As I've been saying for quite some time, the Republicans had an opportunity (certainly as they would see it) in the Great Recession to establish themselves as a desirable alternative party to the party of Barack Obama; but they overreached extremely. They focused at both the state and federal levels not on 'economic' issues, but on attacking abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, demonizing and repealing the Affordable Care Act without proposing a viable alternative, slinging mud at the president as 'not an American,' and, curiously, constructing an entire political identity around being privileged, for which living on a golf course near a country club is the universal American dream.
That the American public rejected all of this in 2012 tells us something very important, beyond the obvious fact that the American public is not so fond of the cynical politics of the Romney-Ryan campaign and the wider GOP today: the American public cares about a lot more than 'economic' issues. And we should! And the fact that we've resisted the economic-issue pandering of a candidate selling himself as a businessman who can right the ship, and the fact that we've refused to let ourselves be held hostage to the idea that we must trade contraception, marriage equality, women's reproductive rights, and basic social provisions for the indigent and poor for a shot at a better 'economic' deal with 'job creation' shows a layer of good sense and fortitude in the American electorate that I was pleasantly surprised to witness. Witness Romney supporters' predictable turn to posting data on the futures market or imperiled quotes from small business owners and you can see that this is something Republicans today simply haven't figured out yet: it's not 'the economy,' after all; and maybe it never was.
But there's something else going on here that helps explain why Americans seemed not to have voted on (the incumbent's) 'economy' this election. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, among other conservative pundits on the media circuit last night, candidly named this factor the 'minority problem,' or the fact that, as O'Reilly put it on Fox, 'the white establishment is now the minority.' He went further to say that the 50% of the American people--not those representing 'traditional [white] America,' but those voting for Obama, 'want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.' Following up on this, Republican pundit Mike Huckabee noted, rightly, 'I think Republicans have done a pathetic job reaching out to people of color.'
In an election in which significant majorities, some of them quite staggering, of voters under 30, women, African-Americans, and Latinos voted for Obama, Huckabee's comment rings true. The more interesting question, though, is why doesn't the Republican party reach out and find ways to appeal to minority voters, given that the minority vote turnout wasn't all that hard to predict?
My speculative answer is that, as O'Reilly's tone and association of 'traditional' America with 'white' America suggest, Republicans truly are the party of the white establishment, unconcerned (at least, perhaps, until this election) with the concerns of US minorities. A quick sample of Republican issue stances that affect, Latinos, African-Americans, and women disproportionately reflect as much: opposition to the Dream Act and the idea that illegal immigrants should be squeezed and marginalized to the point at which they 'self deport'; opposition to basic health, unemployment, food assistance, and education programs that benefit the (disproportionately black) urban poor; and the twisted approach to abortion and contraception that denies women the agency to make health decisions on their own (to say nothing of how a contorted discussion of rape was regularly brought into this conversation as a kind of blessing if it resulted in impregnation). If we bring marriage equality and minorities of sexual orientation into this conversation, we can see that the Republicans have even further shunned a growing majority of Americans.
The Republican response to being at severe odds with all of these demographics was not to reach out and compromise or find common ground on policy, but to (candidly) try to suppress voter turnout, noting blithely that higher voter turnout in general, and voter turnout from a more demographically representative portion of the American public, will almost always yield a Republican loss. This choice to try to suppress the minority vote rather than reach out to minority voters was a deliberate ideological choice by Republicans, not a miscalculation or accident.
What this all suggests to me is that the Republican party is one that wants to pull up the drawbridge of white establishment privilege, comprised as such primarily of people who are rather happy with their institutionalized privilege, and have found a way to justify ideologically--by this every man for himself, social darwinist mentality--the fact that being sensitive to the needs of people who haven't historically had that kind of privilege in US society might mean facing their own.
My late grandfather, for example, was a Democrat, but probably agreed with most of the principles of today's Republicans. In his youth, as part of a family of Irish immigrants in a period in American history in which establishment types were wary of immigrant families like his disrupting the social order, requiring or wanting assistance, and taking jobs away from 'real' Americans, there would have been a similar kind of (Republican) attitude, despite that my grandfather still looked like the people who would question his role in American society. Urban Democrats surely pandered to people like him--an Irish steelworker--while post-New-Deal establishment Republicans worried that they were the ones without a voice. We have a new wave of US immigrants now, as well as a progressing minority population that fights hard with incremental gains to achieve that elusive 'American dream.' Pity that my grandfather's generation and their children would so readily fight to pull up the drawbridge now. This is America; this kind of change is kind of the whole point of it all. And the great thing about America is that, despite those who look upon the progression of this nation as a potential threat to establishment privilege, we find ways to continually broaden that access to privilege. This election reflects just such a sentiment. A breadth of Americans do want 'stuff' and 'things.' But these 'things' are not government handouts in the crude way O'Reilly assumes. What Americans want is an even playing field, not a game fixed for the likes of the presidential candidate we turned away last night.
