We in Wisconsin have seen any number of assaults by the Republican Party on people and organizations opposed to their political aims, indeed on the fundamental rights of those people. Not satisfied with the passage of constitutionally infirm legislation requiring the poor, the feeble, the old to present official pictures of themselves in order to be permitted to vote, they’d like to relieve a merely fanciful burden on poll workers by outlawing same-day registration. Apparently they consider this worth the money it would cost to implement, but the Governor does not. It just shows who is willing to pay what to disenfranchise poor folks and young folks who move around a lot and tend to vote democratic. And without the law the Governor would have had one fewer vote last fall, that of his son.
But that’s old news. Late news is that the Democrats had 53% of the legislative vote in that election, but won only 39% of the seats. Thanks to a really ingenious (it must be admitted) plan of redistricting that Republicans paid their lawyers handsomely to devise in secret.
It’s been a theme, really the main argument, of this blog to show why most of the people who vote Republican do so against their own objective economic interests, to try to understand why they do it, and to give them reasons to stop doing it. Just as the class analysis indicates the Republicans ought to be a minority based on the class interests it endeavors to protect and the number of people who actually belong to those classes, so it is a minority party by every measure except the occupancy of the seats of power. At least in Wisconsin. I assume without knowing that similar stories could be told about at least some of the majority of states where the Republicans control the legislatures.
So they just don’t represent that many people. Then how do they get so many votes? They can’t do it solely and only by making it harder for their opponents to vote. They can’t do it solely and only by frightening people about their class interests and fooling them about which class they belong with. They have to give people who don’t share, or who merely imagine they share, the class interests they represent some other kind of reason to vote for them.
That’s how the Republication party became the home of a bizarre collection of minority beliefs collectively labeled “social conservatism,” but the whole of which virtually no Republication – no one living citizen – accepts.
What’s in the collection? In no particular order:
· That the Founding Fathers meant this to be a Xian nation.
· That the mainstream media are part of a liberal conspiracy to deceive the public about etc., etc.
· That abstinence is the only morally acceptable form of sex education and birth control.
· That the moral obloquy of fetal stem cell research outweighs its benefits for medical science and the sufferers of disease, and the entire legislative agenda of NRLC.
· That the planet is not getting warmer and that the scientists who say so are part of the liberal conspiracy.
· That good people with guns is the only constitutional answer to bad people with guns.
· That any and all advocates of gun control really just want to take away “my guns,” and the entire legislative agenda of the NRA.
· That homosexuality is a curable moral condition.
· That marijuana is dangerous because it leads users to become addicted to even more dangerous drugs.
· That tithing is a religious duty.
· That the world was created with the fossils already in it.
· That homo sapiens is not a primate by origin, and the entire biblical account of creation.
· That marriage must always and only be a union between a male and a female.
· Ditto sex acts.
Social conservatives believe something obnoxious about conception too, but it’s difficult to express in a way that makes what is obnoxious about it transparent.
See how many moral judgments they make in order to defeat their political enemies? It’s not even nearly a complete list. Mind you, I’m not even trying to include in the list beliefs that range from covertly to unconsciously openly racist, etc., etc.
The point is, then, even if only two or three percent of the people feel strongly enough about any one item on the list to let it decide their vote – I’ll do the math. Ten items at 3% per item is 30% of the vote. What percent of the people are self-described social conservatives? What proportion of them shares the class interests of the electorate Republicanism serves, that is, the Few? Almost all the social conservatives are additive because the real Republications are, let’s just say for the sake of argument, better educated than that. They learned tolerance in college and money afterwards.
Or to do the math again: embracing social conservatism alone is still not enough to win elections because all the positions are minority positions. But take the 3% who may be expected based on objective economic interests to be and vote Republican, and add the 15-20% whom they’re frightened or fooled into voting with them on policy grounds. And then you add 30% more who are equally frightened or fooled, and who also happen to hold one or more of those noxious minority beliefs. How far have they gotten? To return to the original argument, the Republicans have to game the elections and the laws regulating the right to and manner of voting. If that effectively subtracts or neutralizes 2-5% of the vote, and social conservatism adds 30%, the 15-20% of the people who normally vote Republican might elect their candidates.
So it’s not about the 47% who happen to be entitled o something from the government. It’s about the 47% who happen to have been collected together around a set of minority beliefs and, secondarily, class interests. Reagan didn’t proceed entirely this way because he didn’t have to. The last honest Republican president was Eisenhower, who could have chosen to become the Democratic candidate instead, but decided, let’s say again for the sake of the argument, that the best way he could help his soldiers build a middle class life was to run under Republican principles as they then existed.
Now, Romney, to get the nomination, had to pretend to share most of these beliefs, and then, to win the election, to turn his back on most of them.
Is this the situation of a viable political entity? A bizarre set of ideological minorities that can only be kept together by a consummate liar? Could it now be possible to get rid of the Republican Party and replace it with….? I’m not sure what that new thing would look like so I can’t say what would make it possible. I can say the Republican Party looks about dead to me. If it hadn’t had real principles (A. Lincoln, T. Roosevelt) in its distant past, it would be.
