Steve Kornacki did a pretty interesting interview with Newt Gingrich in Salon magazine. Gingrich can be intriguing when he isn’t running for office, and his ideas for how to revamp the Republican Party have merit. I want to highlight just one exchange from the interview and then makes some observations.
KORNACKI: When you look at the Republican Party’s relationship with African Americans and Hispanics, what is the message you want to deliver to those voters?
GINGRICH: I’m for a big rethinking. I don’t think a modestly reformed Republican Party has any real chance of competing in the absence of a dramatic disaster. If there was a big disaster, people would be driven away from the Democrats, but in the absence of a really big disaster, if you want to compete in a difficult but not impossible world, we’re going to have to have very large fundamental rethinking.
The first thing you have to do with African Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans and Native Americans is go there. They don’t need to come to you; you need to go to them. And when you go there, listen. Phase one is not going there to tell about you. Why is it we can have entire cities that are disasters, that we can have 500 people getting killed in Chicago, we can have Detroit collapsing, we can have the highest black unemployment teenage in modern history, and no Republican politician can figure out that going there to say, “Gee, shouldn’t we do something to make this better”? And then talk about it jointly, so it becomes a joint product — that it’s not “Let me re-explain conservatism.” I don’t mean to walk away from conservatism, but we need to understand conservatism in the context of people who are talking with us.
Let’s begin with the fact that there were 59 precincts in Philadelphia and 9 in Cleveland where Mitt Romney won zero votes. This wasn’t fraud. It was a clear signal that conservatism as it exists today is a complete non-starter in our cities. It isn’t even given a chance. It convinces almost no one. Gingrich seems to understand this.
He understands that the Republicans don’t understand what these voters want. They might understand some of their problems, like gun violence, gang activity, lousy schools, broken homes, lack of opportunity. But they don’t live those problems. They don’t talk to the people who are working in these communities every day to keep kids out of gangs or to improve the schools or to self-police a neighborhood or to create jobs and opportunities. They don’t see how the government helps these communities or how it provides resources to the people who are fighting for these communities. They don’t see how their policies hurt. You have to talk to people to understand why your proposals are seen as so ridiculous and hostile that there are whole communities where not one person will vote for them, even by accident.
The thing is, once you immerse yourself in these neighborhoods and become acquainted with the organizers who are fighting for a better life for their communities, you will become invested in joining the fight on their terms, which is to say that you will see why your ideas are irrelevant.
Whatever conservatism that can survive sustained contact with poor urban minority communities, that is the conservatism of a new Republican Party that can compete for the black and Latino vote.
I think that Gingrich’s advice is solid, but I have a better way. Don’t send some statewide office-seeker into Compton like an anthropologist. Instead, recruit candidates to run in urban districts and allow those candidates to craft their own message that appeals to their neighbors. If they run on national Republican principles, they’ll be lucky to get 10% of the vote. If they run on a set of values that can actually win, those values won’t look like Republican values…at first. But once some of them win and join the Republican Caucus, the party will be diversified and modernized. Over time, the party would become more fractious, but also larger and more competitive.
Democrats from FDR’s time until now, have always known that party unity gets fewer results than a majority coalition. If the Republicans want to retain their conservative uniformity, they’re doomed. But if they can allow some very left-wing members within their coalition, they can prosper just as the Democrats did through the middle of the 20th-Century with some very right-wing people in their party.
