Here’s a representative passage from a genre of political writing popping up everywhere today: Republican Demographic Concern.
The answer to the electoral woes the GOP experienced on Election Day is demographics, pundits agreed, and Republicans need to expand the party to reach out to new and growing groups of voters.
Latinos, in particular, will likely be a specific group Republicans seek to attract, reporter David Gregory said during a panel discussion Wednesday.
"The party has got to find a way to reach out to Latinos, the fastest growing voting bloc, to become a more diverse party with the ability to shed some of the orthodoxy around taxes, around spending, over the role of government, and this process is going to begin this morning — the soul searching and redefinition," Gregory said.
There’s a secondary line of inquiry, though, that I haven’t seen answered very well: Don’t Republicans honestly believe their positions are correct and best? If so, what kind of “soul searching” is there to be done?
The best response I’ve seen is probably that from Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller (emphasis his):
But that doesn’t mean the party should sell out its core values, either. In many cases, reinvention means drawing a clearer contrast with liberals. The GOP probably needs to reaffirm some values.
For example, it would make no sense for the GOP to abandon its role as the party of life. It would make no sense for the GOP to abandon its role as the party of individual liberty.
But there must be some reevaluation. It’s time to rethink, “who are we?,” ”what do we believe?” — and “why do we believe it?”
And there’s the rub. If Republicans honestly believe their current positions are correct and best, but those positions don’t appeal to enough people to win national elections, their duty is not to take more appealing positions in contradiction to their beliefs. Their duty is, as Lewis puts it, to determine if what they honestly believe actually is correct and best.
It’s the beginning of a great challenge to conservatives that could cause all sorts of cognitive dissonance and pain for their aging stalwarts. But it has to be done in order to stay relevant. Perhaps the most efficient way to effect the change will be when Republican leaders figure out who among them already hold positions that will appeal to those wider audiences — and those leaders swallow their pride and elevate those new voices to leadership positions. Either that, or opportunistic outsiders will have to infiltrate the GOP’s ranks. Either way, what’s missing from the discussion so far, and that I’m glad to see Lewis start to explain to his readers, is that it won’t be enough to nominate Marco Rubio in 2016 and hold him to the same ideological purity standard Republicans have had to meet since 1994. Rather, Republicans have to ask themselves the harder questions.
”Is it in the country’s best interest to suppress immigration?”
”In what world is it rational to reject tax increases in every instance?”
”Can the Republican party ever thrive if its core members actively fight secularism?”
And so on.
(Image from the White House Flickr feed: "P072011PS-0740")
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