The Republican Party represents a minority of Americans (white reactionary Christians). It’s largely homogenous.
The Democratic Party includes: Everyone else. More specifically the Democrats include:
- Latino communities in California
- Cubans in Florida
- Southern small-town African American communities
- Big, diverse cities
- Urban intellectuals
- Democratic socialists from Queens
- Asian communities in California
- LGBTQ
- Etc,. etc. etc.
When we say, “The GOP demographics are aging and shrinking, and the Democratic base is expanding,” Democrats cheer. It means we can win elections. It also means that we are a huge, diverse heterogeneous group.
Keep in mind that the GOP actively discourages diversity. Here is Katie Hopkins, pictured with Ann Coulter, praising Russia as being “untouched by the myth of multiculturalism and deranged diversity“:
Here is Tucker Carlson explaining that diversity is NOT a strength:
What Tucker Carlson meant was that if you discourage diversity, your message can be simple. Your people will fall in line. Politics is easier.
Autocracy discourages diversity and in fact, fascism rises by declaring war on “others,” the “enemies” in our midsts (usually people of different religious or ethnic groups.)
The GOP challenge is that their party represents only a minority of Americans, and a minority of views.
The Democratic challenge is the opposite: Dealing with a big, messy tent.
With the GOP becoming a full-on White nationalist reactionary party, I suspect that we’re in for a party shift. We may no longer divide into “liberal” and “conservative.” We may divide into people who want democracy and people who don’t. Lots of people don’t.
Democracy is hard work. It’s messy. It requires compromise. “My way or the highway” isn’t democracy; it’s autocracy. Some people don’t like democracy because they don’t want to share power (and compromise) with people they don’t like.
Some people think they want democracy but they don’t. They want things their way. My son came home from preschool, having learned about taking turns, and told me, “I don’t like to take turns. I want all the turns.” (Don’t worry. My son grew up to be a very nice young man.)
Highly functioning societies often go against human nature. (Did anyone else read Civilization and its Discontents in college?)
There are things that cannot be compromised. But for a functioning democracy, the list of things that cannot be compromised must be small.
If the GOP continues to become more autocratic, we will have to outnumber them. This means accepting into our tent anyone who wants rule of law / democracy. It also means accepting into our tent people whose policy ideas we don’t like. The alternative is for the non-authoritarians to splinter and lose to autocracy. In other words, purity tests will not work.
I suspect the GOP will continue to become more autocratic. The Mitt Romneys will continue trying to thread the needle, appealing to the base while trying to be reasonable, but all those white supremacists and Breitbart readers are not going to close up shop and learn to love democracy.
Remember that online trolls have gotten savvier. Trolls may pose as Democrats, call themselves Democrats, and then call other Democrats names to make trouble.
Some liberals may not like big tents. Some people don’t really like Democrats but they’re stuck with us because the alternative is Trump-style autocracy.
This used to be true for a brief period between about 1920 and whenever the GOP finished morphing from a conservative party into a reactionary / regressive party.
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Written by Teri Kanefield. Cross-posted from Musings About Law, Books, and Politics.