There's been no dearth of articles recently on the sorry state of the GOP and the breakdown of their ideas machine. But most of the piece, for reasons I don't quite understand, have stopped there, rather than taking the next step and asking what will serve in the stead of a popular agenda. Mark Schmitt, in our cover story this month, shows no such reluctance. Without policy, he says, they're going to run on identity:
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."
The GOP has seen a collapse on all levels. Polls show them less trusted on every single issue. They are raising less money. They are enduring a rash of retirements. They are lashed to a president who's less popular than a child's tears. What they have left, the only thing they have left, are the politics of cultural resentment. We've turned the clock back all the way back before Bush, before Reagan, before the GOP felt it had a popular and dynamic policy agenda at the hearts of its appeal. We're back to Nixon, and his personal insecurities about the popularity of his own politics, and his resulting attempts to channel cultural fracture and societal unrest into a voting majority. The problem is that this isn't 1968. Society has its cracks, but they are not fissures. We have our disagreements, but they are not civil wars. And so when you hear John McCain proclaim himself "The American President Americans Are Waiting For," you scratch your head. It's puzzling. And it's puzzling because this stuff used to be done skillfully. This sort of campaigning is dangerous, and generally requires a light touch. But a light touch only works if the electorate is sensitive to the message, attuned to its own resentment. Right now, it isn't. Frankly, the atmospherics make Obama look like the American president America is waiting for. It's his story that seems to have inspired, his candidacy that heralds a closing of old wounds and the dawning of new coalitions. Thus, they must bludgeon. Thus, they must say what they would have once implied. Thus, "the American President Americans Are Waiting For." Anyway, it's an important piece -- we've not even gotten into Mark's survey of the round Republicans have lost in the states -- and I highly, highly suggest you
read it in full. It'll do more for your understanding of this particular election than everything else you read today combined.
There's been no dearth of articles recently on the sorry state of the GOP and the breakdown of their ideas machine. But most of the piece, for reasons I don't quite understand, have stopped there, rather than taking the next step and asking what will serve in the stead of a popular agenda. Mark Schmitt, in our cover story this month, shows no such reluctance. Without policy, he says, they're going to run on identity:
