Are you ready for some failure?
The Huffington Post’s Thomas B. Edsall writes today that the modern GOP is returning to a “Southern” or “white-voter” strategy because “none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics.”
And to some extent, he says, it’s working:
The party’s opposition to President Obama’s agenda — particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan — is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president’s approval ratings among whites.
Although I disagree that the GOP’s opposition to President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan is “resonating” with “disaffected white Democratic voters,” I do agree that their latest “white-only” voters strategy did backfire in 2006 and 2008 and will fail again in 2010 because of, as Edsall puts it, “the ever-growing importance of the minority electorate.”
But won’t a new Southern Strategy also – and more importantly – fail in 2010 because we live in a very different United States than we did 40 years ago?
40 years ago, painting African-Americans as inferior, dangerous, and to be feared caused violent reactions to the work they were doing to advance civil rights. Now, however, most of us realize that this kind of blanket and blind fear is unnecessary. And although deep strains of racism and institutional discrimination still exist in the United States, any attempt to whip up mindless fear against African-Americans on a mass scale will fail. And even now when Latinos are being used in their stead, haven’t the majority of us learned enough through the civil-rights experiences of the last 5 decades that we no longer have the kind of knee-jerk, fearful reaction?
That said, it does seem as if exploiting the fear of an “immigrant-horde invasion” has been put temporarily on hold to make room for portraying our first African-American president as “The Other.” And it’s evident by the terms used now to describe him – “Muslim,” “non-citizen,” – that using terms normally associated with the demonization and dehumanization of African-Americans will no longer work (which is probably how he got elected in the first place).
So yeah, the new Southern Strategy might now be temporarily successful with 10 or 15% of the white populace who either still hate black people and/or are afraid of Muslims. But 40+ years of learning from history history, a generation coming of age in a country in which “bi-racial” is the fastest growing racial category, a fast-approaching economic recovery, and an Obama first term in which we will all be better off in 2012 than we were in 2008, should deal the final blow to any “white voter” strategy the GOP hopes to exploit.
In the meantime, we’ll all have to suffer through them trying to make it work.
