor
Susana Martinez, a Republican touted for higher office immediately after her
election only because she is Hispanic and female (to Republicans, the political
attributes equivalent of good looks), claimed 64,000 suspicious cases of
possible voter fraud, loosed the state police across the state, found nothing,
and retreated into silence.
Nationwide, Republicans revealed that the only significant
election fraud has been theirs. The
National Republican Party contracted $3-million-dollars worth of efforts at
voter suppression. Republican
legislatures passed laws, often at the last minute, requiring hard- or costly-to-obtain
forms of identification. Republican
administrations shortened voting days and hours, reduced the number of polling
locations, and issued confusing and changing instructions for voting. None of these Republican efforts had anything
to do with preventing voter impersonation.
By contrast, no such efforts occurred in states with Democratic
governors. Again, it is clear which
party believes in democracy and which misleads that it does.
The reason for this disparity is clear. Democrats are for liberty and
justice—economic, social, as well as legal—for all; Republicans are radically
inconsistent, divided between small government for economic and racial
Darwinism and big government for social Big Brotherism—succinctly, unregulated
banks and regulated bedrooms. This
division in the Republican Party means that addressing the problems acutely and
visibly presented by Obama’s election (and re-election) is unlikely to be
healed by patchwork concessions to diverse constituencies.
The current Republican circular firing squad is blaming
everyone and everything: Romney was too
conservative or not conservative enough; his staff was inept; Chris Christie
overpraised Obama; Sandy diverted attention from Romney and showcased Obama—where
is Pat Robertson when we need him to declare that the hurricane was God’s
punishment of the GOP? The consensus
among most Republicans seems to be that they were, of course, right on
substance, just rough on style. So the
GOP agrees with Rush that Sandra Fluke is a slut and with Romney that Rush
should have used sweet talk to say the same thing (women fall for sweet talk
every time).
The Republican
leadership—elected officials, party officers, and party czars like Rush
Limbaugh and Roger Ailes (we can now forget about Carl Rove)—will likely avoid
anything like reflection, which conservative ideologues believe is for liberal
weenies and Harvard professors. Instead,
the GOP will resort to its reflexive approach to all problems: money, misrepresentation,
and manipulation. Some have already
begun suggesting that it need only offer a few marginal concessions on a few
issues which matter to women, Hispanics, blacks, other minorities, seniors,
students, and the poor. The GOP expects
these people to appreciate the condescension of Republican white males,
seasoned by ethnic and gender self-promoters like Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal,
and Susana Martinez.
For example, the GOP approach to disaffected Hispanics
will be amnesty leading to permanent residency for illegal immigrants, but,
note, no pathway to citizenship. That
is, the Republican solution to the presence of illegal immigrants is to create
a large group of Hispanics unworthy of citizenship and, therefore, unable to
vote (Democratic). No doubt, Republicans
will think that the Hispanic community will be, or at least should be, grateful
to them for dividing it into two groups, Hispanics first-class and Hispanics
second-class.
But trinkets and tinkering will not win the votes of
these constituencies. They know the
Republican game and will go for real, not cosmetic, change. Yet Republicans are not likely to recognize
what they need to do to survive as a party or to do what they cannot conceive
or would not accept. For they are
blinded or self-deceived by their assumed supremacy, whether racial, religious,
cultural, or economic. To abandon their smug
sense of superiority and descend to political equality is unthinkable or
undoable.
The Republican
Party may be unable to address, and adapt to, the implications of a diverse
demography of races, religions, gender identities and orientations, and
cultural allegiances—for reasons ironic.
For its “Southern strategy” exploiting pre-existing racist animosities
and specific racist opposition to the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s has
created a largely white, male-dominated party with an intensely intolerant, ideologically
rigid “base” now unlikely to amend its attitudes and adopt policies attractive
to others in time for near-term elections in 2014 and 2016. It certainly cannot win those elections by
allowing the “base” to pick extreme GOP’s candidates in primaries and then
appealing for the votes of moderates and independents as well. Since the GOP did not win the presidential
and most senatorial races in 2012 by relying on its “base,” it cannot hope to
win in the future as trending demographics continue to diminish the proportion
of whites.
So the inter-party
squabble will be ugly. On one side,
cultural, social, and religious conservatives like Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum,
and Mike Huckabee; on the other side, economic and political moderates like
Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Jon Huntsman, and—who else? Caught between the two sides, the Tea Party
will have an identity crisis as it is pulled in different directions and will
likely splinter. Likewise, the
Republican Party will split if it persists in trying to accommodate these contending
sides by expedient but unprincipled vote-swapping. If the Republican Party splits into its two
main constituent parts, the result will be a dominant Democratic Party and two
smaller conservative rivals.
Meanwhile, the
“base” of the Republican Party—the Billie-Joes and Betty-Lous, and their racial
and religious kith and kin in the South, the Plains, and the Rockies—continues
to decline in importance and power. So, I write, not an ode in praise, but a dirge on the
demise, of the young to middle-aged white males, along with their girlfriends
or wives, with little more than their white skin and their high school sheepskin,
if that, as measures of their attainment.
As they are discovering, their race does not signify superiority or even
validate their worth, their poor education in a changing economy limits their
opportunities, so they are stuck in low- or no-skill jobs which barely pay the
bills.
Meanwhile, these Billie-Joes and Betty-Lous see themselves being bypassed by better-educated and
harder working women and minorities. They
sense, though they may not speak, their plight: trapped, powerless, even
despairing as they—at least some of them—realize that they made clearly wrong
and possibly irreversible choices. For,
although they knew that they lived in changing times, they made no effort to
change with them. Instead, they chose to
resist change, to protect their way of life, and thus, as the world passed them
by, to feel resentment and to act out of fear and anger.
Thus, their insistence on intensely self-righteous,
ideological positions on abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and same-sex
marriage, among others, which positions, even if implemented throughout
society, can do nothing to improve their lot in life. For example, the Billie-Joe’s, with the
support of their Betty-Lou’s, may think that legislating a definition of
marriage as only monogamous and heterosexual will protect the sanctity of
marriage and ensure the survival of civilization as we imagine it, but it will
not stop adultery or lower the divorce rate.
The 2008 and 2012 elections have shown the declining
trajectory of the political power of the Republican Party and especially its
“base,” and suggested the diminished chances of reasserting their power in
future elections. They will gain nothing
by political shenanigans or ideological rampages. Instead, the Republican Party must rethink
its attitudes toward “others” as the starting point for adopting political policies
which serve all people. Similarly, its
“base” must also rethink its attitudes toward “others” as the starting point
for accepting education as the best means to serve its needs for a better life.
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