“Whites Will Abandon The GOP”: Having Alienated Every Racial And Ethnic Group, Republican Party Will Be The Party Of True Equality
As you are certainly aware, the new consensus among most Republicans and conservatives is that they don’t need no stinking Latinos (don’t get huffy on me; this is OK, because it’s a clever movie reference, and in any case it’s aimed not at Latinos, but at stupid Republicans) and will soar to victory on the strength of the white vote. People like me have spent a lot of airtime and ink these past couple of weeks arguing over whether this can work. But what’s interesting is this. There’s an assumption embedded in the argument that no one disputes: namely, that whites will always be as conservative as they are now and will always vote Republican in the same numbers they do now. This assumption is wrong. White people—yep, even working-class white people—are going to get less conservative in coming years, so the Republicans’ hopes of building a white-nationalist party will likely be dashed in the future even by white people themselves.
We already know all about the creative-class white voters, the well-educated and higher-income people who have shifted dramatically to the Democratic column over the past generation. Those voters are increasingly lost to the GOP. True, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama among college graduates (of all races) 51 percent to 47 percent, but Obama won going away among postgrads. Combine that with a Democratic lock on a huge chunk of a growing minority vote, and that’s why the Democratic Party goes into presidential elections now with a massive presumed Electoral College advantage (in recent elections, Democratic candidates have regularly won states totaling 263 electoral votes, just seven shy of the magic number).
Everyone knows and concedes all this. And everyone counters it by saying that the Republicans will just goose the less-educated white vote. As I noted above, everyone agrees that that vote is theirs for the goosing. But what if it isn’t?
Back in March, the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute released a big poll on immigration. Those findings are interesting as far as they go, but the questions and results went beyond that. It’s the first poll I’ve seen that breaks the white working class into four distinct age groups (65-plus, 50 to 64, 30 to 49, 18 to 29) and asks respondents attitudes about a broad range of social issues. And guess what? White working-class millennials are fairly liberal!
Click on the above link, scroll down to page 44, and look at the charts. On most questions, white working-class respondents in all three other age groups yielded results that were pretty similar to one another’s, but the youngest cohort was well to their left.
White working-class young people back gay marriage to the tune of about 74 percent. Another 60 percent say immigrants strengthen the United States (the totals for all three other age groups are below 40 percent). About 56 percent agree that changes immigrants have brought to their communities are a good thing. Nearly 40 percent agree that gays and lesbians are changing America for the better (more than double the percentages in the other three age groups).
They have different views because they’re different people: only 22 percent of white working-class millennials are evangelical, compared with 32 percent as a whole and 42 percent of seniors. And an amazing 38 percent of the group call themselves religiously unaffiliated.
All in all, not your father’s white working class. Sure, their views will become a bit more conservative as they age and have kids and own property. More will start attending church, undoubtedly. But the striking differences between their views and those of the three older groups are consistent, they are uniform, and they are pretty vast. (The poll did not ask about their attitudes toward African-Americans, about which I’m curious; I would expect less though still meaningful departure from the older cohorts.)
Which suggests to me that some views won’t change. These young people grew up in the America of Will and Grace and the relentlessly multi-culti Sesame Street just as surely as children in Berkeley and Takoma Park did. They won’t vote like their counterparts who grew up in Berkeley and Takoma Park, but they—and certainly their kids—just aren’t going to be carrying around a lot of the racial resentments that their grandparents shoulder every day.
So let’s hand it to the Republicans. They make the strategic decision to go all 1980s South Africa on us at a time when a sizable and sure-to-be-growing chunk of one of the most Republican-friendly segments of the white vote isn’t going to want that anymore. So, far from the GOP share of the white vote sailing up toward 70 percent as Sean Trende so giddily predicts, it seems just as likely to decrease as we enter the 2020s and see the sprouting of a more liberal (or less conservative) white working class. Finally, the Republican Party will be the party of true equality, having equally alienated every racial and ethnic group in America.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 10, 2013
“The Myth Of Absence”: How America’s Original Affirmative Action Is Still Going Strong
George W. Bush used to joke about it, his mediocre record at Yale, his less-than-diligent efforts throughout his educational career. So many laughed along at every bit of the persona he played into – the incurious certainty, the attempts to pronounce “nuclear” and the confident attitude throughout it all. But few questioned his right to take that place at Yale, another at Harvard and the privileged path that led to the White House.
That is how America has always worked, with the rich and the ones with the last names that matter usually stepping to the front of the line. It’s a system that has overwhelmingly benefited whites and males and, to look at the boards of Fortune 500 companies, still does.
Yet, you don’t see the righteous indignation or a spate of lawsuits to rid higher education of the curse of legacies. Voices are rarely raised to demand that elite colleges and universities take the thumb off the scale for families with a fat checkbook or a name on a campus building. There is not a suggestion that “they” don’t belong.
