“The White establishment is now the minority…The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.”
—Bill O’Reilly, November 6, 2012
y now we’ve all noticed that some of the adults in the Republican Party are talking about the party doing some soul-searching, making it more appealing to women, Latinos, young people, and, yes, even African-Americans.
These Republican grownups, folks like political gurus Steve Schmidt and Mike Murphy, realize the electorate is changing before their eyes and know that Republicans have to change too.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Not only are the extremists in control of the Republican Party not going to change—can anyone imagine Rush Limbaugh embracing immigration reform, for God’s sake?—it makes no sense for them to change, given what it is that really animates most of them.
There are two major forces that serve to energize the base of the Republican Party today. One is fundamentalist or quasi-fundamentalist religion, which is waging war against Constitution-blessed secularism. The other is an increasingly acute cultural anxiety over the browning of America.
Those two forces meet and merge in the mind of Pat Buchanan, who wrote three years ago:
In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
…The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges.
You see, to people like Pat Buchanan—I give him credit for honesty—a diverse nation is not a nation at all. True Americans must all have European blood and belief. All others represent an existential threat to the country.
About one-half of all American children under five have Buchanan skin, a fact that makes Buchanan’s thin cultural skin crawl. And there is evidence that Americans are slowly embracing the secular nation that our Constitution establishes.
Thus it is that those in the Republican Party who care deeply and disturbingly about the threat to the “European-Christian core of the country” —those misguided but earnest folks who nominated Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, for instance—are not going to tolerate any talk of moderating the party’s positions on the social issues.
The Republican Party platform in 2016 will look much like it did this year, a document that reeks of uncompromising extremism, such as the party’s stance on reproductive rights and the status of homosexuals. The party primary process will continue to produce extremist true-believers who honor that extremist document.
Because people who are moved by faith and fear, folks who are on a mission from God or who are defending their waning cultural dominance, will not be deterred by an unfavorable election outcome. They will not be coaxed or coerced into compromise by people in their party who don’t share their enthusiasm for lost-cause crusades.
So it is that we will continue to see Tea Party-types dominate the Republican Party until such time that there is nothing much left to dominate, at least on the national scene. Republicans will always have a voice at the local and state level, even a voice in the Congress, but with uncompromising crusading conservatives in charge of its national prospects, it will one day become irrelevant as a governing national party.
When that happens, when the browning of America forces Republicans into waging only regional and state and local battles, then perhaps the adults can take the party back.
And America would be all the better for it.
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
The Glenn Beck Review
/ November 8, 2012I hope the R’s don’t learn their lesson. Glenn Beck has already announced that he’s going to “double down” on his reactionary push toward the 19th Century. If it takes 2-3 generations for the R’s to grow up, maybe, just maybe, the Dems will get some problems solved…like too much $$ (and any corporate $) in elections.
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 9, 2012Couldn’t agree more with Democrats focusing on campaign reform. Problem is, there are so many other issues in front of it. Won’t likely get fixed until an Obama Court takes it up some years hence. And that’s too bad. It’s our number one problem.
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thgeneralist
/ November 8, 2012And it seems it would be a great idea for the Left and its newly targeted acquisition, the Middle, to want to work hard for those growing, diverse constituencies — rather than taking them for granted. Let’s make it cooler and cooler for people to shed inherited conservatism and embrace progressive ideas and the promise those plans offer the people and, therefore, the nation. We’d best not be silent. We’d best not be lazy. If this seems like a Mr. Obvious statement, so be it.
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 9, 2012It’s not a Mr. Obvious statement. We’ve got to keep on the offensive. Just look at what happened to the anti-choice movement when Democrats began trying to keep quiet on that issue so as not to piss off voters. The anti-choicers grew stronger and bolder and in some states women will be suffering for it, even as we dealt them a setback nationally.
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Jim Wheeler
/ November 8, 2012LikeLike
R. Duane Graham
/ November 9, 2012Thanks, Jim. Those are fantastic quotes. It may be a bit skewed toward the negative, since Twain wrote a lot of its material while he was in a bad way, but I recommend “Letters from the Earth,” which was my first introduction to the side of him represented by your selection of quotations.
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thgeneralist
/ November 8, 2012Jim and Duane —
Can you imagine Twain as the consummate blogger? Oh Yeah! I can.
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Jim Wheeler
/ November 8, 2012What an interesting thought, Generalist. Absolutely!
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 9, 2012Ahhh! Unfortunately, he’d likely get lost in the forest, which would be a shame.
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brucetheeconomist
/ November 9, 2012I suspect Limbaugh is privately overjoyed Obama won. His personal life suggests he doesn’t give damn about anyone other than himself (to be clear: no, I don’t think this is true of all conservatives); and during the next 4 years he’ll rake in more loot, and listeners because of President Obama. Under Romney he’d be much diminished from now, unless Mitt was a closet moderate maybe.
Maybe there is a prospect of a more center right, more libertarian in orientation, third party?
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 13, 2012Bruce,
As a long-time listener of Limbaugh, from about 1988 through about 2007 or so, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter to him who wins, at least in terms of his radio gig. He has his audience so trained that he makes money no matter if Republicans are in power.
Third parties are not viable options in America, and probably will not be in the foreseeable future. In our presidential system, folks form political coalitions before the election (thus the two-party system) instead of forming them in a parliament after an election (the governing party and its opposition).
People on the extreme left and right forget about that salient fact regarding American politics. Even if we had all kinds of options, like in parliamentary systems, various parties would have to come together to form a governing coalition. We just do it before the election in our system.
Duane
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