Washington Post (Plum Line)
By Greg Sargent
September 23, 2015
The
Washington Post this morning notes a fascinating paradox: While the GOP
presidential field is more diverse than anytime in recent memory, the
message being broadcast
to America by the antics in the GOP primaries is growing more and more
“exclusionary.”
The
Post piece points out that the Republican field includes a woman (Carly
Fiorina), two Hispanics (Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), an African American
(Ben Carson), and an
Indian American (Bobby Jindal). Yet Trump has described Mexican
immigrants as “rapists” and refused to correct an audience member who
said Muslims are a “problem in this country.” Some GOP candidates edged
towards Trump’s support for ending birthright citizenship.
Carson claims Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and that he
wouldn’t want a Muslim president. Carson has trafficked in one of
anti-Muslim diehards’ favorite distortions of the Koran.
And
this, from the Post piece, is just perfect. GOP Rep. Steve King, the
GOP’s leading Congressional evangelist for the restrictionist approach
to immigration that Trump
champions, has now bestowed his blessing upon Carson’s anti-Muslim
comments, claiming they will help him among GOP voters in Iowa:
“I
wouldn’t expect those remarks would hurt Dr. Carson in Iowa. I think
they help him,” said Rep. Steve King, a conservative leader in that
state.
“The
people on our side who pay any attention to this at all understand
sharia is incompatible with the Constitution and that a sincerely devout
Muslim — I might say,
a devout Islamist — cannot seriously give an oath to support the
Constitution, because it’s incompatible with his faith.”
There
you have it. As I noted yesterday, there is precedent for believing
this will prove correct. After Trump heaped contempt upon Mexican
immigrants and vowed to ship
11 million out of the country, many predicted he would implode. But
polls showed Republicans nationally agreed with his general sentiments
and a plurality of Iowa Republican caucus-goers — including
three-fourths of Trump supporters — backed mass deportations.
Matthew
Dowd, a top strategist for George W. Bush, speculates that Trump/Carson
rhetoric is resonating among GOP voters who are unsettled and
disoriented by change. “Many
in the GOP have gotten more and more angry during the Obama years,”
says Dowd, adding: “conservatives have seen more of their traditional
institutions under attack, and their version of America going away.”
In
this telling, Obama and his era represent a terrifying cultural moment
in which the USA is getting transformed into something no longer
recognizably American. GOP leaders
lacked the resourcefulness or will to stop Obama and failed to halt
these changes, and are perhaps tacitly complicit in them. Trump (and now
maybe Carson) speaks to anger and bewilderment over this epic failure,
which those voters hear as “telling it like
it is.”
If
this is right, then the paradox at play here — the GOP field is
unprecedentedly diverse; yet exclusionary rhetoric dominates — captures a
larger tension. After 2012,
party elders counseled Republicans to embrace a meaningful
reorientation on policy and values to better align the GOP with
inexorably changing America.
But
the party largely failed to do so. And now, even as the spectrum of GOP
candidates presents an image of diversity to the country, a shrinking
core of white Republicans
who are the “most unsettled by demographic and cultural change” (as Ron
Brownstein puts it) are the ones setting the GOP primary agenda, in the
sense that their support for the likes of Trump and Carson — and,
apparently, their views — has vaulted them to
the top. While that will probably change, it’s possible that it might
not change. And with Pope Francis’ arrival, the GOP primary debate may
now be highlighted in sharp relief against the Pope’s message of
tolerance towards immigrants and Islam alike.
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