There has been a lot of talk about identity politics this election cycle. Is Barack Obama the black candidate? Is Hillary Clinton the female candidate? Will Latino voters go for Democrats or Republicans? Is the Democratic nomination about wine drinkers versus beer drinkers? Is (as David Brooks loves to say) demography destiny? Of course, although there is some value to asking these questions, the media obsession with it reduces the possibility that the election conversation will be about things that really matter such as...oh, I don't know...issues. Whether people are going to be able to keep their homes during the mortage crisis or their jobs during the recession. Whether we will be able to stop global warming before it becomes irreversable. Whether we will finally have a foreign policy that reduces the number of enemies rather than increasing them. Whether all Americans will finally get the affordable healthcare and quality education that they deserve. Stuff like that.
Identity politics are always symptoms of a pathology. They are signs that something is wrong with our political system, either because people feel so cut off from the posibility of progress through participation in the political process that they are forced into a defensive crouch or because they have become so emotionally overinvolved with a set of policy positions that those positions begin to define who they are in some fundamental ways.
The Republicans have an identity politics problem of the latter kind. A real serious problem. And nobody is talking about it.
For a very long time now, conservative activists (particularly of the talk radio variety) have been demonizing "liberals." Here are just a few examples cultivated easily and at random by Googling the word "liberals":
I could list a million of these, many of which are even more over-the-top than Coulter's comments, and many of which published in what are considered to be fairly mainstream media outlets by well-known media or political figures. This has long been a successful tactic used to rile up the base. But a funny thing happens when you spend a lot of time and energy defining your opposition as some fundamentally "other" type of person. You end up defining yourself as well, and in ways that are more far-reaching and comprehensive than are immediately obvious.
Take, for example, the conservative fear of liberal foods:
More seriously, look at how the Republicans are at war with themselves over who is a "true conservative." John McCain is not a "true conservative" despite supporting the war in Iraq and a possible war in Iran, despite having John Bolton's seal of approval for being more of a hawk than the Bush administration, and despite consistently supporting conservative Supreme Court nominees, because he has been for campaign finance reform and a path to citizenship. Mike Huckabee is not a "true conservative" despite the fact that he wants to constitutionally eliminate the separation of church and state and that he supports a highly regressive consumption tax because he talks about poor people.
This identity politics wing of the Republican party has defined "conservatism" extremely narrowly as a fundamental way of being in the world rather than as a set of policies and governing philosophies that can be adopted judiciously and selectively. According to these folks, conservatism isn't about what you think. It's about who you are. If you're not a Reaganite as they define it, then you are an evil liberal who is aligned with Hitler and "the terrorists." (That's their language, not mine.) And they have been so successful at embedding this worldview in their base of supporters over the last couple of decades that they have created a situation where compromise for the sake of their long-term interests is simply impossible. After all, if what you are compromising is who you are, then you must be morally lost.
The irony, of course, is that Ronald Reagan--not the unattainable ideal that the identity politics conservatives have created but the real flesh-and-blood politician--won by convincing a sizeable number of Democrats that we could all be conservatives. Everyone could be "saved," not just the select few. This was in contrast with the (partly fabricated and partly real) perceived elitism of the Democratic party in the 1970s.
Now, the shoe could be on the other foot. Somehow, the Evangelicals have turned into Calvinists. As a result, there are a lot of reasonable people with conservative beliefs on select issues who are increasingly disenchanted with the Republican party. The Democratic party has an opportunity to convince all of the many voters that identity conservatives are condemning to the "pit of fire" that there is another path to salvation. But in order to do so, we need a nominee who knows how to run a revival.
Comments are closed for this post.
