Among the countless ridiculous, embarrassing, and surreal stories that emerged from the CPAC conference was this jaw-dropper:
If there is one message to take away from CPAC’s panel on immigration, it’s that White America is in serious jeopardy and may soon succumb to immigration, multiculturalism, and socialism. The panel “Will Immigration Kill the GOP?” featured former congressmen Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Virgil Goode (R-VA), Bay Buchanan of Team America PAC, and special guest Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA). The group Youth for Western Civilization sponsored the panel, and its head Kevin DeAnna was also a panelist. Youth for Western Civilization is a far-right group that regularly criticizes affinity groups on college campuses, especially those that represent black, Hispanic, LGBT, Native American, and Muslim students.
To begin with, these young bigots without a clue apparently never have seen a map, or they'd have figured out that Hispanics and Native Americans are from the parts of the world traditionally considered Western. And to whatever degree these Republicans mistakenly consider themselves civilized, most even marginally educated people consider Western Civilization's pillars to include the likes of Sappho and Socrates, Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Hadrian, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. Each of whom would qualify as LGBT. But the best part of that quoted paragraph is the name of the CPAC panel itself: “Will Immigration Kill the GOP?” Because CPAC has it exactly backward. Immigration won't kill the GOP, but the GOP's attitude about immigration will. In other words, as a friendly word of advice to Republicans: Your problem isn't immigrants, it's you.
Tancredo, a star among anti-immigrant activists, started the event by claiming that he wasn’t bigoted against Latinos and that the majority of Hispanic Americans support him and favor Arizona’s draconian SB-1070 law. “I have a lot of people who have Hispanic last names who support me,” Tancredo told the jam-packed room, “I speak for most Americans.” The former congressman, who in 2010 received just 37% of the vote in his bid for governor of Colorado, claimed that the GOP should embrace his nativist politics because immigration is the “ultimate economic issue,” and even claimed that Hispanics supported him over his Democratic opponent, Governor John Hickenlooper.
Exit polls notwithstanding. But he's not really a bigot. Some of his best friends are Latinos! Or maybe he'd at least like to hire some to do menial labor?
As previously noted, the modern Republican Party encoded bigotry into its political DNA. When your political agenda is based around robbing from the poor and the middle class to give to the tiny minority of very wealthy, you need a means of confusing and manipulating people into voting against both their and the general public's self-interests. The means the Republicans have used to convince people to hurt themselves and the nation as a whole has been to exacerbate and exploit bigotry. The Republicans are like the pickpocket in the film Casablanca, who implores a new arrival to beware of vultures, vultures everywhere, while surreptitiously lifting the man's wallet. Except that the Republicans' warnings are even more dishonest, and are much more hateful and destructive.
The Republicans often have succeeded by convincing white straight voters to fear blacks, gays, immigrants, and anyone else who cynically can be categorized as Other, even as Republican policies emptied those voters' bank accounts into theirs and those of their patrons. The Republicans now know nothing else. They are divorced from basic honesty and decency, and they clearly care little if at all about others. Lying and fear-mongering and using any means possible to gain and hold power is their basic primal mode of operation. They play their voting base for suckers. They have for decades. But what they didn't anticipate was that their base would steadily diminish demographically, leaving them with no path to electoral future success unless they change the very nature of who they are.
America is growing racially more diverse, and that is changing the electoral map. But even as the public supports humane immigration reform, the Republicans continue to crush dreams. And then they ask if immigration will kill the GOP?
Evidently, while the panel’s speakers see unrepentant Nativism and immigrant-bashing as the way for the GOP’s electoral success, it mainly appealed to the CPAC attendees who feared the demise of White America and the emergence of a more diverse population. All four panelists agreed that unless the Republican Party embraces their hard line anti-immigrant stance, the GOP will become inextricably weakened and the country will dissolve into multicultural dystopia.
The Latino vote was signficant or decisive for the Democrats in several key races in November. It promises to be the same for President Obama next year. As Harold Meyerson recently wrote:
Read the census data that have been coming out over the past couple weeks and you're compelled to a stark conclusion: Either the Republican Party changes totally, or it has a rendezvous with extinction.
But the Republicans are incapable of changing. They don't and won't recognize the need to change. If they can't exploit and exacerbate bigotry to scare people into voting for them, they'll have to run on the issues. But they can't win on the issues. Robbing from the poor and the middle class to give to the rich isn't great politics.
Meyerson:
What the census shows is that America's racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party's response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be. Republicans have obstructed minorities from voting; required Latinos to present papers if the police ask for them; opposed the Dream Act, which would have conferred citizenship on young immigrants who served in our armed forces or went to college; and called for denying the constitutional right to citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants.
If the Republicans have a long-term strategic plan, it seems to derive from King Canute, who commanded the tide to stop.
Failing to block the tide, Republicans will blame it. The political party that preaches personal responsibility lives to blame others, for pretty much everything. The answer to the CPAC panel's question, Will Immigration Kill the GOP?, is right there in how the question is asked.
Immigration won't kill the GOP, but the GOP's bigotry toward immigrants will.