Can Identity Politics Save the Right?
Fresh out of other options, the Republican Party's bid to regain power is likely to come in the form of a pander to "real Americans."
from The American Prospect
Mark Schmitt | May 27, 2008
There are two points at which a political party or an ideological faction can find its voice and begin to claim power. One, of course, is when it is at the height of confidence and electoral success, like Ronald Reagan's conservatives in 1981. The other is when it has hit bottom, when there's nothing more to lose, no constituencies to feed, no illusion that anything in the current strategy is working, no excuse for caution.
The Republican Party today is certainly not in the first position. But, with party identification favoring Democrats by the widest margin in 16 years, and Republicans losing even the battle for campaign money, the party may be close to the second. Parties in nonparliamentary, winner-take-all systems don't disappear. The recent resurgence of the British Conservative Party is a reminder that even after a decade of futility, a new leader, a vision, and impatience with the incumbent party can turn things around quickly. But for now, with Republican state parties in shambles, with no chance of reclaiming a congressional majority any time soon, and suffering, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned, "a catastrophic collapse of trust," the GOP could be hitting that bottom, and grabbing desperately onto a frayed lifeline--the identity politics of American-ness--in a last bid for survival.
To appreciate the value of hitting bottom, consider what happened to the Democratic Party and liberalism. All through the Reagan and first Bush eras, and again in the Clinton years, Democrats always had something. The institutional heart of the party was in the House of Representatives, and during the Reagan era, the complacent assumption that "we'll always have the House" meant that many important Democratic figures didn't feel they had much stake in whether Michael Dukakis won the presidency or President Clinton succeeded. After the Gingrich takeover of Congress in 1994, the Democratic Party's purpose became identified with the personal survival and renewal of the Clinton presidency. Only after 2002, when the Democrats finally lost everything, when they reached the political equivalent of living in their car, did the path to renewal begin. Accelerated by the disaster of the war and awareness of their own complicity in it, enraged by the media and energized by new voices such as the "netroots" bloggers and the stellar candidates of 2006 and 2008, the Democrats proved that a party, and even its liberal wing, can turn things around almost completely in just four or six years.
(Continued here.)
from The American Prospect
Mark Schmitt | May 27, 2008
There are two points at which a political party or an ideological faction can find its voice and begin to claim power. One, of course, is when it is at the height of confidence and electoral success, like Ronald Reagan's conservatives in 1981. The other is when it has hit bottom, when there's nothing more to lose, no constituencies to feed, no illusion that anything in the current strategy is working, no excuse for caution.
The Republican Party today is certainly not in the first position. But, with party identification favoring Democrats by the widest margin in 16 years, and Republicans losing even the battle for campaign money, the party may be close to the second. Parties in nonparliamentary, winner-take-all systems don't disappear. The recent resurgence of the British Conservative Party is a reminder that even after a decade of futility, a new leader, a vision, and impatience with the incumbent party can turn things around quickly. But for now, with Republican state parties in shambles, with no chance of reclaiming a congressional majority any time soon, and suffering, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned, "a catastrophic collapse of trust," the GOP could be hitting that bottom, and grabbing desperately onto a frayed lifeline--the identity politics of American-ness--in a last bid for survival.
To appreciate the value of hitting bottom, consider what happened to the Democratic Party and liberalism. All through the Reagan and first Bush eras, and again in the Clinton years, Democrats always had something. The institutional heart of the party was in the House of Representatives, and during the Reagan era, the complacent assumption that "we'll always have the House" meant that many important Democratic figures didn't feel they had much stake in whether Michael Dukakis won the presidency or President Clinton succeeded. After the Gingrich takeover of Congress in 1994, the Democratic Party's purpose became identified with the personal survival and renewal of the Clinton presidency. Only after 2002, when the Democrats finally lost everything, when they reached the political equivalent of living in their car, did the path to renewal begin. Accelerated by the disaster of the war and awareness of their own complicity in it, enraged by the media and energized by new voices such as the "netroots" bloggers and the stellar candidates of 2006 and 2008, the Democrats proved that a party, and even its liberal wing, can turn things around almost completely in just four or six years.
(Continued here.)
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