Identity Politics

From David Brody, via Andrew Sullivan, a quote that I think puts the whole mindset of the far right in a nice, tight package:

Another pro-family leader who did not want to be named tells The Brody File:

"There would be an open revolt. We would just not put up with it. He's not one of us and McCain pretty much needs to get somebody that is going to make people happier if he seriously wants to hold the base to being supportive. . . .

"He's not one of us." That's the whole shot, right there. It's the kind of thinking that allows some people to declare themselves "real Americans" and rail against immigrants, even though their families, unless they are full-blooded Natives, were immigrants, too.
Digby, as might be expected, has some astute observations, focusing on comments by Mark Schmitt.

The most important thing about it is that he defines something we've all observed as a form of identity politics, which in this election particularly, is a very, very clever insight:

David Frum calls explicitly for this brand of identity politics, declaring that while the Republican Party's issue positions have evolved over the years, "there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood," whereas Democrats "attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: ... intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays--people who identify with the 'pluribus' in the nation's motto, 'e pluribus unum.'" In case it's not clear, in Frum's Latin, "pluribus" means "parasites," and he tells us helpfully, "As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger. . . ."

The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the "pluribus" categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain's inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics.

As Digby points out:

The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to "our" country against their will (long before "we" did) comprise a majority.

I'm not so confident as she that merely composing the majority is going to work to keep the Republicans out of power. I fully expect that if Obama (assuming, as seems to be the case right now, that he is the nominee) wins, he will win by a small margin because of the race issue, which I think is going to be a real consideration in this election. I don't think a Democratic White House in 20009 is by any means a sure thing, simply for that reason.