Here’s a good point:
“This pulls the mask back a little bit on the Tea Party movement,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. “Adding riders against Planned Parenthood and gutting the environmental laws indicate that the Tea Party is focused on imposing a right-wing ideological agenda on the country and using the budget as a vehicle.”
But here’s an even better one:
Like Boehner, who complained that Democratic leaders were “snuffing out the America that I grew up in,” some Tea Partiers are jumping in a time machine. They can’t stop themselves from linking social issues to the budget.
Democratic leaders aren’t really snuffing out John Boehner’s America, Simple demographic change is doing it for them.
Last week’s release of national totals from the 2010 census showed that the minority share of the population increased over the past decade in every state, reaching levels higher than demographers anticipated almost everywhere, and in the nation as a whole.
It’s not fair to reduce these changes to simple racial diversification. For Republicans, the problem is how these brown people are going to vote. We’ve been through this before. The modern Democratic Party in the North was built on the support of Irish and Italian immigrants and their urban political machines. What did an Italian bricklayer in Newark have in common with a Nashville banker? About as much as a modern-day Tuscaloosan insurance salesman has with major New York Metropolitan Opera donor Charles Koch.
Many immigrants come from a culturally conservative background. This is certainly true of Latinos brought up in the Catholic faith and of Muslims. We might expect them to gravitate to the so-called pro-family agenda of the Republican Party. In time, this may happen, as it did with a good portion of the Irish and Italian communities. But Democrats welcome these immigrants while Republicans are in a near-panic about them. This suggests that neither side is being entirely rational about what this demographic change might mean for their electoral prospects. On the one hand, in the long-term we might discover that the country has become more culturally conservative, but we also might find that it has become more economically populist:
The increasingly nonwhite tilt of the youth population has profound implications for American politics into the distant horizon. The young, increasingly minority population is likely to view public investment in schools, health care, and infrastructure as critical to its economic prospects, while the predominantly white senior population might be increasingly reluctant to fund such services through taxes. The trends could portend a lasting structural conflict. (See “The Gray and the Brown: The Generational Mismatch,” NJ, 7/24/10, p.14.)
If we’re concerned about a future America resembling the America we grew up in, both sides have reason to worry. The big difference between the two parties is that Democratic areas of the country are already used to racial and religious diversity. A bit more of it isn’t troubling to most Democrats. The modern Republican Party, on the other hand, has been carved out of racial anxiety, starting with the riots of the 1960’s and the ensuing White Flight from the cities. But even this old surety of American politics is beginning to break down, as we saw the traditionally Republican suburbs of places like Philadelphia and Detroit turn against the GOP in the latter years of the George W. Bush administration. These suburbs are increasingly diversified and moderate on social issues. And, while the Republicans made big gains in these districts in the 2010 midterms, they won’t be able to win them consistently as long as they continue to pursue a racially polarized Southern Strategy while threatening women’s rights.
In the short-term, the Republicans are more interested in disenfranchising minority voters than in attracting their interest in their party platform. There’s a small, closing window still available where Republicans can win by taking advantage of the white-majority status of most states and districts. Pushing white racial-anxiety serves their purpose and did wonders for them in the last election. But there is plenty of reason to doubt it can work for them in 2012, and certainly not far beyond that.
For conservative strategists, this means that they need to know when to take their foot off the racial-angst gas pedal and pivot. They will certainly make the effort, maybe no later than once the Republicans have decided on their presidential nominee. But, in the meantime, they’re creating a monster that they cannot fully control. For starters, they have had to mask the racial component of their appeal by wrapping it in religious and patriotic rhetoric bound together by strange original-intent ideology. So, we get stuff like the Tenther Movement that sees no role for the Federal Government outside of what was expressly provided in the original Constitution, including its first nine amendments. All amendments passed after the Tenth are illegitimate or suspect in some way. So, birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, as is the direct election of U.S. Senators.
It’s a strange spectacle, but it becomes understandable when you think about John Boehner’s statement that Democrats are trying to snuff out the America he grew up in. I hear Boehner say that and I think to myself that Boehner grew up in FDR and LBJ’s America, not Ronald Reagan’s. But he’s not talking about that. He’s talking about the white working-class bar his father ran. They were Democrats because the Democrats looked out for the working-class back then. But then the Civil Rights Movement came and the Democrats started looking out for the brown-side of the underclass. Then the country liberalized its immigration policy. And suddenly it didn’t look like the Democrats were interested in preserving the America that Boehner took for granted.
Race is still central to the political battles we’re having in this country, and it’s no surprise that a lot of white people are behaving very irrationally about having a black president. But there are a lot more reasons for people to feel anxious than the browning of America. Income inequality hasn’t been this extreme since before the Great Depression…before the New Deal…before the Civil Rights Movement. Economically, our country currently resembles the America of the 1890’s or 1920’s more than it does the country that we all grew up in. That’s what’s worrying Democrats. We feel like our America is being snuffed out, too…by people like John Boehner.
