GOP Staring Into A Big Black-- And Brown And Educated And Young-- Demographic Hole

It may sound paranoid, but the demographic shifts in the United States are such that the GOP-- which has so alienated non-whites and the non-elderly-- is desperate to drastically curtail democracy before it's too late for them. Since at least the French Revolution, the forces of the Right have fought against popular democracy every step of the way. At the founding of this country, conservatives were clear that they would sabotage the whole effort rather than permit universal suffrage to be adopted. Conservatives wanted to make sure that voting would be only allowed for white male property owners, the older the better. One of the Koch brothers' most virulent-- and effective--political arms, ALEC, has been working on the state legislative level to turn the ship of democracy around back in that direction. And in states where the Republicans have gained legislative majorities-- Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, New Hampshire, etc-- they have moved down the path of limiting the franchise in ways outlined for them by ALEC. If you do think this is paranoid, let me point you to Jonathan Chait's article in the new issue of New York, 2012 or Never.

“America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,” announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s “The Roadmap Plan,” a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, “We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.” Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like “We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,” and that this election “could be our last chance.”

The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis-- that “freedom” is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care-- is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP-- the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes-- is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a natural-majority coalition for Democrats.

The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. And the trends were even more striking in some key swing states. Judis and Teixeira highlighted Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile grounds for the expanding Democratic base.

...[T]he dominant fact of the new Democratic majority is that it has begun to overturn the racial dynamics that have governed American politics for five decades. Whatever its abstract intellectual roots, conservatism has since at least the sixties drawn its political strength by appealing to heartland identity politics. In 1985, Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist, immersed himself in Macomb County, a blue-collar Detroit suburb where whites had abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. He found that the Reagan Democrats there understood politics almost entirely in racial terms, translating any Democratic appeal to economic justice as taking their money to subsidize the black underclass. And it didn’t end with the Reagan era. Piles of recent studies have found that voters often conflate “social” and “economic” issues. What social scientists delicately call “ethnocentrism” and “racial resentment” and “ingroup solidarity” are defining attributes of conservative voting behavior, and help organize a familiar if not necessarily rational coalition of ideological interests. Doctrines like neoconservative foreign policy, supply-side economics, and climate skepticism may bear little connection to each other at the level of abstract thought. But boiled down to political sound bites and served up to the voters, they blend into an indistinguishable stew of racial, religious, cultural, and nationalistic identity.

Obama’s election dramatized the degree to which this long-standing political dynamic had been flipped on its head. In the aftermath of George McGovern’s 1972 defeat, neoconservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick disdainfully identified his voters as “intellectuals enamored with righteousness and possibility, college students, for whom perfectionism is an occupational hazard; portions of the upper classes freed from concern with economic self-interest,” and so on, curiously neglecting to include racial minorities. All of them were, in essence, people who heard a term like “real American” and understood that in some way it did not apply to them. Today, cosmopolitan liberals may still feel like an embattled sect-- they certainly describe their political fights in those terms-- but time has transformed their rump minority into a collective majority. As conservative strategists will tell you, there are now more of “them” than “us.” What’s more, the disparity will continue to grow indefinitely. Obama actually lost the over-45-year-old vote in 2008, gaining his entire victory margin from younger voters-- more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal.

...[I]n the cold calculus of game theory, the expected response to this state of affairs would be to accommodate yourself to the growing strength of the opposing coalition-- to persuade pockets of voters on the Democratic margins they might be better served by Republicans. Yet the psychology of decline does not always operate in a straightforward, rational way. A strategy of managing slow decay is unpleasant, and history is replete with instances of leaders who persuaded themselves of the opposite of the obvious conclusion. Rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position, they chose instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.

At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

It's what helps explain the Republican Party's embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric-- or even the GOP-dominated Wyoming state legislature's decision to allow for the raising of a standing army... and an aircraft carrier!

Here in California Republican politicians have been dealing with this for a long time, as they turned off the rapidly growing Hispanic voters with their racist rhetoric. And as they've shrunken into a less and less relevant rump of a party, many of their leaders have simply dug in and doubled down. Bigoted Santa Clarita Congressman Buck McKeon is a great example. California's 25th District is a much more diverse district than when McKeon first became its congressman in 1992, both due to shifting demographics and redistricting. The district is now younger with more working families represented by labor unions. Now there is a 30% Latino population and growing African American and Asian/Pacific Islander populations. McKeon has been an ardent opponent to reasonable immigration reform. He opposed the federal DREAM Act and is leading the charge in the district to repeal California's state DREAM Act. McKeon is also anti-equality for gays and lesbians. He personally supported California Prop 8 with campaign funds, opposed the repeal of DADT, supported DOMA, and tried to outlaw same-sex marriage by chaplains in the military. The constituency in the 25th district is definitely moving in a more progressive direction away from McKeon's record, and by alienating such large groups of voters, we think this is the year he can lose his seat to a more mainstream candidate. That mainstream candidate is Dr. Lee Rogers, a young father in his 30s, a professional, married to a Latina and more in touch with the way the district is today (rather than in the 1950s). Please consider contributing to his campaign here.

Chait concludes his article by reminding us that even GOP "strategists like Karl Rove and Mike Murphy urged the GOP to abandon its stubborn opposition to reform. Instead, incredibly, the party adopted a more hawkish position, with Republicans in Congress rejecting even quarter-loaf compromises like the Dream Act and state-level officials like Jan Brewer launching new restrictionist crusades. This was, as Thomas Edsall writes in The Age of Austerity, 'a major gamble that the GOP can continue to win as a white party despite the growing strength of the minority vote'.”