When I first moved to Old Town Alexandria, Virginia in 1980 there was a sign on a small office building that said National Headquarters for Veterans of World War I. Driving by that building always left me wondering when this distinguished organization would cease to exist.
Sure enough one day the sign was gone, replaced by a shiny new plaque for a law firm.
After the 2012 election results, I wonder if the Republican Party will suffer a similar fate?
Possibly, and here are two reasons why: tribal behavior and demographics with tribal behavior the more devastating of the two.
On November 13th in The New York Times under a subhead that read “MIND”, Richard A. Friedman, M.D. penned a piece entitled, Primal Emotions Come to Fore in Politics. Here, he describes the psychology behind group voting patterns. He says whether you vote for a Republican or a Democrat is NOT based on ideas alone.
Most people do not choose a political party by carefully analyzing its policies or even its track record for competence. Instead, some social scientists argue that people select their political party in early adulthood the way they choose their friends or social groups: They go for the party that has people who resemble themselves.
Once you’ve selected your party, you are likely to retrofit your beliefs and philosophy to align with it. In this sense, political parties are like tribes; membership in the tribe shapes your values and powerfully influences your allegiance to the group.
So strong is the social and emotional bond among members of a political tribe that they are likely to remain loyal to their party even when they give it low marks for performance. Yankees fans don’t jump ship when their team loses any more than Republicans switch parties when they lose an election.
Here is a personal example of Dr. Friedman’s theory in action. Recently I asked my 86-year-old mother why she voted Democrat her entire life and her explanation was rather simple, “Everyone I knew voted Democrat and I was always one who went along with the crowd.”
My mother’s reasoning also explains why there is so much continuing loyalty to the Democrat Party within the African-American community.
Tribal voting patterns are also prevalent among younger voters.
Within my extended family that is spread across the nation, those in their thirties or younger would not dare vote for Romney or any Republican. They know it is not cool to vote for a party that wants to turn back the clock. Democrats after all are young and hip. This sums up what Dr. Friedman wrote: They go for the party that has people who resemble themselves.
Certainty this phenomenon has been prevalent among Jewish voters, teachers, gays and union members for decades. Now even Asian-American voters went 73% tribal for Obama.
But none of this “voter group think” compares with how Hispanic demographics will surely land the Republican Party next to the Whig Party in the history books, considering that 50,000 Hispanics will turn 18 every month for the next two decades.
With Obama last week garnering 75% of the Hispanic vote, you can be sure that Team Obama (or its successor) will know their names, where they live and will be at their doorstep with a birthday cupcake and a voter registration form.
It is painfully obvious that Democrats fully embrace the sheer strength and pull of tribal politics and there is not much Republicans can do about it.
If you want to call me a naysayer then go right ahead, but before you do, read what newly elected Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz told Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker:
In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat…If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’
If you are looking to me for any explanations about how the GOP can save itself I do not have any. But I do know that Bible based principles, the basis for more traditional thinking on social issues WILL NOT CHANGE and neither will Republican beliefs that less government, lower taxes and more personal responsibility is better for our nation’s future.
So unless there is a dramatic shift in our nation’s tribal voting behavior you can expect that shiny brass sign on the Republican National Committee headquarters to eventually be replaced by a law firm with either all Asian or Hispanic partners.
I too live in Alexandria, which is as “pregressive” as you can get.
I have left my tribe, even though I live among them. I guess I’m an outlier, but not entirely — there are others like me, but, apparently, not numerous.
My “tribe,” incidentally, is ignoarant of economics and often inept at governance, although it does a creditable job in Alexandria.
Jim Moran our Dem Congressman For Life!
Also,the property taxes we pay in City of Alexandria are the area’s highest so the City has more money to govern.
AND they intend to expand the tax base with more high-rise and upscale construction. Yay.
For those not familiar with Jim Moran: it was his son who was caught on camera by James O’Keefe encouraging voter fraud.
So, Republican tribe gone bye bye?
Speaking as a Conservative, I could get happy about this. Because there will always be a tribe for decent people of good, common values that include hard work and hand-ups-instead-of-hand-outs.
And that tribe has not been the Republican Party in years.
Change or die, Republicans. Change or die.
If the idea of the GOP meeting its demise is supposed to frighten me, it doesn’t. Two big government parties don’t offer much of a choice. It’s little more than the illusion of choice. It no longer matters which path we choose. All roads lead to the demise of this once-great republic.
