{"id":638,"date":"2012-11-13T10:37:47","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T15:37:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=638"},"modified":"2012-11-13T10:37:47","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T15:37:47","slug":"post-election-thoughts-where-do-republicans-go-from-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2012\/11\/post-election-thoughts-where-do-republicans-go-from-here.html","title":{"rendered":"Post-Election Thoughts: Where do Republicans Go From Here?"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the chagrin of 57 million Americans, including yours truly, Barack Hussein Obama remains the 44th<\/sup> president of the United States.\u00a0 Legions of commentators from across the political divide have been busy supplying us with seemingly endless advice for the GOP.<\/p>\n

Remarkably (or perhaps not so remarkably), there has emerged something of a bipartisan consensus on this score.\u00a0 In the final analysis, the orthodoxy boils down to this: the Republican Party can\u2019t expect to win any future elections unless it \u201cappeals\u201d to non-whites.<\/p>\n

Certainly, the proverbial Monday morning quarterbacking has assumed other forms as well: This year\u2019s Republican candidate, like far too many of yesteryear, has never been a true conservative; Mitt Romney didn\u2019t embrace the Tea Party and \u201cconservative\u201d talk radio; Romney was insufficiently aggressive toward Obama, and so forth.<\/p>\n

But the line that appears to have gained the most traction, the idea that has been springing like a geyser from the heads of Republican and Democratic pundits alike is that Republicans must <\/em>start to appeal to racial minorities.<\/p>\n

We can be sure that this talk will continue indefinitely.\u00a0 Thus, we should bear in mind the following considerations.<\/p>\n

First, the very same people who are now speaking as if this is some great epiphany that dawned upon them the day after Election Day have been making this claim for years (and<\/em> years<\/em>).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Second, the GOP has indeed <\/em>been appealing\u2014or trying to appeal\u2014to Americans from every shade of the rainbow for a long, long time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The perpetual controversy surrounding Abraham Lincoln\u2019s reasons for waging war upon the Confederacy aside, the fact remains that thanks to this Republican\u2014and a whole lot of others who he deployed to the battlefields\u2014black American slaves were liberated from their bondage.\u00a0 Yet this achievement came at the cost of the deaths of some 700,000 whites (a number that, relative to our current population, translates into the millions).\u00a0 But this wasn\u2019t its only cost.\u00a0 Whites were injured in even greater numbers than were killed, their property was decimated on an immense scale, and, as importantly as anything else, nothing less than a reimagining of the federalized structure of American liberty began to occur.<\/p>\n

Ann Coulter is as outspoken and visible a contemporary Republican polemicist as any, and yet in her most recent book, she goes to great lengths to remind readers that from the time of Reconstruction until the 1960\u2019s, Republicans repeatedly voted for all manner of measures\u2014\u201ccivil rights\u201d bills\u2014designed to enable blacks to achieve a greater degree of liberty.<\/p>\n

Forty-one years ago\u2014one year before I was born\u2014Republican <\/em>President Richard M. Nixon signed \u201caffirmative action\u201d into law.<\/p>\n

Republican President Ronald W. Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegal Hispanic immigrants back in 1986.<\/p>\n

More recently, Republican President George W. Bush pushed hard, albeit unsuccessfully (thank God), for another amnesty for many millions more of illegal immigrants from south of the border.\u00a0 Bush also made sure that the most distinguished posts of any cabinet were occupied by blacks in his<\/em> cabinet (think Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice).<\/p>\n

The conventional wisdom can have all of the force of any phenomenon of nature. Just an iota\u2019s worth of thought, though, and\u2014on this score, at any rate\u2014it dissolves before our eyes.\u00a0 With the greatest of ease, anyone who chooses to think about the matter for more than the duration of a sound bite could supply an interminable list of examples of GOP minority outreach.<\/p>\n

Yet none of this appears to have done a bit of good.\u00a0 In fact, matters appear to have actually worsened for Republicans.<\/p>\n

Personally, I believe that if\u2014if<\/em>\u2014the GOP can survive, its best chance lies in speaking to those issues that are nearest and dearest to the hearts of whites<\/em>\u2014working class, middle class, and lower middle class whites particularly.\u00a0 These are issues like massive immigration from the Third World\u2014both legal and illegal\u2014\u201caffirmative action,\u201d crime, and the importation of inner city pathology to white working class neighborhoods via section eight housing and the like.<\/p>\n

This approach would also include frequent invocations of liberty-friendly narratives featuring America\u2019s founders and the forging of new narratives underscoring the linkage in blood between our founders and ourselves: our founders are our fathers <\/em>and liberty is the inheritance that they bequeathed to us.<\/p>\n

