The real problem with the American right: Aging, white radicals

[kpete]

The real problem with the American right: Aging, white radicals
Everyone knows the GOP has been unable to moderate its image or agenda. But less understood is the true reason why


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If the theory were correct, you’d think repeated election defeats would have set the process in motion already. Maybe a third defeat, in 2016, will catalyze a more rapid transition. But over time, I think the important differences between the Democrats’ old challenge and the challenge Republicans now face have started to show.

Democrats didn’t have an easy go of it, exactly, but they were able to modify their positions across a range of issues without, for instance, creating a left-wing-primary perpetual motion machine, or giving rise to a permanent population of resentful protest voters. Maybe Republicans can do the same. But the 2013 experience suggests they are so in hock to aging, white, conservative reactionaries that taking on new debts with minorities, gay people, single women and so on entails the risk of defaulting on the old ones.

Another way of saying this is that Republicans have depleted most of their crossover potential. And that’s a pretty novel problem for a modern American political party. It’s manifest in the GOP establishment’s pusillanimous relationship with conservatives. They didn’t cry “Hallelujah” when “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson preached a bigoted sermon about gay people and the Jim Crow South, but they also notably didn’t treat his remarks as an opportunity to instigate a Sister Souljah-style confrontation with the right. To the contrary, they rallied to Robertson’s defense and to a defense of conservative revanchism in general. And when they have mustered the courage to confront the extreme elements in their party, it’s been over tactics, money, campaigns, rhetoric and other shades of window dressing. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell will (finally!) criticize moneyed pressure groups for misleading voters and attacking Republicans, and they’ll dump on unrepentant hard-liners when they say insensitive but revealing things about gay people, poor people and ethnic minorities. But they haven’t cut the Gordian knot by admitting that these people’s motivating beliefs have failed or been rejected by the public. It’s a consultant-class conflict, not the deeper turbulence that would accompany an ideological course correction.

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Conservatives are everywhere actively preempting phantom Republican moderates. Unless that problem begins to resolve itself organically, from the grass roots up, I don’t think there’s any process Republicans can undertake to fix it.


MORE PLEASE:
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/22/the_real_problem_with_the_american_right_aging_white_radicals/