Me neither. The sooner the Republican Party is gone, the sooner the statists who run it are out of power.
Someday we’ll have an actual Conservative Party.
Tribes do not all survive. Some tribes’ adaptions to reality are less functional than others. Let It Burn.
Subotai Bahadur
It no longer makes any difference how we vote or how much support we try to gather or who we try to reach, or with what arguments and stratagems.
Once the 2012 federal election has successfully been stolen and nothing will be done about it, and once the infrastructure is in place for the Demonrats to steal every other election from now on at will, we no longer have a republic.
Oh, and by the way, it is clear to me that the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries were stolen also. Just sayin’.
Heard this before. More than once. It hasn’t happened.
One of my close friends in college married a liberal graduate student in Sociology who was determined to rehabilitate the world, or more specifically that little corner of the world that populates American prisons. He was full of ideas from his professors. Several years after he completed his degree and joined the work force I noted to her that his attitudes seemed to have changed. That he now wanted to lock them up and throw away the key. “No.” she corrected me, “He now wants to see them fry.”
Having to face reality has a way of doing that to people.
Forty years ago my entire tribe was Democrat. It is now about 50% Republican. They came around to my point of view.
Well, the policies fostered by the Democrats over eight decades are about to blow up in everyone’s face. I don’t know where the pieces might land afterwards nor do I know how they might be reassembled – it could be something much more functional than we have now, it might be something that resembles North Korea. It may not look like what we have now.
And I would also add that nothing is forever in politics. If we could predict the future by simply extrapolating the past, none of us would need bother going there. The team that everyone expects to win doesn’t always win – that’s why they gotta play the games. The future belongs to whoever shows up for it.
You know what will kill the Republican Party?
Whiny crybabies.
Sadly, this article is more evidence that we have more of those lately than I can stomach. So, sadly I must retort.
Ahem…
I don’t remember the Democrats crying after 2004 that they were losing and that they should just pack it in, do you? Heck Nancy Pelosi just got whammed in not one but TWO elections. Where is she today? Right back in the game. I think she’s a stock player in the travelling circus roadshow of idiots called the Democrat Party, but you have to admire her gumption to just let defeat roll off her back.
She is not alone in this attribute, You just know that Ex-Senator John Edwards is preening in front of the mirror today, plotting his return to politics. He’s probably having weekly meetings with various pundits to figure out how and when to run for Senator – AGAIN.
We lost AN election, just one. Yes, it surprised me too and yes it does indeed suck, but there will be more. Our job now is to be to “Loyal Opposition”. Our job isnt to sit around and cry and fret that “no one loves us”. Frankly thats the appeal and unofficial of being a Republican.
“We don’t want to be loved, we just want to be left alone”.
Here’s my advice:
1. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Stop whining. Grow a pair. Take your beating and learn from it. Have faith that we will win. It might take longer than you would like and it might cost more than you would expect, but we will win. If you cant agree to this very simple idea, then my advice is to stop talking buy lots of ammo and head for the hills, because if you do believe that all is lost, then any energy spent talking about how to win is probably wasted. Me? Im staying and fighting. Wanna join me me? good! Welcome!
2. Try and remind yourself daily that people who call themselves Democrats are not your enemy. They are simply “the unconverted”. Your job as a Republican, a “person of Liberty” is to learn to convert them to our side. How do you do that? First, talk to them. Dont yell, dont scream, just talk. Learn to talk to people who dont agree with you with the idea to convert them to your side. They have been lied to, help them, empower them to cut through the lie. You wont get them all but you will get enough.
3. Pessimism is not leadership. Be positive. Force yourself to think positive. The other side is working day and night to demotivate you. DO NOT ASSIST THEM IN THIS TASK. Fight Negativity every day!
4. Be ready to confront emotion with the facts. Do not yell, do not scream but be ready to respond, politely but firmly. Remember, what they want more than anything else is for you to shut up. Do not give it to them.
5. You want some good news? Ok, here’s some good news. The core of our argument is that “bigger government is not better government”. You should understand that they, yes they, those very same Democrats will provide us with example after example every-single-day of how that is true. Our political opposites are literally feeding us with the core of our argument! How cool is that!
Your job is to make sure that the people paying for the bad government know how their money is being misspent. Your second job is to motivate them to do something about it. First things first, ok?
