Sorry GOP, You Can’t Get There from Here_

“Politics is downstream from culture.”

Right-Wing Blogger, Andrew Breitbart

A guest January 11th NY Times OpEd by Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, lays out the fundamental barriers to the ability of the Republican Party to implement is current identity given the demographic changes sweeping the United States. Indeed the battle against “wokeness” is a losing struggle to prevent that tsunami of changing demographics and morphing values from redefining American culture:

“Conservatives often quote an aphorism by the right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” The point is that passing laws and winning elections don’t ultimately matter if your opponents control the entertainment Americans consume and the values they learn in school. And for many conservatives, it’s self-evident that the big shifts in American culture — fewer Americans identifying as Christian, more Americans seeing gender as fluid, a growing focus in universities and corporations on diversity, equity and inclusion — are creating a society hostile to the values that conservatives prize.

“Despite Republican power in Washington, these shifts have produced a deep gloom among the party’s base. A 2021 poll by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that white evangelical Protestants — the heart and soul of the modern Republican Party — hold a bleaker view of America’s future than any other major racial or religious group. They’re more than 30 points less optimistic than Black Americans, the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting bloc. As the conservative writer David French noted in 2019, ‘one of the most striking aspects of modern Evangelical political thinking is its projection of inevitable decline.’

“This pessimism is inextricably bound up with demographic change. A poll last year by the University of Maryland found that more than 60 percent of Republicans want to declare the United States a Christian nation. But according to the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans who identify as Christian has dropped to 64 percent as of 2020 from 90 percent in the 1970s. Almost 60 percent of Republicans believe that ‘American customs and values’ will grow weaker if white people lose their demographic majority. But non-Hispanic white people now constitute only about 60 percent of the population, down from around 80 percent in 1980, and already make up a minority of Americans under the age of 16.”

Yes, America, it is about those aspects of bias and hate we love to deny. It is racism. Antisemitism. Gender bias. Ethic belittlement. It is a powerful undercurrent, shared with many of the right-wing populist movements in Europe, in a belief that White Christians are simply superior. Harkening back to eras where missionaries of old went on global missions to “civilize” “heathens” and “darkies”… with an undercurrent of “they were meant to serve us” mixed with that awful “noblesse oblige.” It justified slavery, the exploitation of indigenous peoples by Spaniards and plantation owners alike. It allowed entire towns of successful post-Civil War descendants of slaves in Florida and Oklahoma to be slaughtered without consequence by Whites asserting their control over “uppity upstarts,” who did not know “their place.”

In the modern era, that White air of superiority posits an unwinnable goal… but still, it represents the backbone of the currently configured GOP. What’s worse, the majority of diehard Republicans know that… and realize that their elected leaders, no matter how right-wing they might be, simply cannot deliver that “White Christian” rule that underlies their entire platform.

“If last week’s 15 rounds of balloting for House speaker proved anything, it’s that Democrats like their congressional leaders a lot more than Republicans do… While Democrats again and again voted unanimously for Hakeem Jeffries, Kevin McCarthy endured insult after insult from his side of the aisle. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, mocked Mr. McCarthy for having ‘sold shares of himself’ to win the speaker’s job. Tucker Carlson said Mr. McCarthy’s ‘real constituency is the lobbying community in Washington.’ A [December poll] by Monmouth University found that Mr. McCarthy had a net approval rating of only 9 percent among Republicans. By contrast, his predecessor Nancy Pelosi had a net approval rating of 59 percent among Democrats.

“It’s not just Mr. McCarthy. According to that same poll, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has a net approval rating of negative 23 percent among his fellow Republicans, while the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has a net rating of positive 33 among his fellow Democrats. The Republican disdain for the people who lead them on Capitol Hill is nothing new: At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Mr. McConnell was booed. When John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, left the speakership in 2015, his approval rating was underwater in his party, too. Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader once considered the leading candidate to replace Mr. Boehner, was defeated for re-election in 2014 by a right-wing insurgent who spent only about $200,000 on his campaign.

“Why are Republicans so much more dissatisfied than Democrats with their congressional leaders? It’s not as if those leaders have been markedly less effective. Sure, Democrats have passed big spending and environmental bills during Joe Biden’s presidency. But while Donald Trump was president, congressional Republicans enacted a huge tax cut. They also engineered a transformation of the Supreme Court that is likely to tilt federal policy to the right for decades. No one can credibly claim that Mr. McConnell is a lousy legislative strategist.

“The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t win legislative victories. It’s that legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent, which is less about government policy than about American culture. Democrats worry about voting rights, gun control, climate change and abortion — enormous challenges, but ones that congressional leaders can at least try to address. What Republicans fear, above all, is social and demographic changes that leave white Christian men feeling disempowered, a complex set of forces that Republicans often lump together as wokeness.

“Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, who had voted against the last two Republican speakers before initially opposing Mr. McCarthy as well, claimed last year that the United States was imperiled by Democrats who ‘hate America, they hate people who love America, and they hate the religion and the descendants of the people who built America.’ That’s not the kind of problem a Republican speaker can fix.” Beinart. All the statistics, the demographic vectors, popular entertainment and even the clothing choices made by young people today are going opposite to this White Christian vector. Sure there will continue to be diehard adherents of this judgmental edict in all age groups. But they are increasingly on the wrong side of history… and hate that!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we cannot be surprised at the violence and gun-worshipping among this lagging rightwing unwillingness to face the inevitable… and we just may have to experience another explosion of civil bloodshed before the necessary change becomes our, and their, reality.