I’ll have thoughts at length later,
1. It gets right that winning over a greater share of nonwhites is a years-long project rather than something that can be done in an election season. Minds change, but they change slowly and people have to hear from you a lot before they will trust you enough to listen effectively. But then you need to have something to say…
2. The report way, way overstates the importance of amnesty as compared to economic issues as a problem for Republicans among nonwhites. The report understates the economic policy-related political problems of Republicans generally. As Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam pointed out, it isn’t the job of the Republican National Committee to offer specific policy proposals (though they didn’t let that stop them from urging amnesty), the exaggeration of amnesty and the studied avoidance of public perceptions of Republicans on economic policy paints a deeply misleading picture of our situation.
3. I’m all for recruiting more nonwhites into the ranks of the GOP leadership, but that, in itself, doesn’t get you anywhere. If every Republican spokesman in the country were nonwhite, it would not help the Republicans if all the spokesmen did was repeat the same old “cut tax taxes for the high earner job creators who built that” stuff.
March 19th, 2013 | 7:08 pm
[...] 1. It gets right that winning over a greater share of nonwhites is a years-long project rather than something that can be done in an election season. Minds change, but they change slowly and people have to hear from you a lot before they will Go to the Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
March 19th, 2013 | 10:55 pm
I’m entirely in favor of the GOP adopting a more middle-class-focused policy agenda and rhetoric. But I view with skepticism of predictions that this will significantly increase the Republican share of immigrant and minority voters. There is a cultural dimension to the attraction of immigrants and minorities to the Democrats that all the good policy ideas in the world will not touch, even for the upwardly mobile and entrepreneurial among these groups. To put it bluntly, the Democrats portray themselves as a coalition of “out” groups that are displacing the declining “core” of the country, whose party is the GOP. For an immigrant or minority voter, to vote Democrat is a matter of pride: an expression of one’s racial or ethnic identity and a rejection assimilation. And the Democrats are the party of the ascendant and most visible elites – Wall Street financiers, tech billionaires and executives, professionals of all kinds, academics, journalists. Upon moving to a new country, who wants to join the losing side?
March 20th, 2013 | 10:02 am
What follows is just personal fantasy talk. But before I get into the personal fantasy, a quick analysis.
Every Republican running for office says he or she is for cutting spending and the reach of the state, but campaign promises don’t always hold up. So how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? A year or two ago the Heritage foundation issued report cards on the sophomore class of House Republicans and scored them on spending. I took that scorecard and compared it to the Christian Coalition scorecard on social issues. Lo and behold, it turns out that if you want a candidate that will stick to his guns on spending and limiting the reach of the state, the best thing you can do is vote for the most socially conservative candidate. As it turn out, Republican politicians that are weak on social issues are also the Republicans that are most likely to be weak on spending and restraining the reach of the state. So now onto my fantasy…
Here’s what I want the leaders of the Republican Party to say (and I’ve only got five more minutes so this doesn’t even qualify as a first draft): “The Republican Party is the party of freedom. But ‘freedom,’ unmoored from Truth (with a capital T), is nothing more than fashion. The Republican Party welcomes all creeds, regardless as to whether you are a Protestant, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, an Eastern Orthodox, or even an atheist. But Republicans will always stand our ground that mercy should be shown for children still in their mother’s womb and that the government can never claim legitimate authority to redefine marriage and family. Some people say those issues aren’t important to them, but if those issues aren’t important, no other restraint on the state will hold. How can I say that? Most of us are spinning today at the massive expansion of the government into our lives and the now $16 trillion of debt funding that expansion. Some say that’s all Republicans should talk about and put the concerns for life and family aside. They say that the health of the party and of the country depends on that. But what they are really saying is that if the Republican Party will just stand down and let the government redefine marriage, family and life itself, then somehow, after all that, the government will become a conservative lapdog on things like marginal tax rates. That is a fantasy if we’ve ever heard one. So we are going to stand our ground and fight for mercy for the unborn and we are going to fight against the government redefinition of marriage. Those are the toughest fights. And the Republican Party will win those fights or it will die trying. And whether you support us or oppose us, we can promise you this: the party that wins those fights is the only party that can restrain the government from the total power it craves.”
As I said…just a fantasy…and it’s looking more and more loony every day.
March 20th, 2013 | 7:46 pm
DJF,
“To put it bluntly, the Democrats portray themselves as a coalition of “out” groups that are displacing the declining “core” of the country, whose party is the GOP. For an immigrant or minority voter, to vote Democrat is a matter of pride.
I’d put it a little differently. For some nonzero fraction of nonwhite voters, the Democrats seem to be the party that considers them as much the “core” of the US as anybody else, but they don’t get that vide from Republicans. I think that has something to do with Obama’s improvement among Asian-Americans from 2008 to 2012 despite less favorable circumstances. Though that is an impression that is entirely anecdotal. Republicans used to face a similar problem with Catholic, eastern and Southern European whites. It should not be impossible to mitigate.
“And the Democrats are the party of the ascendant and most visible elites – Wall Street financiers”
That was less true in 2012, but that the Democrats can, in large measure, be the party of Wall Street (in 2008) and the Republicans still be the party of the rich points to a certain clumsiness among Republicans.
March 21st, 2013 | 1:48 pm
I was writing a response to Pete late last night, but, when almost finished, I hit the wrong key and it disappeared. Maybe I’ll try to reconstruct it later. The upshot was, as a matter of practical politics, Pete is not convincing me, and, at a theoretical level, I think his approach is affected by the categorical error – common among much of the American Right – that politics and culture can be kept separate. But, as always, I applaud Pete’s plucky optimism.
March 21st, 2013 | 4:32 pm
DJF, I hope to read your longer response as I always learn from our exchanges. I think that culture and politics interact and in complicated ways. I also think that Republican weaknesses among nonwhites is caused by multiple factors and will only be remedied (absent an apocalypse) by the use of multiple strategies. One of the biggest ones is that Republican arguments (or rather the arguments used by many prominent Republican spokesmen) don’t register with those who are already predisposed to agree with them. See the Republican presidential primary contenders (other than Santorum) on Obamacare.
But I also think that people don’t want to vote for a party that makes them feel like “outs” – or maybe to put a more positive spin on it they want a party to make them feel like ins. My totally unscientific sense is that some Asian-Americans looked at the Obama presidency as a cue that America belonged as much to them as anybody else. Some Tea Party rhetoric also possibly looked different to them than it did to many committed conservatives. Do I think Republicans were doing anything consciously to alienate Asian-Americans? Nope. Do I think they could do more to not seem like a party that combines white identity politics and high earner inertest group politics? Yes. The good news is that the Republican party that was seen as the representative of Yankee Protestants and the rich was able to win over many working-class and middle-class Catholics and Eastern and Southern Europeans – partly because Republican candidates were able to authentically talk to them as ins. It should also be noted that Reagan had vast amounts of practice in doing this.
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