All parties are
coalitions. The Republican Party, in its present form, is a particularly weird coalition
of evangelical conservatives, tea-party libertarians, and rich people. All
three groups exhibit their own form of fundamentalism. The evangelicals have
the Bible, the libertarians have the American Constitution, and the rich people
have a breathtaking sense of entitlement.
The acceptable
face of what binds these three together is the belief in personal
responsibility. As a libertarian, you want to defend your own piece of land
with your own gun without help or interference from the Government. As a
Christian, you’re answerable for your moral choices to Christ who is your
personal saviour. And as a corporate leader, you’d like to hire, fire, drill,
liquidate, pollute, foreclose, move offshore and accumulate without consulting Washington
bureaucrats, while continuing to pay less tax than your secretary.
These freedoms
constitute the Party’s super-ego. Its id
looks a lot like an ageing, angry white guy. As the demographics shift against
it, the Party becomes more entrenched in its own prejudices. Fox News and the
radio shock jocks help to shore up its support, but inadvertently disable its leaders
by keeping them in the same bubble of misinformation. Losing hope of winning
the public argument, it increasingly puts its faith in non-democratic
strategies.
In states where
Republicans are in power and the results promise to be close, attempts at voter
suppression are big right now. Requiring a voter to present a driving licence with
a current address on it would certainly stop dead people from voting. It would also
discourage the young, the old, the poor and the transient. Sending white
volunteers to patrol polling centres in black neighbourhoods is another way of
discouraging the wrong kind of voter, as is advertising the right date for the election
in English and the wrong date in Spanish.
As well as
purging the voter rolls, Republicans have been busy in recent years purging
their own party, in some cases replacing experienced, moderate congressional candidates
with callow ideologues. The unintended consequence of these purges is a purge
of popular support. African Americans don't much like a party that habitually
portrays the elected President as a sinister interloper, who only got into college
through affirmative action, governs on behalf of welfare recipients and is too
stupid and lazy to do the job. Latinos don’t want to have to carry
documentation on the street to prove they’re not illegal immigrants. Women
would like their health insurance to cover birth control without their
employers being allowed to veto it on moral grounds. Young people just don’t
get see why gay rights are such a problem.
It’s not easy
being a Republican these days. If you’re running as a candidate, the list of
what you’ve got to sign up to keeps growing. An unelected fiscal guru called
Grover Norquist has you sign a pledge never to raise taxes. The National Rifle
Association demands that you love guns and give the right answers on gun issues.
Worried about gun violence? Get a gun. High
school massacres? Arm the teachers. The evangelical wing holds you to increasingly
intrusive policies on women’s healthcare. And of course you’ll be expected to
denounce Darwin and to reject global warming as a liberal myth.
If you deviate in
a primary election on any of these, you can expect to be demolished by
fabulously expensive TV ads funded by anonymous
donors, thanks to a recent ruling by the Republican-leaning Supreme Court.
And if you win the primary, just like Romney you’ll have to get good at dodging
and obfuscating in the hope that the general voter never finds out what you
actually stand for.
My money is on
Obama to win. My biggest concern is that having won the argument, and won over
the majority of voters, he might still lose the election.
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