Middle American News

Chilton Williamson, March 2008

undits, pollsters, and entrail readers alike complain that the 2008 primaries have so far been nearly impossible to predict or to read, and that the familiar well-thumbed and dog-eared electoral textbooks might as well be tossed out the window. Their indignation is understandable, but not their perplexity. The reason for the confusion that pervades this primary season is, or should be, perfectly obvious to everyone with the slightest understanding of political life in modern America. It is the fragmentation of the American political system, actively encouraged by the identity politics of the Democratic Party and the Big Tent strategy of the GOP. In both instances, divisive tendencies have been promoted as inclusive ones, and party identities have grown blurred, confused, and finally schizoid.

The media for many months now have characterized the Republicans as being in disarray, one candidate representing the moderate wing of the party, another the conservative, yet another the populist. Similarly, they have conscientiously identified one candidate as the social and religious conservative in the GOP primary race, a second as the social liberal, a third as the economic conservative, a fourth as the foreign policy conservative, and a fifth as the libertarian candidate. Why this situation should seem untoward or surprising to anyone, it is difficult to fathom. The GOP has boasted for years that it is the Party of the Big Tent, the Party of Inclusion, the political equivalent of the House of Many Mansions, and for this it has been paying the price in the current electoral season. In this race, each mansion has fielded its own candidate to do battle against the candidates of the other mansions, whom they often seem to detest more than they do the candidates thrown up by the opposing national party. This internecine enmity, which is routinely deplored by party leaders, in fact is a perfectly human, as well as an entirely inevitable, phenomenon. Any reader of Shelby Foote’s History of the Civil War cannot fail to be struck by the fact that officers on both the Confederate and Union sides disliked, even despised, each other more than they abhorred their opposite numbers across the lines. The strategy of the Big Tent, considered by GOP moguls to have been a stroke of genius, today is pulling the party apart in a way that was entirely foreseeable--just as it was foreseeable that, under this formula, a nominal Republican representing the antithesis of conservatism would eventually get himself elected president and staff his administration with like-minded phoney conservatives. The very day that George Romney exited the race in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington, President Bush addressed the same gathering with a plea to rally round the nominee-apparent, John McCain. But what is there to rally round for at least two-thirds of the party? The battle beneath the Big Tent has led to the former side-show winning out, despite the fact that that side-show is more like a freak show whose primary exhibit talks about remaining in Iraq for one hundred years and promises the country an optimistic future of two, three, many Iraqs.

On the Democratic side, the party has been fragmented by its obsessive emphasis on identity politics: multiculturalism, ethnicity, and what people who have never studied Latin call “gender”—in the plain and correct term, sex. Not even the most ardent Democrats, it seems, regard themselves in a political context as Democrats first and foremost. Now they are women first of all, or blacks, or Hispanics, or homosexuals, or transexuals, or handicapped persons--or all of the above. Despite some confusion in the initial primary in Iowa, in which a significant number of voters seem to have got their identities muddled, on February 25--Super Tuesday--the race appears to have shaken out, with women voting for Mrs. Clinton, blacks voting for Barack Obama, and Latinos going for Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton. Whether the primaries, and finally the Democratic convention, eventually come up with a winning ticket is immaterial here. The fact is that the so-called politics of inclusion have proved, for the Democrats as for the Republicans, to be the politics of fragmentation and chaos, in which the political party itself has come to seem of less importance to its registered members than the various identity and interest groups that comprise it. Identity politics indeed are political, but they are incompletely so, as the record of human history proves. Because identity politics are personal and tribal rather than, in the true sense of the word, political and programmatic, they are not suceptible to compromise. The history of identity politics suggests that, through them, the Democratic Party could in time cease to be a party, and the United States a nation.

Thanks to the role played by mass immigration in flooding the country with poverty-stricken Mexicans and other Third World peoples, the certain prospect of a presidential race in which contenders of both parties favor granting a “path to citizenship” amounting to amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the surety that an influx of scores of millions more Mexicans over the next few decades would institutionalize the politics of identity in the United States, the immigration issue has become inseparable from that of the more general fragmentation of the American political system. Restrictionists are with good reason appalled by the elevation of John McCain from Freedom Rider on his own bus a year ago to the GOP candidate for president next November. All, however, may yet not be lost.

No matter who wins in the fall, it will be important to remember that, as president, neither John McCain, Mrs. Clinton, nor Barack Obama could conceivably be worse on immigration than the present incumbent in the Oval Office. The country roundly defeated one presidential immigration enthusiast last year, and there is no particular reason to believe that it cannot defeat another, even should the Democrats take control of the three branches of government in November. Win or lose, they will find the issue just as perilous as George Bush discovered it to be, owing to a responsible Congress willing to oppose the White House, action initiated at the state and local levels, and grassroots activism mobilized by the various immigration-control organizations. Moreover, a Democratic winner almost certainly will have grabbed the prize with the aid of a large majority of the Latino vote, which, after the election, would have no place else to go. The Republicans, no doubt, will continue to lust after a Hispanic constituency. Yet, having lost them by a wide margin in 2008, they would be best advised to give up on the Latinos and look to find their strength in some other identity group. (The late Sam Francis very sensibly used to argue for white males.)

This scenario implies, in respect of the immigration issue at least, that in the forthcoming national election the Republicans should lose the presidency and the Senate, while retaining the House. This outcome would give the minority party’s conservative base, working together with its moderate wing, a powerful incentive to regroup against both the McCain liberals and the Democrats to fight an amnesty bill, while entrusting it also with the legislative means to defeat or stall such a bill. Indeed, the incentive in 2008 or 2009 for them to do so would likely be greater than it was in 2007. Polls show that, in California especially, the Hispanic community turned out to vote, for the first time in history, in numbers commensurable with the size of the Latino population. Would the congressional Republicans really wish to gamble on the hope that they could win back the percentage of Latinos that they had lost since 2000 and 2004, and then some? A more prudent strategy would be to accept the loss of the Latino vote, and take steps to ensure that the Hispanic constituency will not be further enlarged by future immigration.

As for black Democrats, they too have a strong incentive to ensure that the Latino population in this country does not expand beyond its present proportions. If Barack Obama fails to win the Democratic Party nomination, that will be due in significant part—maybe even largely—to the refusal of Latinos to vote for him. Worse, even liberal commentators are now speculating openly that Latinos will refuse to vote, now and in the foreseeable future, for any black candidate. Immediately following the Georgia primary, Pat Buchanan joked that it was beginning to look as if Bill Clinton might have been the last, as well as the first, black president. Once that very real possibility sinks in on American blacks, the Rainbow Coalition will be finished, and lily-white immigration restrictionists--among others--will stand to gain 30-odd million coal-black allies.