Jonah Goldberg and two sad ole white guys discuss on National Review how the Blacks, Asians, and all those ‘Others’ need to get with the program, be Americans, and learn to love the GOP. That will solve all the party’s current problems.
“I see that the way we will get the Hispanics and the other groups, the Asians, as part of the Republican Coalition is to get them first part of the great American Coalition. Make them think of themselves, not make but, persuade them to think of themselves primarily as Americans. Restore the overarching, all-encompassing concept of an American identity, which we used to have, which we knew how to bring about and which in the last 20 or 30 years very largely as a result of the democrats wanting to emphasize ethnicity rather than American-ness. We have lost that and frankly one of the reasons we have not regained it and doing very badly at the moment is because the Republicans have neither had the imagination nor the courage to think how they could appeal to these other ethnic groups as Americans and craft an appeal that won them over. They have got to do that.”
Do any of you sad, whining white guys own full length mirrors? And I mean that in the most sincere metaphorical way.
For decades the GOP has followed the letter of Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy. The GOP was still trying to deny the existence of this strategy, but a recording of Lee Atwater pronouncing it surfaced recently from the vault of history. Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
You cannot say ‘n*gger, n*gger, n*gger’, so you substitute code words. First it was forced busing. Then it was welfare queens. Most recently, it was illegal immigrants.
You know why these groups did not vote for the GOP? Because they have working eyes and brains, and they know when a group hates their guts, considers them inferior, and has used them for decades as whipping boys and girls to stir up the base racist, anti-anything other than white core of their voters.
The problem now is, the core Southern Strategy vote is just no longer big enough. The core demographics of this nation are changing, and changing fast, and the GOP will not be able to put together a national winning campaign that is rooted in racism, homophobia, anti-immigrants, and the poor anymore. Heck, the Middle Class in America has lost 40% of its wealth in the past three decades. Why should anyone below the top 1% vote for the GOP ever, ever again?
Eventually the GOP in its present state will be reduced to the core 27% of the American people who can be counted on to vote in total ignorance and against their best interest again and again.
27 Percenters – Those Americans who will predictably vote against their own best interests. In his seminal post on the Crazification Factor, John Rogers used the 2004 Obama/Keyes senate race as a measure: “Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.”
Or, as commenter Davis X. Machina phrased it:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