When Abigail Fisher was refused admittance at the University of Texas, she didn’t think that because she didn’t earn her way into the top 10 percent of her high school class — a bar that in Texas would have gained her automatic admission – that just maybe she should have studied harder. She refused the school’s offer to attend another Texas university, earn good grades and transfer in.
She didn’t consider the university’s logical explanation that it, like every other school, takes a “holistic” approach when putting together a class – using musical talent, community service, athletic ability, SAT scores, disadvantages overcome and yes, family legacy, among a long list of qualifications.
She did not consider the facts, as Pro Publica pointed out in a breakdown of the case, that UT offered provisional admission to 42 white students with lower test scores and grades, and that 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s were also denied entry.
What Abigail Fisher did was assert that she was discriminated against because she is white. She has expressed her disappointment in not being accepted to a school she had dreamed of going to, one her family members had attended. But she has never acknowledged that a dream her family members could dream for generations could only be shared by African Americans starting in 1956, when they were first admitted there. (It wasn’t until 1964 – fewer than 50 years ago – that blacks integrated the residence halls.)
If life is a zero-sum game – what someone else gets takes away from me – then recruiting minorities for a diverse student body at UT, using race and its legacy as a consideration among many when choosing a freshman class, takes away Fisher’s rightful place.
Does she know or care about the history of the University of Texas, where minority students didn’t even get the chance to compete for so long, giving unfair advantages to every white hopeful? Does she know or care about the ways she as a woman has benefited from the tactics and gains of the civil rights movement, from the lessons pioneering feminists learned from the protesters who changed a segregated nation?
Would Fisher ever acknowledge that her family history at the university gave her an advantage and she still could not cut it?
The Supreme Court compromised in its ruling on Fisher’s case against the University of Texas last week, sending it back to lower courts for review but telling the courts to carefully scrutinize any consideration of race in programs to promote diversity.
Not every childhood finger-painted creation on the refrigerator door is a masterpiece, no matter what mom and dad say, and not every student is going to get first choice on the college list. But after this Supreme Court ruling, expect more legal challenges from students who get the skinny college envelopes in the mail.
And you know the lawsuits won’t examine the SAT scores of millionaires, or ask if too many oboe players made the cut. In America, where a man with degrees from Columbia and Harvard is blithely referred to as a “food stamp” president by opponents, any perceived gain by a minority is too often seen as a loss for the way things should be rather than a step toward equality and inclusion that’s valuable for all.
The lack of respect for black achievement is nothing new.
What’s truly missing in American education is a comprehensive history class, one that clearly states what African Americans have contributed, as a counter to a characterization that has taken hold of many minorities as undeserving takers. It was a belief on full display when privileged presidential candidate Mitt Romney – wealthy son of a governor – complained about the 47 percent who expect to be given things such as food and health care. There was outrage but also support for his statements, especially from the high rollers in the room who ignored the minimum wage workers serving them and the guy mixing drinks and making the tape.
In Charlotte, N.C., where I live, an exhibit that should be required viewing for every American fills in some of that history. The Kinsey Collection: Where Art and History Intersect has opened at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, named for a former Charlotte mayor and honored architect who had to sue his home state of South Carolina for the right to attend Clemson University. Bernard and Shirley Kinsey’s amazing collection of art and historical artifacts and documents, one amassed during more than 40 years of marriage and shared goals, is American history, no hyphen required.
It includes a Currier and Ives lithograph of “The First Colored Senator and Representatives in the 41st and 42nd US Congress,” from 1872, a portrait of seven distinguished men elected after the Civil War — when black soldiers suffered a mortality rate 35 percent greater than other troops. After post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement of black voters in the South for much of the 20th century, such officials vanished until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, weakened last week by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The contributions of African Americans to this country have not been noted, but “we’ve got the documentation,” Bernard Kinsey told me as we walked slowly among the proud portraits, the books written and overwhelming evidence of the sacrifices made during a preview of the exhibit last week. He called it “the myth of absence.”
Despite the privilege that would assert otherwise, the descendants of these history makers aren’t stealing anyone’s seat. They are merely taking their rightful place.
By: Mary C. Curtis, She The People, The Washington Post, July 1, 2013
“Terms Of Art”: The Rebranding Of The Republican Party Is Simply The Renaming Of Intolerance
Many on the political right simply can’t get this diversity thing right — and I deeply doubt that they want to. Theirs is a bone-deep contempt for otherness, a congenital belief in the superiority-inferiority binary, a circle-the-wagons, zero-sum view of progress, prosperity and power.
