The Week in Review section of the New York Times today features a couple of different pieces that pick up a theme that I've been obsessed with over the last couple of months, to wit, the Republican Party has made a series of disastrous demographic bets, and that its reliance upon old reactionary culture war strategies has lost whatever magic it once had. Timothy Egan writes about the degree to which the bullshit "anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elitist" rhetoric is alienating huge swaths of young, well educated people. The likely result will be that the McCain will lose the ten most highly educated states in the election. I know it's hard for right wingers to admit, but high levels of educational attainment generally go hand in hand with economic vibrancy. They also tend to be incompatible with the flat-earth (old school style, not bad Friedman metaphor style), anti-empirical, and intolerant world views associated with the Palin/Huckabee wing of the Republican Party. Aim for a base of snake handlers, tongue speakers, and home schoolers, and what do you know, that's what you'll end up with.
Frank Rich weighs in how Republicans and the media overstate the degree to which white voters this year are susceptible to racist and generally antediluvian campaign themes that have been the staple of right wing politics for the last 40 years. Again, this is a generational change that promises the potential end of the endless re-adjudication of the Sixties and other culture war memes that have been the glue of the Republican coalition.
David Brooks regrets the road not taken by the McCain campaign, arguing that a sort of progressive Republican campaign in the tradition of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt might have had better success. I am struck by the incredible historical mendacity of this argument. Brooks knows better than most, I suspect, that the Republicans long ago made a deal with the devil when they decided to incorporate the evangelical base as the heart and soul of the party. The end result is that it is people like Brooks (an urban effete latte sipper if I've ever seen one) who are battling for legitimacy in their own party.
I don't want to count on victory before it happens. I have long been a political pessimist by nature -- my senior thesis in college, written in 1982, was about how the election of Reagan was going to be politically transformative. I've waited my entire adult life for the moment I believe is about to come. But if, through dint of good timing, a truly special candidate and our own hard work, a progressive epoch emerges, I suspect that you will find the David Brookses of the world cast aside by a blindly angry right, which will convince itself that the only problem was that McCain was flawed and tepid. I'm rather looking forward to the carnage.
