Does the GOP have any intention of becoming more than a party of older white people? They “say” they want to change and be “more inclusive” but do they really? Really? It doesn’t look that way based on pretty much all of the evidence. Off the top of my head I can’t think of even one minor area where any change has become evident in the Republican Party, but there are dozens upon dozens of examples every week of mentally-deficient, racist, authoritarian, blindly anti-science, voter suppressing Republican hi-jinks.
How many votes, really, can the so-called “Southern strategy” still squeeze like turds out of a bloated, hick white electorate, when younger and better-educated whites aren’t inclined to want to buy what the obviously IQ deficient Republicans want to sell them force on them in the first place? And the House seems ready to kill any sort of immigration reform, so they’ve written off Latinos. As in “fuck you, you’re never going to vote for us anyway” written off.
I don’t think Republicans realize how stupid they look to the rest of us. The “marketing message” they send. If they did, why would they continue to humiliatingly beclown themselves, often on a national stage? Did you watch the live webcast of the Texas Senate abortion filibuster? I was glued to it for hours and one thing that struck me was (literally, I’m not trying to be arch) how terribly DUMB the Republican pols looked. They appeared, as a group, to the naked eye, to be excessively thick.
When they’d switch the camera over to where the Democrats were, the ‘crats looked like normal people who were frankly astonished at the authoritarian idiocy of what the GOP pols were getting up to. It was some of the most riveting “reality TV” I’ve ever seen.
But talk about a reality check: Surely there must have been plenty of pro-life Americans who watched that webcast, too, and they saw the same thing everyone else saw, normal people on one side and the residents of Hooterville (with a supermajority in the Texas Senate!) on the other. At a certain point, issues like pro-choice and pro-life will become separated from matters like forcing corporations to pay “living wages” and more economic/survival matters. Will even pro-life Christians still side with a GOP that, for instance, doesn’t believe in the minimum wage?
What has traditionally worked for the GOP on a national level no longer works and they are wildly flailing, without a fucking clue about what to do about it. A coalition of idiocy can only really last so long…
Even if the GOP won every southern state and Indiana, that still relegates them to a regional party status and one that will become increasingly marginalized as red states like Texas flip blue in coming years and as more deeply red states turn more, shall we say, er, Confederate.
The writing is on the wall in Texas, with her Latino population (and newly energized Democratic women). Racist or anti-immigration politics were popular with California Republicans within recent memory, keep in mind. Look what it got them, a permanent Democratic super-majority in the state. The chances of the GOP having a resurgence in California are dead. The GOP is basically dead here. They can’t will elections and they don’t even try anymore.
In the clip below, Rachel Maddow brilliantly sets up the white Republican pins and then knocks them all down. First up the new revelations about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s openly racist staffer.
Via Raw Story:
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, reported Tuesday that Rand Paul’s director of new media was an avid supporter of the Confederacy who celebrated John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. The aide, Jack Hunter, had served as a chairman for the League of the South and warned America would no longer be America if white people were not the racial majority.
The same aide was hired by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to write a book. Maddow noted that DeMint was now head of the Heritage Institution, which faced criticism earlier this year after publishing a report on immigration that was co-authored by a man who believed Hispanic people were inherently less intelligent that white people.
“Should the Republican Party be just the party of aggrieved white people, even to the extent that it may stray occasionally into Confederate territory in order to do that?” Maddow wondered. “Do you want that in order to maximize every possible white vote you can get out of an electorate that is less and less white all the time?”
Apparently they do. What other options do they realistically have?