With the country growing less white by the year, and Democrats currently enjoying huge electoral advantages among the nonwhite, will the Republicans double down on their strategy of stoking white grievance? Our Adam Serwer says yes, Jonathan Chait says probably not, or at least they'd be dumb to do so. But it's worth thinking about whom and what we're talking when we talk about what "Republicans" will "do."
Unfortunately for political operatives who'd love to be able to devise a strategy and then just implement it, a party is a big, unwieldy beast with lots of people who can influence the course it charts. Let's say Mitt Romney is the 2012 nominee. He can say, "I'm going to concentrate on economic issues, and push the culture war and white grievance stuff to the side." But he can't make Sarah Palin stop talking about what she wants to talk about. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or any of a hundred other people with varying degrees of influence, many of whom are very invested in a particular political narrative and strategy and won't be dissuaded from it by anyone. The nominee's voice will be the loudest, but a lot of other voices will still matter, and they may not be pursuing the same goals he is, or at least not in the same way.
And then you've got the Republican base, which gets a say, too. White identity politics is in large part a product of the increasing diversity of the country, and the greater that diversity becomes, the more a significant portion of the Republican base will demand a certain degree of culture war in their politics. Mitt Romney would probably like it if nobody ever asked him about Barack Obama's birth certificate. But people will, and when they do, he's going to have to simultaneously assure his party's substantial wing-nut caucus that he's sympathetic to them, and assure the rest of the country that he's not wearing a tinfoil hat. It's not an easy thing to do.
And after a primary season in which the candidates will spend a lot of time sending the appropriate signals and massaging the appropriate resentments among the base, there will be only so radically the nominee can shift his/her focus for the general election. All of which is to say, while it's tempting to think of this kind of broad political strategy as a set of considered decisions made by a small group of people who are in agreement, in practice things are much messier.
