BlackAsCoal
Gold Member
- Oct 13, 2008
- 5,199
- 530
- 155
Racial and cultural resentment have replaced the party’s small government ethos.
excerpts
Trump’s strategy, while winning him the GOP nomination in the short term, has likely only served to compound the long-term demographic and ideological problems the Republican Party has long known it faces. Over the past few decades, the GOP has remained largely white, less educated and older while the numbers of minorities in the country soared, college attainment rose and the millennial generation came of age politically. Alienating the country’s growing ranks of minorities is unwise on the sheer face of the numbers, and bad reputations can stick around for years; like sports teams and baldness, our political beliefs are passed down through generations and familial connections.
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Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country.
Most prominently, as has been said time and again, it is a party of breathtaking whiteness.
“You’re not going to do better than 59 percent,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, told me not long ago, citing the percent of the white vote that his candidate got in 2012 while winning 24 states. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, got only 56 percent of the white vote in 1980 but won in a 44-state landslide.
According to the American National Election Studies, the white percentage of the national vote overall has dropped fairly steadily from around 95 percent during the period from 1948 to 1960 to the low 80s by 1992 to 73 percent in 2012. The Republican Party did not keep pace with this change, nor did it do much to win younger voters. 2008 featured a gaping chasm between the over-65 vote and the 18- to 29-year-old vote: There was a 43-point difference between how the two groups voted, with the older crowd going for John McCain by 10 percentage points, even as he lost the overall election by a 7-point margin to Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.
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Howe’s theory for the racial animus of Trump supporters boils down to simple attrition: “Everybody who was reasonable seems to have gone home in 2012,” he said. Romney’s loss in 2012 discouraged many of the once-energized fiscal conservative activists.
“This isn’t the most artful way to say it, but it’s like, where do you go when the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people?” Howe laughed ruefully. “I think what you do is you say, ‘Well, I may lose but I can’t align myself with them.’”
The End Of A Republican Party
It's a long read, but it's an honest and intelligent assessment of the dire predicament that republicans find themselves in today.
excerpts
Trump’s strategy, while winning him the GOP nomination in the short term, has likely only served to compound the long-term demographic and ideological problems the Republican Party has long known it faces. Over the past few decades, the GOP has remained largely white, less educated and older while the numbers of minorities in the country soared, college attainment rose and the millennial generation came of age politically. Alienating the country’s growing ranks of minorities is unwise on the sheer face of the numbers, and bad reputations can stick around for years; like sports teams and baldness, our political beliefs are passed down through generations and familial connections.
---
Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country.
Most prominently, as has been said time and again, it is a party of breathtaking whiteness.
“You’re not going to do better than 59 percent,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, told me not long ago, citing the percent of the white vote that his candidate got in 2012 while winning 24 states. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, got only 56 percent of the white vote in 1980 but won in a 44-state landslide.
According to the American National Election Studies, the white percentage of the national vote overall has dropped fairly steadily from around 95 percent during the period from 1948 to 1960 to the low 80s by 1992 to 73 percent in 2012. The Republican Party did not keep pace with this change, nor did it do much to win younger voters. 2008 featured a gaping chasm between the over-65 vote and the 18- to 29-year-old vote: There was a 43-point difference between how the two groups voted, with the older crowd going for John McCain by 10 percentage points, even as he lost the overall election by a 7-point margin to Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.
---
Howe’s theory for the racial animus of Trump supporters boils down to simple attrition: “Everybody who was reasonable seems to have gone home in 2012,” he said. Romney’s loss in 2012 discouraged many of the once-energized fiscal conservative activists.
“This isn’t the most artful way to say it, but it’s like, where do you go when the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people?” Howe laughed ruefully. “I think what you do is you say, ‘Well, I may lose but I can’t align myself with them.’”
The End Of A Republican Party
It's a long read, but it's an honest and intelligent assessment of the dire predicament that republicans find themselves in today.
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