We’re now well into the political aftermath of the 2012 election, and
the pattern of destruction is telling. In demographic after
demographic, Obama
defeated
Romney by remarkable margins: 55 percent among women, 60 percent among
voters under 30, 71 percent among Hispanic voters, and a stratospheric
93 percent among African-Americans. Rather than a fluke, the Obama
coalition of 2008
looks like it’s here to stay, and the recriminations and soul-searching amongst conservatives and Republicans are in full swing.
The sudden
post-election shift of major politicians and media figures on immigration reform betrayed a fear that their party’s hard-line stance
wrecked its chances with Hispanics.
A chorus of conservative bloggers, Republican strategists, and even what’s left of the party’s
moderate politicians
have laid blame on its nurturance of white nativism, its tone-deafness
on women’s reproductive challenges, or the absolutism of its
anti-abortion rhetoric.
There’s certainly some truth to these takes. But this notion that
scattershot appeasement of various voting blocks is the path back for
Republicans makes a fundamental error. It buys into conservatives’ silly
caricature of Democrats as a party without a vision — “an incoherent
amalgam of interest groups, most of which are vying for benefits for
themselves and their members at the expense of other Americans,” as
Yuval Levin bitterly
put it.
There is, in fact, a fundamental vision that unites virtually all the
disparate groups in Obama’s coalition. It’s sitting right there in the
exit polling and the narrative of the campaign, for anyone willing to
see it. Crudely put, it’s the economic issues: on the practical level,
the recognition that the free market, whatever its virtues, does not
deal justly with people when left to its own devices. And on the moral
level, the simple, elegant, age-old conviction that we are all our
brother’s keeper. And it’s the GOP’s rejection of these propositions
that set it on the path to electoral defeat.
Start with women:
Political science suggests
the gender gap between the parties first emerged in the mid-1960s, well
before abortion or women’s issues hit the national stage. Todd Akin and
Richard Mourdock
were part
of a larger wave that brought down four other GOP Senate candidates
with proven electability, suggesting the cause of their demise went well
beyond abortion. Plenty of women are socially conservative,
their views on abortion
track those of the country as a whole, and Romney
actually won
amongst white and married women. So what gives? As best we can tell,
the emergence of entitlement programs in its full form in the 1960s. It
drove a wedge between men and women, with the former continuing to
support it and the latter becoming ever more intensely opposed.
Economic solidarity and social welfare are arguably
the key drivers
of the Hispanic vote as well. 66 percent of hispanic voters think the
federal government should ensure universal access to health care, 61
percent support Obamacare, and 55 percent support government investment
as economic stimulus. Over two-thirds of Hispanic voters in California
said they would consider
voting for a Republican who disagreed with them on immigration, but
agreed with them about giving all children a first rate education. Over
half said they’d consider a Republican who agreed with them on taxes and
spending. In 1986, Ronald Reagan passed immigration reform and the
Hispanic portion of the Republican vote
promptly dropped in the next election.
The youth vote is a bit harder to pin down. They are
dramatically more liberal
on marriage equality, immigration, marijuana legalization, gender roles
and ethnic diversity, but not abortion for instance. And we’ve all seen
the “young people for Ron Paul” phenomenon. But despite their
greater willingness to privatize entitlements, their widespread
economic liberalism of the youth vote is undeniable.
That brings us to the question of income itself. In 2012, those making less than $50,000 a year (roughly the median income)
broke for Obama
by a wide margin, while those making more went for Romney a bit more
narrowly. Lower income voters’ preference for the Democrat
has held over the last several decades. And political scientist Andrew Gelman
found that
poorer voters are socially conservative but economically liberal, and
it’s the latter commitment that determines their votes. Wealthier
voters, meanwhile, lean conservative on economics and vote accordingly —
though it’s also amongst the upper classes where the left-right split
over social issues is widest and most intense.
This actually gets at an interesting complication with how the
well-off vote. Higher incomes correlate with support for the GOP, but
higher education also correlates with higher incomes. And education
correlates with support for Democrats. This instability shows up in the
polls: Obama
won
amongst those without a college education, those with a college degree
swung for Romney, but then those with a post-graduate degree swung back
for Obama.
In 2008,
the upper class split evenly between the two tickets while those making
over $200,000 briefly abandoned McCain, then returned to Romney
in 2012. The voting habbits of the highest eschelons of the economy are not well documented, but there’s plenty of
circumstancial evidence
they prefer the Republicans. Nonetheless, wealthy enclaves of socially
liberal professionals are now breaking for Obama on a regular basis.
The Republicans have now staked their political livelihood on the
energy and ferocity of a very specific block of voters: older,
wealthier, whiter, staunchly socially conservative, deeply protective of
their pivilege and deeply hostile to the needs of any outside group.
The viewpoint that comes with this coalition apparently entails the
confidence that the market on its own is already dispensing sufficient
justice and the poor deserve their lot (the only way to make sense of
Romney’s
characterization
of Obama’s policies as “gifts”) and that the everyday struggles of any
American who is not wealthy or a business-owner simply has no relevance
to the economy (the only way
to make sense
of Republicans “job creator” rhetoric). This undercuts the GOP’s
ability to appeal to women, the young, and minorities. But more
importantly, it cuts them off from
any American who cannot count
themselves amongst the economically privileged, or who has reason to
fear the often amoral dynamism of the market. Meanwhile, the rise of
education and urbanization is turning more of the upper class towards a
liberal, compassionate and cosmopolitan social vision, eating away at
the Republicans’ coalition from within. Contra their vice presidential
candidate, the Republicans did indeed lose on “
the budget issues.”
They could try to solve this impasse by going left on social issues.
That may pick them up some women and younger voters at the margins, and
would certainly help them amongst the upper classes. But the well-off
aren’t that large a portion of the American populace to begin with. It’s
further down the income distribution where the great scores of
potential voters are. And while presumably there must be some
authentically conservative alternative to Obama’s resoundingly
successful
approach to these voters, it’s pretty clear the GOP is at a complete loss as to what it might be.
Several writers a bit out of the conservative mainstream —
Ross Douthat,
Ramesh Ponnuru, and
John Podhoretz,
for instance — have correctly diagnosed their party’s problem. But even
they could not bring themselves to repudiate Paul Ryan’s budget, the
loadstar of the Republicans’ economic vision. Only Douthat offered
anything close to an alternative policy path for his party, and even
then an
entirely anemic one.
As Josh Barro, no doctrinare leftwinger by any stretch,
pointedly observed,
“Any conceivable agenda that is likely to be effective in getting
health care, jobs and higher wages in the hands of the American masses
will be unconservative, at least on the terms by which most American
conservatives define conservatism.” That catch-22 is not some random
quirk of fate; it’s the inevitable logic of the moral vision the
Republican base brings to America’s communal economic life. Obama won
last week because he articulated an opposing philosophy.
TP
The
Presidential Task Force on Power yesterday uncovered a plan in Power
Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) branch in Lagos to defraud the Federal
Government of over N24 billion.
The
memorable words of Charles Dickens, a Victorian era writer and orator,
that the “law is an ass – an idiot” seem very complimentary to the
Nigerian law. Our law is more than an ass, it can be more than a pig –
that is if you assume ass to be an animal. But it is not only law that
is an ass in Nigeria; the reports of committees are also asses.
As
corruption in Nigeria continues to develop wings and feathers, many
Nigerians have opted for death penalty as punishment for anybody found
guilty.