This became apparent yet again Wednesday when it was revealed that one of the co-authors of a much maligned Heritage Foundation “study” about “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” Jason Richwine, had written a Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 2009 titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.”
Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post summarized Richwine’s dissertation thusly:
“Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in I.Q.’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group I.Q.s are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’ ”
Matthews continues:
“He does caution against referring to it as I.Q.-based selection, saying that using the term ‘skill-based’ would ‘blunt the negative reaction.’ ”
Skill-based. Clever. Or Machiavellian.
In reality, it’s just another conservative euphemism meant to cast class aspersions and raise racial ire without ever forthrightly addressing the issues of class and race. This form of Roundabout Republicanism has entirely replaced honest conservative discussion, to the point that anyone who now raises class-based inequality is labeled divisive and anyone who raises race is labeled a racist.
It’s a way of wriggling out of unpleasant debates on which they have stopped trying to engage altogether. The new strategy is avoidance, obfuscation and boomerang blaming.
This “skill-based” phraseology is simply the latest in a long line of recent right-wing terms of art.
There was Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment about the people who would “vote for the president no matter what.” He continued: “there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
That was in line with the other-ing of President Obama, whether in the form of aspersions about his birth or his faith or his understanding of and commitment to the country he leads. Recall John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, saying that Obama “has no idea how the American system functions” and saying that he wished the president “would learn how to be an American.”
Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, blamed turnout in “urban areas” for their loss, rather than their ragtag campaign operation and a coreless nominee who was utterly inept when attempting to connect with average voters. Remember Romney liked grits, y’all.
The former House speaker and failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — the one who said that poor children had no habit of working “unless it is illegal” — told Fox News last year that President Obama was “not a real president.” During that same television appearance, Gingrich said of the president: “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while, um, watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythms are.”
Huh. Needs large amounts of rest and to go play basketball and watch television. Nothing subliminal there. Moving along.
This list could extend to more than one column — including terms like “job creators” and “we built this,” and the candidate Rick Santorum (who has three degrees) calling the president a snob for wanting “everybody in America to go to college ” (which is not at all what the president said).
And it could stretch back further to the patron saint of the right Ronald Reagan’s use of the welfare queen meme and George Bush’s and Lee Atwater’s invocation of Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign.
But I think you get the picture.
The right is constantly invoking class and race as cudgels in our political discussions; they just hide the hand that swings the club.
The rebranding of the Republican Party is to a large degree the renaming of intolerance.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New Tork Times, May 8, 2013
“The Choice Now Is Between Bad And Worse”: Is It Too Late For The GOP To Save Itself With Latinos?
Since the 2012 election, there’s a story we’ve heard over and over about Republicans and the Latino vote. After spending years bashing immigrants, the party got hammered among this increasingly vital demographic group this election cycle, whereupon the party’s more pragmatic elements woke up and realized if they don’t convince Latinos the GOP isn’t hostile to them, they could make it impossible to win presidential elections. They’ve got one shot on immigration reform. Pass it, and they can stanch the bleeding. Kill it, and they lock in their dreadful performance among Latinos for generations.
This story is mostly true. But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t already too late for the GOP to win Latinos over. It’s going a little far to suggest that Latinos could become the equivalent of African Americans, giving 90 percent or more of their votes to Democrats in every election. But is it possible that so much damage has already been done that even if immigration reform passes, Republicans won’t see any improvement in their standing among Latinos?
Since we’re talking about what might happen in the future, this is all speculative, and it’s a little ridiculous to predict that anything that happens now will hold for “generations.” One generation, maybe, but nobody can say what the political landscape will look like in 30 or 40 years. But let’s think about how this is likely to play out in the near term.
If immigration reform fails because of anti-immigrant sentiment from the GOP’s right wing, that’s obviously a disaster for them. But even if it passes, that might be only a marginally better outcome. The debate itself could be making things worse by giving the anti-reform forces a bigger platform to express their views, even if other elements of the party are trying to put on a friendlier face. And if a bill does pass, who’s going to get the credit? Barack Obama, of course. It’ll be trumpeted in the media as the major legislative accomplishment of his second term (either the first, or the only, depending on how the next few years go), and much of the story will be about him for no reason other than that he’s the president and that’s how these things work; the president is the protagonist of most of the stories told about what happens in Washington, whether he deserves to be or not.
Furthermore, the legislation will almost certainly pass with the votes of almost every Democrat in both houses of Congress, and over the opposition of most Republicans. It doesn’t need many Republican votes, and for every Republican officeholder who wants to see it pass, there are probably two or three who feel enough pressure from the party’s right wing that they’ll end up voting against it, if for no other reason than to forestall a primary challenge— the primary thing every Republican member of Congress fears these days.
So how is this debate going to look to the public as the vote approaches? On one side you’ll have Obama and the Democrats, along with a few Republicans; on the other side you’ll have a whole lot of Republicans, some of whom will no doubt continue to say offensive things about immigrants. For good measure, many people will assume, whether it’s true or not, that the Democrats are sincere in their support of immigration reform, while the Republicans who join them are doing it just to save their political skins. When it’s over, Obama will declare victory, and everyone will know that it happened because the intransigent Republicans were defeated. Some conservative Republicans running in primaries around the country will still see immigrant-bashing as a potentially fruitful campaign tactic, giving voters the occasional helpful reminder about where much of the party stands. And in the next election (and the one after that, and the one after that), the default assumption among Latino voters will continue to be that your average Republican despises and distrusts them. That isn’t to say that any individual Republican candidate can’t overcome that assumption and win the votes of significant numbers of Latinos, but it will be a very difficult thing to do, and most will fail when they try.
So at this point, it certainly looks like the two potential outcomes are that conservative Republicans succeed in killing immigration reform, which is disastrous for the GOP, or it passes, which is only a little bit better. If they’re going to change their image among Latino voters, it’s going to have to be a long-term project.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 30, 2013
“The Sky Is Green And The Grass Is Blue”: An Introspective RNC Autopsy That Still Gets It Wrong
The Republican National Committee is out with what is being billed as an introspective look at what went wrong for the party in 2012. Maggie Haberman reports at POLITICO:
The Republican National Committee concedes in a sprawling report Monday that the GOP is seen as the party of “stuffy old men” and needs to change its ways.
Among the RNC’s proposed fixes: enacting comprehensive immigration reform, addressing middle-class economic anxieties head on and condensing a presidential primary process that saw Mitt Romney get battered for months ahead of the general election.
The committee also proposes major improvements to the party’s voter database and digital technology, which paled next to that of the Democrats and contributed to the party’s losses last year.
The suggestions are among dozens the committee makes in what RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has dubbed an “autopsy” of the party’s 2012 failures and a roadmap forward. Priebus is scheduled to unveil the 98-page report at a news conference Monday morning at The National Press Club.
“There’s no one reason we lost,” Priebus plans to say, according to prepared remarks. “Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement. … So, there’s no one solution: There’s a long list of them.”
I took a quick look at the report this morning, with an eye towards what it might say about the party’s intertwined relationship with the religious right. And six words, so central to the religious right’s messaging and mobilization, and thus imperative to a Republican presidential hopeful’s lexicon, do do not appear at all in the report. Those words are Christian, religion, abortion, marriage, Jesus, and God. No Christian nation, no crucial role of faith in American public life, no shining city on the hill, no scourge of abortion, no need for prayer to save an unrepentant America from sin, no downfall of western civilization caused by the erosion of “traditional” marriage. No mention of infringements of religious freedom.
In fact, on matters of religion, the report sounds remarkably like an effort at Democratic faith outreach. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, Black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them, too.” And “the RNC should consider hiring a faith-based outreach director to focus on engaging faith-based organizations and communities with the Republican Party.” Wait, doesn’t Ralph Reed already do that?
It becomes clear which faith communities those might be, just a page later:
President George W. Bush used to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande … and a hungry mother is going to try to feed her child.” This tone, coupled with the longstanding relationship with Hispanics he built as governor, demonstrated to the Hispanic community that Republicans cared equally about all Americans. . . .
In addition, the RNC must improve how it markets its core principles and message in Hispanic communities (especially in Hispanic faith-based communities).
Several times the report recommends engaging Hispanic faith-based organizations and communities — but it doesn’t mention such faith outreach in connection with other demographic groups, such as Asian and Pacific Islanders and African-Americans. Or women! The section on women is particularly — what’s the right word? — amazing? “Too often, female voters feel like no one listens to them.” (Really?) “They feel like they are smart, engaged and strong decision makers but that their opinions are often ignored.” (Do you wonder why?)
The report, of course, is just spin, a carefully crafted campaign outside a campaign to try to tell voters the sky is green and the grass is blue, or that the Republican Party is different from the one on display during the 2012 campaign. The pitch for religious Latino voters, though, hints at what’s really at work on the religion front: that the party is trying to figure out a way to keep conservative, religious white voters energized without alienating a pluralistic electorate. Saying that they’re going to reach out to religious Latinos is the party’s way of saying that it hasn’t given up on the religious right’s issues, it just needs to emphasize them in a different way. This might ring true for religious conservatives who have long heard from leaders like the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez that Latinos’ views on social issues line up with theirs (although in reality they’re hardly a monolith). But with or without a new “faith-based outreach director” at the RNC, I suspect that the old lexicon will be back in fairly short order.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, March 18, 2013
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