6. Watch your language.
For example, do not say “CUT”. If you talk about “cutting a government program”, then that means in the minds of most people that someone is going to go without. Instead, talk about “efficient” government. The left always wants to tell me that my car is a waste but they never want to even remotely consider that government is inefficient. Make them defend programs that are so inefficient that even the soviets would say they don’t work.
Feel free to discuss the DMV, the post office or any of a thousand examples that will be clear to everyone that a dollar taken from them and spent in waste is a dollar not spent on a real problem and a dollar they dont have anymore. People encounter inefficient government every single day. Remind them that there are alternatives.
7. Go to Amazon and Netflix and watch William F. Buckley. Why? Because its a reminder that you can be conservative and you can confront the other side and you can not only win against overwhelming odds, but you can actually convert the people on the other side! You can do it by sharpening your arguments and your delivery. Yelling and screaming just reinforces their stereotype of the people on our side.
Our mission is not to separate from them, our mission isn’t to feel good about ourselves, our mission is to save the country. We are going to have to do this one liberal at a time but I like to think that the country is worth it. Dont you? Of course you do. Thats what makes you you!
I also firmly believe that the alternative to this approach is too awful to consider.
8. Stop the pity party. Stop looking for scapegoats. Its wasted energy that does nothing but help the other side.
Ok, so why did we lose this election? Was it Romney/Ryan/Palin? Was it the dreaded MSM/Karl Rove/Dick Morris? Well you know, Ive looked at it closely and Ive concluded that the reason we lost this election was one simple thing:
We didn’t get as many votes as they did.
And why was that? Because we, the royal we, the other side, simply failed to make an argument against this administration that the jury of the American people were willing to accept. We spent all of our time talking to each other instead of converting the other side.
Do murderers get jury verdicts we dont like? Of course. Do we burn down the Hall of Justice in response?
No. We just get better at catching, trying and convicting murderers.
9. Franks First Rule of Strategy:
“If you do something and it doesnt work, stop doing it.”
So lets all agree to stop doing the same old thing. Let’s cut this crap out about how we are becoming “the Whigs”. This is the Party of Lincoln. This is the Party that stopped Slavery in this country. We did it when everyone, and I mean EVERYONE hated us for even talking about it. This is the party the ended the Soviet Union. We did it when everyone said we should compromise and talk to the other side because “everyone knew” that the future was going to be dominated by Communism.
We fought back. We will keep fighting for this country. We did not do “the easy thing”. We will not do what we do because it is popular, we will do it because it is right. We will do what we do not because it benefits us personally but because it is our duty to this country to do so.
Stand Fast My Brothers and Sisters.
Be proud of who you are and what you believe. We are winning.
“Try and remind yourself daily that people who call themselves Democrats are not your enemy.”
And yet they constantly express their desire to either murder or enslave me.
pssst. Dont tell anyone, but we have the guns.
For now.
On account of widespread election fraud, we are left with exactly three alternatives:
1) Emigration
2) Secession
3) Trying to survive while attempting to ride out the inevitable catastrophic collapse of the United States of Zimbabwe, and the not-so-inevitable long period of recovery that you hope will someday follow. Good luck with that.
Election fraud is in every election, in every precinct. Yes its true that Chicago, they allow the dead to vote and they tend to vote predominately Democrat. However in 1972 and 1984, despite the direct wishes of the Democratic party machine, the dead in that city voted for Republicans Nixon and Reagan by overwhelming numbers.
If you cant produce a victory outside of margin of error, that just says you need to work harder. Spend more time working on winning and less time venting your spleen about “leaving the country”, ok? ok…
Frank,
You have the warrior spirit that our forefathers demonstrated. Well written and well done sir! Just wanted to put up at “atta-boy” since the initial response has been whiny.
BTW, your website link in your profile name has the wrong punctuation.
“Election fraud is in every election, in every precinct. ”
In every precinct?
Wow. Love to see your proof of that.
In Washington and Oregon, where there are no precincts because voting is all mail, all vote counting is done by county employees. They are 10-1 donkeys. They count the ballots in poorly supervised warehouses. It’s true that fraud is equiprobable no matter where you live, as long at you live in one of the “blue” urban counties like King or Multinomah. All mail in means that the entire county gets counted like the 100% Obama wards in Philadelphia.
4) Military coup.
Actually, I would put that as #1.
Where is our Pinochet?
You might notice from the reactions you got that this isn’t the website for a practical person who admires William F. Buckley.
