If conservatism is to live on in this nation, its adherents must flee the GOP

Friday, Oct. 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.

The Republican Party’s war on minority voters is more than a last-resort strategy to keep winning elections.

It’s actually an assault on democracy itself.

Think about it: Why would the GOP not want people to vote? Yes, the surface-level answer is that Republicans need to freeze out voters of color so the party can continue to win elections by artificially pumping up the power of the white supporters who sustain it, but there’s more to it than that. In breaking down the situation, it becomes clear that the GOP’s voter suppression strategy speaks to vastly more than simply a political calculation of a minority party.

• Going back decades, the GOP’s overall campaign strategies have pitted Americans against each other by dividing the population into “us” versus “them” — us being white voters, them being voters of color. This is a fundamentally biased position that excludes whole swaths of the population. It’s not clear exactly when the GOP crossed this line — it wasn’t always this way. But traces of it can be found in the Southern Strategy that was developed in the Nixon years, and it appears to have metastasized during the Reagan administration — remember his “welfare queens” attacks on Black women to appeal to a white base? — and the beginnings of the culture wars of the 1990s.

• Today, the Republican Party must suppress votes because it’s a minority — and is one by choice. Instead of broadening its appeal to ethnic communities, it has doubled down on its whites-only strategy. Consider that upwards of 85% of the votes for President Donald Trump in 2016 and congressional Republicans in 2018 came from whites, even as the American population grew more ethnically diverse. Continuing to win elections on that strategy is unsustainable, and the GOP knows it. Therefore, their satisfaction with minority status means they must suppress votes.

• The GOP understands that “us” is a minority group led by an even smaller minority — certain big-money interests, the people benefiting from the enormous wealth transfer of recent decades due to Republican economic policies that tilt heavily toward the wealthiest Americans. More wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than at any time in American history, and the GOP is entirely about representing the interest of that 5% or 6% of the population. The rest can be damned. The Republicans simply manipulate the rest of the have-nots in their narrow minority coalition by spreading irrational fears.

• The GOP’s absolute refusal to try to create a bigger tent by listening to the needs of a larger population — and therefore court them — means one thing: It doesn’t want to represent anyone other than its narrow leadership. This renders the contemporary GOP as fundamentally anti-democracy, because the inherent design of a democracy compels parties to vie to expand their base and represent more, rather than fewer, people. And expanding the base means including more people, solving problems for as many people as possible, and representing the interests of an ever-widening group of constituents. Republicans want nothing to do with that — they know who they represent, and it’s a vanishingly small percentage of society. Today’s GOP is deaf to the voices and needs of a diverse America and listens only to the tiny percentage at the top.

• The corollary of this is that the modern GOP wants to silence everyone else. Indeed Republicans want to limit the fundamental rights of non-supporters. Consider last week’s explicit remarks of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that young Black people can go wherever they want in South Carolina “as long as they are conservative.” The message to nonconservative South Carolinians? You can’t even travel freely in the state, much less vote without GOP interference. “Us” will be free in the GOP view, “them” will face ever-narrowing rights. And of course, Graham lied when he used the term “conservative” — the modern GOP has no resemblance to a conservative party. Instead what he meant was you can travel wherever you like if you’re a Republican.

President Donald Trump amplifies the moral rot of the modern GOP but this anti-democracy effort has been the long-term project of Republicans for several decades, with or without Trump. Whatever vestiges of ideology are gone from today’s GOP. It didn’t even offer a policy vision for the next four years at its 2020 convention.

True conservative ideology most certainly has a place in the dialogue of the nation but real conservatives — ethical and pro-democracy — now find themselves stateless because today’s GOP has abandoned conservatism.

Clearly, the party’s goal is to maintain power for the top few percentages of Americans at the cost of everyone else. It means to silence and suppress the rights of non-Republicans.

There is no cure for that and no signs of reform — ideological conservatives must form a new party to represent their political philosophy. For everyone else, the message of this election cycle where Republicans across the country have gone to war with voting is this: This isn’t simply strategy, it’s a worldview — and the GOP has declared war on democracy itself.