The GOP and the Albatross of White Racial Panic
At the moment we’re moving toward one party that is genuinely multi-racial in composition and another that is increasingly a white persons’ party, albeit having limited minority representation and a small number of non-white officeholders. There’s a small but substantial minority of the population that finds a new America where whites really aren’t the overwhelmingly dominant group, simply in numbers, very frightening. I’d put the number at somewhere between 20% and 25% of the population. And they are overwhelmingly in the Republican party or they’re right-leaning independents who vote Republican.
And that’s what brings you to the what we might better call the Steve King problem, the guy who’s in trouble today for saying that virtually all DREAMers are drug mules and criminals. He’s now been denounced by John Boehner, Raul Labrador (one of the biggest border security hawks in Congress) and others. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their rebukes. But King is speaking for the raw, undomesticated voice of that slice of the electorate for whom these social and population trends spell a basically non-stop state of white panic expressed through Obama conspiracy theories, fears of marauding Mexican hordes, hyper-opposition to primarily Latin American immigration and so much more.
Yes, King is more intemperate, voluable and perhaps more hateful than most. But he does speak for that relatively small slice of the electorate which makes up a pretty big slice of the GOP electorate and keeps the GOP anchored in opposition to immigration reform and to policies which put most of the non-white population off-limits to the party indefinitely. That’s why the whole plan to ‘double down’ on the ‘whites only’ strategy now increasingly favored by Republicans isn’t so much of a strategy as a recognition that it can’t break free or discipline that mammoth part of its voter base.