Delende Es

Photo ID laws, as noxious as they are, have minimal effect on elections. Most people who lack photo IDs aren't likely to vote in the first place, and such laws were passed only in safe Republican states. Pushing hard for things like this is a mark of the Republican Party's desperation.

When Barack Obama was elected, I was teaching at Spelman College. I told my students I never thought I'd live to see this day. I grew up in the last dying vestiges of Jim Crow. Segregation was not legal any more, but I never had a non-white class mate at school until I was a freshman in college in 1977. I thought we had finally turned a corner.

The thing is Republicans didn't have a lot of options. Demographic changes have been reducing the white share of the electorate by a point or two every election cycle, and the Jim Crow generation is finally reaching EOL.

Republicans recognized this too. After Obama was elected, they conducted a post mortem that concluded:

"In 1980, exit polls tell us that the electorate was 88 percent white. In 2012, it was 72 percent white….According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country….The Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring."

But there's a big problem with that strategy. As a party long associated with the Southern Strategy to definitively turn its back on white bigotry. And that would require them to be willing to accept significant losses in the short term to maintain their viability in the long term. Politics is only ever the politics of right now.

So with Trump they took a different path -- appeal to white bigotry loudly and explicitly, something that the Lee Atwater's of the world had thought was impossible. It isn't if you simply refuse to be embarrassed by your behavior. You include media reluctance to take a side as part of the plan.

They never thought they could get away with something like this in the 21st century, and normally they would have been right: it would have lost them as many votes among educated whites as it won them among working-class whites. But after eight years of a black president in the White House, racial tensions were ratcheted up just enough that Trump could get away with it. Only by a hair, and only with plenty of other help, but he did get away with it, losing 10 points of support among college-educated whites but gaining 14 points among working-class whites. That and the electoral college were enough to drag his sorry ass across the finish line. Barely.

The Republican party is now all in on this strategy. They try to let Trump do the dirty work, but you only have to look at the reactions, or lack thereof, to Trump's tweets this week to see that they have decided to follow his path, hoping they can squeeze out enough electoral wins to stack the judiciary. Then activist conservative judges will see them through their time in the wilderness. Republicans believe that wrecking the social fabric of the country is their only path to retaining power. And they're right. If they ever lose the white working class, they are toast.

They're probably toast anyway. The white non college educated class is going the way of the dodo. The twenty year old generation reject Republicans by large majorities. The Jim Crow generation continues to ride their Medicare scooters into the sunset.

Demography is inexorable. In the meantime, what we need to do is convince the fence sitters. That is what won the mid term election. Energizing the progressive base had nothing to do with it, AOC and her friends notwithstanding. What won the midterm for Democrats was capturing persuadable voters in the suburbs, particularly women, who voted Republican in 2016. The data is unequivocal on this point.

I was shocked by Donald Trump's win. Maybe I shouldn't have been. Faced with a country moving away from white supremacy, a last gasp from the rump of the Jim Crow generation was perhaps inevitable. Still, it required a perfect storm of events to come together -- Comey's last minute letter to protect his own ass (an effort that evidently failed); a small number of working class voters in three states willing to say "what the hell, let's try this;" an Obama administration too close to Wall Street by half, protecting the money changers at the expense of the people and creating a space for people to say "well that didn't work; try something else." Even so, it required our antediluvian electoral system, created to preserve slavery, to drag Trump's sorry ass across the finish line.

I fear being overconfident, but I'm skeptical that confluence of events can occur again, especially now that the people who said "Oh well, let's try this" now know exactly what "this" actually means. It is possible that Trump could squeeze even more out of the white supremacist vote than he did last time but I have a hard time seeing how.

I really think this was the Gettysburg of the Southern strategy, its all downhill from here, and the GOP will wander in the wilderness for a generation. They might not even survive. They might be so identified with white supremacy that they will go the way of the Whigs.

The country needs conservatives to check the worst excesses of people like Sanders. Something will have to replace the Republicans. Likely it will be something with the name "Republican" because of the vast infrastructure supporting the party, but having abandoned the bigotry that has defined the GOP throughout my entire life.

But until that happens, GOP delenda est.