Counting Coup

by digby

There has been a lot written in recent days about the religious right and the Democratic party’s attempts to gain their votes. I think I’ll let all that simmer for a while and examine the real problem with these quixotic crusades to get the most conservative people in the country to vote for the Democrats.

It’s not about politics and it’s not about religion. It’s about tribalism. The Republicanism is an “identity” movement in which member’s affiliation with the party is more akin to affiliation with clan or family.

All three Republican frontrunners — Giuliani, McCain and Romney — are suspected of not being true members of the tribe. And as with most tribes, the Republicans have a way for members to show their loyalty and courage even if they have been forced to spend years among the enemy and have adopted some of their ways.

Rick Perlstein illustrates how this works with an examination of Mitt Romney’s recent presidential announcement:

Mitt Romney is in trouble. In a deeply conservative party, the former governor of Massachusetts is a ghost of Republicanism past: a moderate. His presidential announcement speech read like a tribute to his father, the late George Wilcken Romney, who became a GOP shining star in the early ’60s largely because he was liberal enough to get elected and reelected governor in a Democratic state, Michigan. Mitt Romney held the event in his father’s state, in front of a backdrop–a hybrid car–that honored his father’s most famous accomplishment as an automotive executive in the 1950s: championing the Rambler, Detroit’s first fuel-efficient “compact car.” He said, “We have lost our faith in government–not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government,” as if oblivious to the heresy: Rehabilitating government as a good in itself is not the usual way of introducing yourself to voters in today’s post-Reagan Republican Party. Maybe Romney’s tried to shake it, but he just can’t: He carries progressive Republicanism around in his blood.

Which raises certain suspicions about that announcement speech. As the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) immediately observed, its location, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, is a “testament to the life of … a notorious anti-Semite and xenophobe.” Some observers wondered if perhaps this wasn’t intentional: If you want to prove to conservatives you’re no liberal, what better way than to announce on the former estate of a man who, as the NJDC also pointed out, was “bestowed with the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by Adolf Hitler”?

The campaign denies such calculations outright of course. “I think most people, no matter what your ideology,” spokesman Kevin Madden says, “saw that as a somewhat absurd criticism, given that it’s a museum, a place of learning, a Michigan landmark. Thousands of schoolchildren go through this place.” And he’s right: Thus framed, the charge is an absurdity. Praise the Lord, there is no electoral payoff in appealing to heartland memories of the Henry Ford whose Dearborn Independent reached a circulation of 900,000 featuring articles like “Jewish Jazz–Moron Music–Becomes Our National Music.”

Those memories no longer exist–except to the hair-trigger sensitivities of the likes of the NJDC, which put out their press release and garnered an AP article on the flap. But here’s something to consider: The Romney campaign has harvested benefits from that flap, whether it was intentional or not. Consider the sarcastic reflection of this denizen of the right-wing website Free Republic:

Allright, an AP hit piece! The MSM has more acute RINOdar than we. Real RINO’s don’t get rinky-dink MSM hit pieces such as this. This proves that the MSM believes Romney is a conservative, and therefore must be roughed up.

Translation: I used to suspect that Romney was only a “Republican in Name Only.” But now I realize: He bugs the liberal media. By the tribal logic of right-wing identity politics, that is enough–Mitt Romney now can be called a conservative

Now liberals have some tribal signals too, no doubt about it. But it consists of things like a stirring call for single payer healthcare or a denunciation of the war in Iraq. Reaching back to the past to notorious leftists to give a wink and nod to the base would be useless. If Bill Richardson, for instance, went to a Che Guevara museum to make his announcement the only meaning that would be conferred is that he’s a kook and it would actually lose him votes in the primary.

But a Henry Ford political revival is apparently all the rage on the right:

Half of the facility (the half not populated by futuristic kitsch and automotive souvenirs) is “Greenfield Village,” a Colonial Williamsburg-style living museum of glassblowers, blacksmiths, and one-room schoolhouses. And it is simply not credible that a son of the Motor State like Romney is unaware that, for millions of Midwestern tourists, a trip to Dearborn is as much about celebrating “innovation and transformation” as it is conjuring up the wistful nostalgia for the pre-automotive–and, by plain implication, pre-immigrant–America that Ford worshiped. And it is simply not credible that an alert and ambitious Republican pol like Romney is unaware that this Ford–the xenophobe–has been making a comeback in Republican circles. Former congressman J.D. Hayworth quotes him as a hero in his recent book Whatever It Takes: “These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.”

Every Midwesterner also knows that Dearborn is a city of many nations–Arab nations, specifically, more so than any American town. Is it entirely a coincidence that, folded into Romney’s otherwise forward-looking announcement speech, there was the now-de rigeur right-wing Republican line, “I believe homeland security begins with securing our borders”? Writes Hayworth of Ford’s doctrine of “Americanization”: “Talk like that today, and our liberal elites will brand you a culture imperialist, or worse.”

The Republican tribe has worked for decades on two separate tracks. They know that their real philosophy and agenda is repellent to the majority of Americans so they all agree to keep it more or less under wraps at election time. But they do have to prove to each other that they are for real and the way to do it is through coded language and angering the left into making them look like heroes to the tribe.

Perlstein writes about the masterful use of these coded messages from the master himself:

For the suspicious, Romney’s announcement in Dearborn recalled Ronald Reagan’s notorious 1980 campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi, mere miles from the site where, in 1964, Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers. Then, the symbolism was absolutely deliberate: Reagan pledged fealty to “states’ rights,” a concerted attempt to nudge the tribal identities of Southerners into the Republican column once and for all. But it didn’t mean Reagan, or anyone in his audience, was for bringing back Klan terrorism any more than Romney has Michigan anti-Semites dusting off their copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Reagan’s benefit from speaking at Philadelphia, Mississippi derived primarily from all that outrage that he spoke at Philadelphia, Mississippi. He stood up to the Yankees. He proved to Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and the rest that he felt their pain: tribally, he was one of them–just as Romney has just demonstrated oneness with conservatives sick of being called “fascists” by liberals.

Reagan provides another lesson for Republican aspirants who might be in trouble with the conservative base: past positions on issues don’t necessarily matter. As Romney himself notes, “On abortion, I wasn’t always a Ronald Reagan conservative. Neither was Ronald Reagan, by the way.” He’s referring to the time, in 1967, when Reagan signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation.

Of course, Reagan wasn’t always a Reagan conservative on most things, at one time or another. In 1967, in fact, in his first year as governor of California, he passed the biggest tax increase in state history. Except for a few scolds, conservatives proved entirely forgiving. Indeed, that was when they started plumping him for president. More important was that he got the tribal stuff right, the us-versus-them stuff–as when he confronted young people harassing him with make love, not war signs. He said it looked like they were incapable of doing either.

So you see the GOP base is not really concerned with issues or even God, Family, Country. They are about hating liberals. (Many of them are about hating dark or foreign liberals in particular.) We can present a thousand ten point plans and say they should vote for us because their economic interests lie with liberal policies, but it won’t make a bit of difference. We can point out their hypocrisy and flip-flops and it means nothing. Republican identity politics transcend such prosaic concerns as policy and political philosophy. It’s all about whether you are one of them. If you can prove that then they could not care less what you once stood for. The only thing that will trip you up is being insufficiently hostile to liberals once they have validated your membership. That will get you kicked to the curb in a Midland Minute.

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