This, the whining nutcase party of 2012 is basically a bunch of Birchers and you’ll notice that Buckley did his best to exclude the Birchers from the party.
They’re all paranoid, they’re extreme, they’re delusional, they’re racist (though they’ll never admit it even to themselves). They’re LOSERS.
Your sort will win again, and they’ll all hate you for it.
Tribal voting behavior means the death of the United States, never mind a political party.
No, it doesn’t, as long as the tribe of White Christians prevail.
It was Christians from Western Europe that established and built this country and can run it still, if they’ve a mind to.
All that should be needed to remind them is exposure to Obama’s “Revenge”-inspired policies.
First man to die in British actions against the rebels may have been Christian, but he wasn’t white. You can act like Crispus Attucks never existed, but I won’t.
And the fact that a Black man was killed in a Boston riot in 1774 is supposed to mean what, exactly?
Do you think that this gives the entire non-White and/or non-Christian tribes as much of a valid claim to the genesis of this nation?
Maybe in YOUR mind, but then the mark is so easily fooled…
The Boston massacre,(IIRC three other people, presumably White Christians, lost their lives, but we were never taught THEIR names, were we?), was in 1774, and thus were not rebels because it was not yet a rebellion.
Hispanics have to start voting in much larger fractions for this to become crippling. Maybe that’ll happen; The Lost Majority has a chapter on this, the authors don’t see it coming (and they’re pretty clearly Democrats).
I agree this is a concern, but of much, much greater concern is the fact that the GOP would rather lose every election than be conservative and defend the constitution.
The Democrat Party is a personality cult centered on Obama. If some scandal blows up to take him down a notch, Democrats got nothing. They have a very weak bench for 2016, unless you count Hillary who is never going to have a personality cult built around her, and still might get tarred if Benghazi blows up.
The Democrat coalition also relies extensively on stupid young people, who could get very excited by younger, more liberty-oriented candidates on the Right. But again that’s only going to happen if the GOP decides they want to start winning elections again. Not holding my breath.
For 2016, the struggle will be between the Blue Wall I-80 Dems vs. what I call the I-70 Dems. One model of what could happen was the 2009 Virginia gubernatorial race when rural R. Creigh Deeds was selected for his perceived electability – but the tribes stayed home and let McDonnell cruise to victory. Dem primary voters might short-circuit one or more of the identity/liberal candidates (e.g. Clinton, Cuomo, O’Malley) and go for the better-late-than never pander to suburban and rural whites (Hickenlooper, Beebe, J. Nixon, McCaskill, Donnelly, Shr. Brown, Beshear, Manchin, Warner). The 2016 Republican bench is deeper, more urban, younger, and yes, more diverse.
I’ve always known I was atypical, but wow. I grew up in a habitually Democrat family yet cast my first vote, less than six months after my 18th birthday, in the Republican presidential primary. This was in 1980, when the Reagan mystique was still yet to form except among those supporting his nomination.
Having been in a habitually Democrat family during his governorship in California, I also had to overcome the longstanding antipathy toward the man. Of course, by the first Tuesday in June the choice had already been pretty well narrowed down to him or four more years of Jimmy Carter.
Between Carter in the White House and Reagan’s immediate successor in the governor’s mansion, I had been souring on the Democrats for some time. I was the one who, long before my 18th birthday, first raised the idea at home of vioting Republican in 1980.
None of us ever looked back.
Let’s watch how fast Boehner caves on taxes and debt. Get ready for higher taxes and $19 Trillion in National Debt.
Don’t know if Texas will turn blue as the doomsayers are predicting. There is a reason why The Lone Star State’s economy is better than the national average; people who are of an entrepreneurial spirit are moving there, as well as to other. For the foreseeable future, another two generations or so, Texas is going to stay solidly Republican. At worst, it becomes a swing state that leans Republican, if not a strong Republican leaning state.
Idaho and the Dakotas are also becoming more and more heavily red because of the pro-business environment the Republicans seek. People are going to keep voting with their feet, and in the result, shift around the electoral college apportionment among the States. I look for California to actually start LOSING electoral votes in 20 years, give or take.
“But I do know that Bible based principles, the basis for more traditional thinking on social issues WILL NOT CHANGE…”
So the GOP is the CHRISTIAN party. Thank you for clarifying this. Since promoting certain religious beliefs as viable federal policy is counter to the First Amendment and any alleged support of personal liberty, looks like I need to withdraw from the GOP. Thank you for enlightening me.