What Republicans Believe

The key findings of a very depressing study of Republican voters from Democracy Corps:

• You can‘t understand the government shutdown unless you understand the GOP from the inside. 
• They think they are losing ground and Obama has won his socialist agenda. 
• Obama is big government - but much bigger — they believe he is building dependent minorities that will give the Democrats a governing majority. 
• They are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority—as Democrats use government to build dependency and therefore also their support with minorities. The race issue very much alive. 
• Obamacare is the end game for Republicans: Democrats have already built constituencies of dependence based on welfare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and illegal immigrants. Now add to that the uninsured. 
• The problem in DC is not gridlock; Obama has won; the problem is Republicans failing to stop him. 
• For Evangelicals, homosexuality is the defining issue and threat. 
• Evangelicals and Tea Party dominate the party—make up more than half of all Republicans. They are both cheered by the Tea Party (despite the fact that non-Evangelical Tea Party adherents are social libertarian) because the Tea Party will stand up to Obama, Democrats, and RINOs in the Republican Party. 
• Moderates are a quarter and they matter. They are very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party, which requires being both social and fiscal conservatives. The women open to splitting ticket if Republican candidates do not represent their views. 
• Climate is next and could prove explosive outside the party and divisive within the party as climate skeptics are a majority in the conservative factions.

Some of this is true: the nation is getting less white, less religious, more accepting of homosexuality. One evangelical man in Roanoke, Virginia described the town he grew up in like this:

It's like a bubble. It's like a Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogeneous.

If that is what you want, you are right to worry, because it is disappearing. (To the extent that it ever existed.) These people feel that neither party has represented them, and they are right. Democrats have supported immigration, integration, women's rights, gay rights, separation of church and state, changes to how history is taught in schools; Republicans have supported big business and free market capitalism. As I see it, these people are foolish to think that restraining the government and unleashing capitalism will help them defend their world, because I think it is really capitalism that destroyed small town America and its values. Certainly free market capitalism will never lead to a world where everyone is middle class and goes to the same pool; only a massive expansion of government power, with much higher taxation on the rich, would have any chance of bringing back a middle class America.

I see the Tea Party as the angry protest of a losing team. If these people would ally with liberals, they could fight for some of their action items, like preserving small towns and helping the middle class. But as long as they see brown people and gays as their main enemies, that can't happen.