The GOP Needs More Than Shriner’s Hats

As soon as we’re old enough to go to kindergarten, we learn not to mock others who aren’t like ourselves, particularly not for being dumb or—how many after-school detentions have been handed down over the too-eager use of this word—“retarded.” Being special comes in all forms, and so on.
But apparently, we promptly unlearn this lesson the instant we enter politics. During campaign season, barely any pleasure feels more delicious than brutally making fun of the people who support the other guy. To hear conservatives tell it, Barack Obama’s followers were nothing but a bunch of impressionable bobby-soxers fainting at the feet of a matinee idol.
Liberals, for their part, had so much fun with elderly person jokes that they put the Golden Girls writers to shame. Wonkette called McCain’s fans “mouth-breathing old wingnuts.” And after contemplating the crowd at a McCain rally, one commenter on the liberal blog ThinkProgress mused, “Is dementia contagious?”
Culture-in-decline Cassandras like to wail that this “your-side’s-supporters-are-idiots” attitude is a new thing. But actually, it’s as old as the Republic. Consider the pro-slavery Richmond Examiner’s haughty depiction of its political adversaries in 1856: “The abolitionists … have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen.” I guess mouth-breathing is just the new saucy.
But what was new this year is this: Some of us began looking on our own fellow travelers with scorn. It started in earnest at the GOP convention in September. One right-wing relative of mine, hardly a diversity activist, called me up to bemoan the lily-white, wrinkled GOP delegates. “What’s with all these old white guys wearing Shriner’s hats?” she asked.
Indeed, the scene did look more like a Brady Bunch 50-year reunion than a group of regular—and regularly varied—Americans. My relative wasn’t the only Republican who felt awkward looking at the party’s supporters. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. told me he got his own call from a black Republican friend at the convention who half-jokingly begged him to come up to Minneapolis to improve the optics: “We need you here!”
Conservative wunderkind Matt Continetti put the problem most bluntly. “When you look at the ethnic composition of Obama’s coalition, you see that it’s kind of a mini-America,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard. “About two-thirds of Obama’s supporters are white and a third minorities. The Republican coalition, by contrast, is white, male and old.” Ouch.
Now, on the one hand, who really cares? Nobody ever said a political coalition has to look like a Benetton ad to work. But it’s less that the GOP is losing trendy population groups than that it’s losing the growing population groups. A growth-oriented investor wouldn’t put money in a business that served only the cohorts John McCain won, whites and the elderly, unless—no way to put this delicately—the service that the business provided was funeral planning.
In 30 years, whites will be a minority in America; the Hispanic and Asian populations are on track to double during that time. Meanwhile, the GOP’s appeal to minorities—which has long been fragile—is diminishing. McCain widened Bush’s 2004 de%uFB01cit with Asian voters by six points, and his Hispanic de%uFB01cit by 11 points.
This could hardly be more alarming, since McCain may be the single most courageous senator out there in terms of defending Hispanic immigrants. (Remember his screw-you-Tom-Tancredo ad entitled “God’s Children”?) If McCain stumbled so badly, I hate to think how Mitt “They Should Go Home” Romney will fare in four years.
The statistics raise a darker possibility: What if America is just outgrowing the GOP for good, like a kid shedding a too-small pair of jeans? This can happen. In Turkey, the secular party is losing ground as religiously Muslim Turks move to the cities and get political. The message still works, but unfortunately, the people who aren’t receptive to it are the ones who are multiplying.
It shouldn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason that only old, white, male people—hey, that’s Continetti speaking, not me—want money returned to their pocketbooks, the core goal of the GOP. But, as every high-schooler knows, reputations are hard to shake.
Is there hope for a party left behind by demographics? Here’s a sentence that may never before have been typed in American politics: Look to Louisiana for an answer. There, Republicans have seized the “post-racial” mantle by championing two young reformers of immigrant background, Indian-American Gov. Bobby Jindal and Vietnamese-American Joseph Cao, who just toppled corrupt Democrat Rep. Bill Jefferson.
The lesson: Don’t look down on visuals. Don’t assume hard-working Hispanics will thrill to a message of
%uFB01scal conservatism, actually run some people who look like them for of%uFB01ce. The day after he won, Cao looked the spitting image of the future Republican: Walking the streets of New Orleans with a New York Times reporter, he %uFB01elded autograph requests from young, non-white admirers while quoting his favorite philosopher, Aristotle. There’s a guy who gets the old white guys and the next generation. Eve Fairbanks is an associate editor at The New Republic.