Real Americans Vs The Others

by digby

Mark Schmitt has a terrific piece up today on the state of conservatism and the Republican party and what it's left with after its massive failure under George W. Bush. Do read the whole thing. The most important thing about it is that he defines something we've all observed as a form of identity politics, which in this election particularly, is a very, very clever insight:

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party's issue positions have evolved over the years, "there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood," whereas Democrats "attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: ... intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays--people who identify with the 'pluribus' in the nation's motto, 'e pluribus unum.'" In case it's not clear, in Frum's Latin, "pluribus" means "parasites," and he tells us helpfully, "As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger."

In Frum's book, this ugly bit of identity politics is carefully nestled within thousands of words about policy. And this is how the code is supposed to work. The GOP's attack on "liberals" was always an attack on people not quite like "Americans"--secular, cosmopolitan, educated, egalitarian....

The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the "pluribus" categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain's inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics.

Traditionally, the phrase "identity politics" has referred to the Democratic coalition's caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close. Obama is not Jesse Jackson; Hillary Clinton is not former Rep. Pat Schroeder. He chose to campaign on national reconciliation, she on bread-and-butter economics and her expertise on military affairs. Whereas McCain--a man whose known positions on the war and on the economy are deeply unpopular, whose other positions are endlessly shifting, whose party and ideology are rejected--is recast entirely in terms of his biography, his honor, his character, his American-ness.

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus "pluribus," unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain's slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn't salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else--ideas, competence, governance--is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, "The American President Americans Are Waiting For."



Conservatives have been coming to this moment for a long time. The last two elections were really only lightly garbed in ideology. Here's none other than George Will laying out what a weakened position the republicans have really been in since 2000. The ground has actually been shifting for some time now:


Republicans must remember that Bush's 2.4 point margin of victory in 2004 was unimpressive: In the 12 previous re-elections of presidents, the average margin of victory was 12.9 points. Bush's 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004 was the third-smallest for a re-elected president (Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton won 49.2 percent in 1916 and 1996 respectively). Kerry's 48.3 percent was the largest ever against a president being re-elected. (In the 12 previous re-elections, no losing candidate received more than 46.1 percent; nine of the losers received less than 45 percent.)


And that was after he lost the popular vote in 2000 and then had a huge spike in popularity after 9/11. The fact is that they barely ever had a governing coalition. And yet, after 2004, we were reading endless ridiculous paeans to the all-powerful Republicans and their permanent majority of Real Americans. It was hype then and it is certainly hype now.

As Schmitt points out, it can only work again if:

... the media and many Democrats--believe it will. We are easily spooked by the confident swagger of the Republicans, who not so long ago were plotting permanent world domination. But then, so was Bear Stearns.

The Republicans were never as strong as everyone thought they were. (And, yes, they are probably not as weak as we think they are now.) The country has been on a knife's edge for a long time, nearly evenly divided for some years now. And in my view, after eight years of failed Republican governance, the public will naturally try the other side.

The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to "our" country against their will (long before "we" did) comprise a majority. So even if they Republicans manage to make this election a referendum on the "Real Americans" vs "The Other," which is all they can do, they can't win that way anymore. The Real Americans are outnumbered by the rest of us. The takeover is complete.


Update: It has come to my attention that I was perhaps being a bit too cutsie in my final couple of sentences. A regular reader, who writes under the name "Cap and gown" writes in:

[O]ne crucial factor that undergirded support for the New Deal and the welfare state was a change in attitudes towards the working class. Whereas at the turn of the century the working-class was viewed as un-American and thus undeserving of public sympathy or support, by the 1930s the image of the worker had decisively changed. The worker came to be seen as essentially American which in turn legitimated programs designed to help workers such as unemployment insurance, old age pensions, etc.

In contrast to Schmitt’s argument, and by extension to your own, therefore, I do not believe that it is necessarily that “others” now outnumber “real Americans.” Rather, the concept of who is a real American has grown in the eyes of most voters while the Republicans cling to an older version of who is a “real American.”


That's actually what I meant ...
.