Wither the GOP

I have promised a lot of blog posts on various topics, but before I get to those I want to write a quick post on my view of the 2012 presidential election.  This isn't meant to be an explanation of why Obama won, to the exclusion of other theories—I don't pretend to have any expertise in that area.  It's just an observation that I think has some force.

It comes down to this:  the conservative movement is remarkably dickish.  I am not making a substantive point about their policies, though I think many of those policies fit the description.  I just mean that conservatives seem to take particular glee in saying hurtful or outrageous things, and I think this costs them dearly when actual Republican politicians have to ask for actual votes.

The tendency is not entirely surprising when it is observed in conservatives who aren't running for office.  If Ann Coulter delights her audience by saying a bunch of reprehensible things, and then this causes Republicans to lose their races, Coulter still gets to keep the money.  Coulter is then functioning as a parasite on the conservative movement, and in fact I think a lot of conservatives view her as such.  What is particularly pathological is when the parasites end up in an influential position in party primaries, so that candidates have to pay obeisance to the very parasites who will later undermine their electoral chances.  I think that is a fairly accurate depiction of the way the modern conservative movement works.  (In fairness, the conservative media establishment also does non-parasitic work promoting the conservative movement.  Whether it is a net positive for conservatism is debatable.)

But here's the surprising thing.  Dickishness seems to have spread to the candidates themselves, which makes it harder to view them as victims forced to endure their party's parasites.  Many of Romney's attacks on Obama were essentially dickish gimmicks.  "You didn't build that."  "Voting is the best revenge."  Both of those lines of attack were basically bullshit, depending on a tendentious and dickish misinterpretation of Obama's (admittedly clumsy) statements.  They were cheap attacks that seem better-suited to amusing conservatives than to persuading undecided voters.

More strikingly, I think, Republican primary debates basically look like contests to see who can deliver the most vicious attack lines against Democratic constituencies.  This is hard to explain, since these are candidates who will have to face the consequences of their actions!  One way to square this with the "parasites" story above is to say that candidates have to be dickish to get the endorsements of the parasites.  So Republican candidates are like those rats with toxoplasmosis who cuddle up to cats—their parasites are not only feeding off them, but driving them to political suicide.  But I'm not sure that's right.  I think it's possible that dickishness has become intertwined with the conservative movement in a fundamental way.  To some degree, conservatism is a mood, and in the United States, that mood often encompasses gleeful dickishness.

To shift gears a little, I think dickishness is generally practiced from a position of privilege.  People who are not operating from a position of power generally can't afford to antagonize other people with wanton cruelty. And so this may give a partial answer to a longstanding question of American politics, which is why practically every minority group votes overwhelmingly Democratic despite having divergent interests, beliefs, and backgrounds.  (The paradigmatic example is the coalition of Jews and blacks in urban politics, but there are many others, including the huge Democratic advantage among Asian-Americans.)  In addition to the many substantive reasons for these people to vote Democratic, maybe we can add a stylistic one:  they are not privileged, and so they are not amused by the Republicans' inveterate dickishness.  If that's true, the Republican Party's problem is both shallow and deep.  On one hand, it should be able to improve its performance without abandoning its principles.  But on the other hand, abandoning its dickishness may be virtually impossible to do.  And so the final irony:  the very people who love to castigate "black culture" have a deep cultural problem that will cost them not just the votes of blacks, but the votes of anyone who isn't predisposed to laugh when the powerful pick on the weak.