The much touted \u201cHispanic vote,\u201d though not insignificant, is still not nearly as potent a force as it is being made out to be.\u00a0 For example, whites are a minority in the heavily Hispanic state of Texas, and yet the 75% or so of the whites there who voted for him enabled Romney to win it handily.\u00a0 Conversely, as Steve Sailer observes, in places like Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania\u2014states with a minimal Hispanic influence\u2014Romney lost by virtue of his failure to garner a sufficiently high percentage of the white vote. <\/em><\/p>\n

Republicans will not go this route, so, if they insist on \u201creaching out\u201d to non-whites who have thus far shunned all of their efforts, I suggest another strategy: abandon the rhetoric of color blindness.\u00a0 If ever we needed proof that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are most decidedly not <\/em>color blind\u2014not that any remotely conscious observer of the contemporary scene should need any more proof than that with which their eyes and ears have been providing them every day of their lives\u2014the election of 2012 supplied it in spades.<\/p>\n

In other words, precisely because non-whites are <\/em>so intensely color conscious, they simply do not believe Republicans when the latter assure them that they are color blind.\u00a0 And the more Republicans insist upon this, the less that blacks, Hispanics, and other non-whites believe them.<\/p>\n

Thus, Republicans are perceived as liars.\u00a0 <\/em>Of the Republican, the non-white voter can all too easily think: \u201cThou dost protest too much!\u201d\u00a0 Paradoxically, it is exactly because Republicans spend so much of their time trying to convince non-whites that they do not see color that they actually diminish <\/em>what little credibility they already have among non-white voters.<\/p>\n

Less pander and more candor in this arena just might help Republicans electorally.\u00a0 At the very least, it can\u2019t hurt them any more than they have been harmed already.<\/p>\n

There is, though, a third strategic possibility: Republicans should consider promoting <\/em>lots and lots of Islamic <\/em>immigration to America.\u00a0 The political benefits that they can anticipate from this course of action should not be underestimated.<\/p>\n

First, such Muslims will for the most part be non-white, so the old canard that Republicans are anti-immigrant and \u201cracist\u201d will be exposed for the lie that it is.\u00a0 They would have knocked out these two birds with one stone.<\/p>\n

Second, morally, Muslims are very conservative.\u00a0 They are committed to \u201cfamily values.\u201d President George W. Bush once said with respect to Hispanics immigrants that \u201cfamily values\u201d don\u2019t stop at the Rio Grande River.\u00a0 Well, neither do \u201cfamily values\u201d don\u2019t stop at the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

Third, religiously, Muslims are very conservative.\u00a0 Unlike many of America\u2019s Christians, and its Catholic Christians particularly, Muslims tend to take their faith very seriously. This promises to serve both Republicans and the country well inasmuch as militantly religious Islam will impede the onslaught of militant secularism.<\/p>\n

In summary, I suggest that in the wake of last week\u2019s election, Republicans should consider doing one of three things: (1) Concentrate harder on appealing to working class, lower middle class, and middle class whites; (2) Abandon the defensive rhetoric of \u201ccolor blindness\u201d; (3) Promote an exponential increase in Islamic immigration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first strategy is the easiest.\u00a0 But it is also the most honest. Above and beyond anything and everything else, this is indeed what the GOP should do. \u00a0There is a complex of issues that has affected the targeted whites dramatically.\u00a0 These are the issues to which Republicans (and all politicians, honestly) should speak more often, for these issues have not only proven to be deleterious to the interests of whites, but the long-term interest of the country.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second strategy is also more truthful than anything that the GOP has been trying. At a minimum, it stands a not unreasonable chance of gaining Republicans more respect from non-whites\u2014even if it doesn\u2019t necessarily gain Republicans more votes from them (Malcolm X, recall, endorsed Barry Goldwater, and he had said that he has more respect for the Southern segregationist than the Northern liberal, for the former at least lets you know where he stands).<\/p>\n

It is inconceivable that Republicans of all people would so much as consider the third strategy. Truth be told, I wouldn\u2019t want for them to do so.\u00a0 In submitting the third strategy I intend to do nothing other than mock Republicans for all of their talk about granting amnesty for illegal Hispanic immigrants.<\/p>\n

For all of its idiocy and destructiveness, strategy #3 is no more idiotic and destructive of the Republican Party and the country than is amnesty for illegal Hispanic immigrants and general acquiescence in the Hispanicization of America.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the chagrin of 57 million Americans, including yours truly, Barack Hussein Obama remains the 44th president of the United States.\u00a0 Legions of commentators from across the political divide have been busy supplying us with seemingly endless advice for the GOP. 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