Tag Archives: GOP

Trying to Understand

In a recent post, I noted that Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner–the well known polling and survey research outfit–has issued a report titled “Inside the GOP,” detailing conclusions from a variety of focus groups conducted with the Tea Party, Evangelical and Moderate factions of today’s Republican Party.

Some of those conclusions simply confirm the hunches of political nerds like me, who obsessively follow politics and government. For example, the report notes that “the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country–and their starting reaction is ‘worried’ ‘discouraged’ ‘scared’ and ‘concerned’ about the direction of the country and their powerlessness to change course.”

We sort of figured that.

Despite the disproportionate media attention generated by the Tea Party faction, Evangelicals continue to make up the largest bloc in the GOP base, and they focus far more on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion than either of the other factions. Evangelicals characterize the President as a socialist, as ‘worst President in history’ and as ‘anti-American.’ These accusations are echoed by the Tea Party faction. (For those of us who do not fall into these categories, these extravagant and overwrought accusations have a “never-neverland” quality to them–they make you want to scream things like “Do you even know what a socialist is?” and “Where were you when George W. Bush was President?)

The research paints a picture of dispirited moderates who wonder where their party went; however, it also notes that moderates are a rapidly diminishing presence in the party. They are “very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party.”

The report also acknowledges the Elephant in the Room (no pun intended).

The GOP base is “very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities.” As they see it, “Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities.” As the report delicately notes, “Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.”

There is a good deal more, and the entire report is worth reading. For those of us who wonder why the GOP has expended so much energy and vitriol trying to prevent working-class Americans from accessing basic healthcare, the answer is that  they are panicked by their conviction that “Obamacare” is the “end game”– a program which will cement voter loyalties to the Democrats.

The next explosive–and divisive– issue, according to the report, will be climate change. “Climate skeptics are a majority in the conservative factions.”

All in all, the report paints a picture of a party that has been captured by what used to be considered the fringe–or, more accurately, the fringes. And while those fringes overlap somewhat, there are major differences that do not bode well for what used to be a Grand Old Party.

I’ve been predicting a schism for nearly twenty years, so obviously I’m not a reliable soothsayer….but the divisions–both within the party and from the American mainstream–are getting pretty deep.

Comments

Sums It Up

One of my “virtual” friends recently posted the following to Facebook. It made me think–and it also made me sad.

I like universal health care not just for its moral reasons but because it encourages job mobility, entrepreneurship, takes the burden off our manufacturing industries, and leads to cheaper health care costs. I like to spend money on public education because it makes our workers competitive in the international market. I want cap and trade because reliable and knowledgeable humans who are super-awesome at economics tell me that the long-term costs of inevitable climate shift will be worse than doing nothing. I want solar power and other green alternatives in order to ease climate change and to make us energy independent so people in countries half a world away with thousand-year-old grudges will stop yanking us around. I favor separation of church and state because, like Thomas Jefferson, I don’t want people of faith to have other faiths shoved on them by the power of the government.

In other words, as “Lefty” as all of that makes me today, I’m pretty much a 1972 Republican.

How did we get to the point where these sensible positions made him–and so many others– unwelcome in the GOP?

Comments

When Politics Becomes Religion

Back in the olden days of the Cold War, I was convinced that Communism was less about economic theory and political reality and more about quasi-religious fervor. By the 1980s, it had become abundantly clear that Adam Smith had been right, and that centrally-planned economies didn’t work, but evidence had long been irrelevant to the true believers. (Maybe the USSR version wasn’t working, but that was because they weren’t doing it right.)

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague made a similar observation about the Tea Party folks. “You can’t talk them out of their positions by pointing to facts, because it’s a religion, and religion is all about faith–not fact.”

Now, noted GOP pollster and consultant Mike Murphy has made much the same point.

“There seem to be two schools of thought in GOP. One group, the Mathematicians, look at the GOP’s losing streak and the changing demography of the country and say the party needs to make real changes to attract voters beyond the old Republican base of white guys. Not just mechanics, but also policy. They want to modernize conservatism and change some of the old dogma on big issues like same sex marriage. I’m one of them. The other group, the Priests, say the problem is we don’t have enough ideological purity. We must have faith, be pure and nominate “real conservatives” (whatever that means; the Priests are a bit slippery about their definitions) who will fight without compromise against liberalism. The Priests are mostly focused on the sins we are against; they say our problem is a lack of intensity; if we are passionate and loud enough, we will alert and win over the rest of the country. The Mathematicians hear all this and think the Priests are totally in a 55-year-old white guy echo chamber of their own creation and disconnected from the reality of today’s electorate. They worry more about what the party should be for, and how we grow our numbers. They think the Priests fail to understand it is not 1980 anymore and votes are not there for the Old Pitch. The Priests hear the Mathematicians and think they are all sell-outs.”

