Why The Republican Revitalization Plan Won’t Work
by David Atkins
Republicans are in trouble and they know it. The demographics of the country are tilting increasingly against them as younger and minority voters flee to the Democratic Party. By 2016 several more states will be in play for Democrats than in 2012, and by 2020 Texas may well be a blue state. Not even gaming the electoral college can save them if that happens.
Facing certain demographic doom, the Republican Party has a plan: dial down or at least hide some of the most virulent racism and sexism in their ranks in order to woo women and minority voters, while playing up the economic libertarianism that fuels much of the Tea Party base and made some inroads among many younger voters.
It sounds simple enough. How hard can it be to emphasize libertarianism while deemphasizing the less popular social and religious prejudices that have turned off so many voters? Pass immigration reform, drop opposition to marriage equality, stop talking about rape, and focus on the core economic issues. Some of the base would balk, but where else would they have to turn? The Democratic Party? A few of the base might stay home, but that wouldn’t be remotely as disastrous as losing 70% or more of a rapidly growing Latino population, plus 55% or more of the female vote.
Or so it might seem. But it won’t be so easy. That’s because much as it might seem that libertarianism as a political philosophy needs no racist or sexism supports, that’s not the case. Libertarianism depends greatly on racial and religious prejudice to exist because the examples from around the world and throughout history of societies with insufficient government regulation are so disastrous that they must be attributed to inherent genetic or cultural failings. That’s why one of the Right’s favorite quotes is John Adams warning that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It was Adams’ presumption that the freedom given to the People by the Constitution would result in anarchy absent social controls. And such it is with modern libertarians. As I have said before:
This, by the way, is why racism, theocracy and libertarianism go hand in hand, when from a philosophical point of view they should have little to do with one another. The negative effects of the lack of a central government are so obvious in developing countries that wherever the social order fails as in Somalia, it must have been due to bad religion, or the defect of having been born to an inferior race.
Ron Paul fans must reassure themselves that such things would never happen to white, Christian folk. They’re immune from the Somali problem by virtue being of different stock and different values, you see.
In fact, racism and prejudice are absolutely essential to the conservative program. Progressives have been at pains to point out for some time now the close similarities between the God, guns, gays, and anti-government message of the American conservative movement, and its counterparts among radical religious fundamentalists elsewhere in the world. They’re mirror images of one another, different only in degree but not in kind.
The Right’s only defense against this obvious argument is that we’re different. Different by virtue of being Christian. By virtue of being White. by virtue of living in God’s Chosen Nation. It’s the only fallback explanation for why economic libertarianism is supposed to work here when it has failed so spectacularly everywhere else.
People understand this notion intrinsically even if they cannot articulate it. That’s why those without racial and religious prejudice don’t fall for libertarianism: we understand that the difference between us and Afghanistan or Somalia is neither genetic stock nor the object of our religious devotion, but rather our luck in being the agents rather than the victims of colonialism, as well as our dedication to the progressive compacts of civilization. We understand at a fundamental level that Ron Paul cannot possibly believe as he does unless he also believed that white Americans will be some exempt from the same natural rules of political science that doom every other nation with inadequate controls on the exploitation of private power.
And that is why the Republican revitalization won’t work. Without the crutch of racial, sexist and religious prejudice, libertarianism itself becomes a joke. Social conservatives make this point constantly to their well-heeled economic royalist friends, but it seems that their advice will go unheeded. The likes of Rand Paul and Paul Ryan aren’t about to let the Todd Akins and Christine O’Donnells tell them how to grow the party, nor should they. But the ascendant libertarians are going to find their summit to the head the GOP a lonely place indeed.
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