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research recently conducted a series of focus groups for a project they titled “Inside the GOP.”  The report included a number of trenchant observations–more on those in a forthcoming post–but the finding most relevant to Murphy’s lament is that the current divisions in the Republican party aren’t only between the Priests and the “Mathematicians” (aka the dwindling number of moderates). There are also two varieties of Priests: Evangelicals and the Tea Party. And while both are faith-based and fervent, their dogmas and doctrines differ.

Religious wars are always the ugliest…..

Comments

An Intriguing Analogy

A recent article in The New Republic made the argument that our current governmental paralysis is actually evidence of insufficient partisanship–if partisanship is understood to require concern for the long-term best interests of one’s political party rather than one’s own political fortunes.

In other words, if the crazy caucus really gave a rat’s patootie about the fortunes of the GOP, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing.

In fact, as the article notes, there has been a massive shift away from traditional partisanship, enabled by donor-ideologues like the Koch brothers and Super Pacs, and abetted by districts-as-fiefdoms created by gerrymandering.

The analogy that struck me, however, was the comparison of traditional political parties to old-fashioned corporations, enterprises whose executives used to aim to build long-term value and market share.

In the 1980s, that long-term focus changed. The new mantra became “shareholder return,” and financiers (aka corporate raiders) swept in with leveraged buyouts, greenmail, private equity, etc.

As we saw with Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital portfolio, some companies survived these raids but many were wiped out. Cruz, the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson, DeMint, and even Paul Ryan should be seen as something like the corporate raiders of American politics. They are trying to extract maximum value from their current positions in the system, with little regard for the long-term future of the Republican party.

Worth pondering.

Comments

The War Between the Americans

I recently read an article that traced the roots of Tea Party zealotry all the way back to 1938 and the first signs of the eventual split between Northern and Southern Democrats. The trajectory of intensely racialized politics continued through Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the Reagan realignment, giving us today’s “rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican Party.”

That’s a nice way of saying that today’s GOP is a party of Southern white guys, and a lot of them really resent the fact that we have a black President.

My husband and I have friends from the South who still refer to the Civil War as “the war between the States.” I used to think that phrase–and the hostility it conveyed–were remnants of a time past.

Granted, when I went to school in Chapel Hill, NC, in the sixties, there were still separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Just a couple of years ago, a docent at the Rice Museum in Georgetown, SC, told us how unfair it was that slaveowners weren’t compensated for the loss of their “property” via the Emancipation Proclamation. (And before you hit that comment button, anyone who has listened to lame “jokes” at Northern cocktail parties  knows racism isn’t limited to the South.) But America was making progress! These retrograde attitudes were on the wane. Or so I (naively) thought.

And then Barack Obama was elected, and–rather than confirming progress– the boil was lanced, the rocks lifted…pick your metaphor.

Now let me say up front that it is perfectly possible to disagree with this–or any–President about policies and priorities. It is perfectly acceptable to criticize a chief executive, and to do so loudly and vehemently. And there are plenty of Republicans whose disagreements with this President are simply that: disagreements.

But only the willfully blind can deny that there are also frightening numbers of people who are clearly and obviously motivated by racial animus.

These are the people whose “policy disagreements” with Obama emerged before he had policies, and whose “principled” disputes included birther conspiracy theories, allegations that he was/is a Muslim, a Kenyan, a socialist, a Nazi–“policy disputes” that took the form of cartoons portraying him as a monkey, pictures of the White House with watermelons on the lawn,  vile comments posted to news stories, and the behavior of Tea Party crowds like the recent rally at the White House featuring Sarah Palin, a confederate flag, and demands that the President “put down the Q’uaran.”

Joe the Plumber (remember him?), never the brightest bulb in the room, wasn’t exactly subtle last weekend when he posted an article on his blog titled: “America Needs a White Republican President.”

These aren’t policy disputes.

The vitriol has been hard to miss–unless, of course, you prefer not to see it. And there are a lot of otherwise nice people–people who would never burn a cross on someone’s lawn, or make overtly racist remarks–who clearly prefer not to see what is glaringly obvious. (A lawyer of my acquaintance recently professed surprise when someone commented on the outpouring of racism in the wake of Obama’s election, saying he hadn’t noticed anything of the sort. Evidently he doesn’t get the offensive forwarded emails, or read the comments sections of the daily paper, or listen to Rush Limbaugh or his clones.)

I don’t know what we can do about the seething hatred triggered, ironically, by the election of a black President. Historians confirm that racism, Anti-Semitism, homophobia and the like tend to spike during periods of economic uncertainty, and we can hope that as the economy improves, it will subside.

I do know one thing: Edmund Burke was right when he said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

At the very least, the good people need to speak up. Pretending not to see the ugliness and vitriol just feeds the hatred.

Who’d have thought the Civil War would last so long…..

Comments