After 24 hours spent celebrating an election that appeared to breathe new life into progressivism in the United States, I started to give serious thought to the disappointment emanating from conservative America. And when I say conservative America, I'm not talking about Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, John Boehner or Eric Cantor. Nor am I talking about Rush, Newt, Grover, Turd Blossom, or even the Donald. No, I'm talking about the tens of millions of Americans who stuffed their hopes for our country's future into a fresh batch of right-leaning candidates and pleaded with those same candidates to fix things.
On election day, I'd been thinking about these tens of millions of Americans (almost half of the voting population, it should be noted) and reveling in how triumphant I was feeling and how it compared to the utter disappointment on the faces of the folks at the real-life Romney Death Rally. And it gave me satisfaction every time I reflected on this new-found reversal of fortune. Since that night, though, I've been trying to shift my perspective. The more I think about the outcome, the more I try to see things, even if only in some limited capacity, from the vantage point of good-natured, well-meaning conservatives in America. These people exist, and they exist in great numbers. And when I think about the outcome of this election from their eyes, I start to understand why they might be upset.
You know what? I'd be mad, too.
I'd be mad, first and foremost, that conservative leaders in Washington have been playing a very cynical political game for the past four years instead of doing their level best to govern. To be more specific, Republican leaders have fought the President at every conceivable turn (and even some inconceivable ones). Every proposal, no matter how benign or centrist, was met with a wall of obstruction. Take, for example, the Affordable Care Act. The ACA wasn't some secret socialist plot to overthrow the insurance industry; it was a package of modest reforms that were rooted almost wholly in conservative policy from the 1990s and early 2000s. Mitt Romney passed extremely similar reforms as Governor of Massachusetts, providing much of the architecture for the ACA. You'd never in a million years guess that was true by watching the conservative reaction to the ACA's passage. Now, many of my fellow liberals weren't (and still aren't) entirely pleased with the ACA. We didn't think it did enough to fix some of the glaring problems in American health care. But we realized that health care in America was in desperate need of reform, and that process had to start somewhere. We were happy to reach toward the middle (far past, even) to find some common ground in the interests of moving forward. Because that is how compromise works. And, at the end of the day, the ACA brought substantive, meaningful change to millions of Americans and gave them an option where none existed before. Meanwhile, Republicans made it their top political priority to limit President Obama to a single term (and actually admitted as much). Why wasn't their top priority the American people? Why wasn't their top priority helping the President to lift our nation out of the worst economic recession we'd seen in almost eight decades? Because they were too busy trying to limit the President's effectiveness in the hopes of tarnishing his record by Election Day 2012. The GOP could have held up some goal achieved or helpful law enacted as evidence that they deserved more governmental influence; instead, they tried to point toward the yawning gap where achievement should have stood, the gap they engineered, and had the audacity to blame it on the President.
I'd be mad that state-level conservative leaders around the nation badly misplaced their priorities and energy. Instead of focusing on economic recovery measures, many conservative state legislatures focused on undermining the efforts of labor unions, limiting access to safe, legal abortion, and implementing regressive voter disenfranchisement measures. The latter effort seems particularly galling. The GOP in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania (among others) tried to solve a problem of voter fraud that is almost completely nonexistent by enacting voter ID laws and/or purging voter rolls. Why expend so much effort in limiting the size of the electorate? Perhaps because higher turnout tends to favor more liberal candidates and measures. Furthermore, many measures specifically targeted groups that tend to overwhelmingly support Democrats, including the poor, students, and minority groups. In their efforts to gain electoral advantage, then, these conservatives took the most direct and cynical route possible and tried to limit access to the very foundation of democracy, to silence the voice of the American electorate. Our right to vote should not be used as a pawn in political gamesmanship.
I'd be mad that conservative politicians in America have largely abandoned people like me. To be fair, this is true to a certain extent for the general political climate in the US right now. The rich and powerful hold disproportionate sway over most politicians, regardless of party identification. However, the GOP has really perfected the art of giving lip-service to the working class while undermining these average Americans with their actions and policy proposals. After all, many of the wealthy in America have already recovered quite nicely from our most recent economic recession, while the poor and middle-class continue to suffer the effects of insufficient wages, the exporting of American jobs, and underwater mortgages, among a multitude of economic hardships. The GOP has shown unwavering devotion to those who least require additional support and effort on their behalf: the wealthiest and most powerful Americans, those who have already found great success.
I'd be mad that GOP leaders insist on an extremely narrow definition of a 'real American'. Alienating minority groups by trivializing the specific concerns and desires that each of these groups holds dear is certainly bound to cause trouble when the votes get counted; Republicans are playing a losing game by telling African-Americans, Latinos, and gay and lesbian Americans (to name but a few) that the only worries these groups should carry into the voting booth are the worries that inform the rest of the electorate. Nobody wants to hear that you don't respect their very real and pressing issues, and you can't just pretend that they should be thinking about the things you want them to think about. Therefore, you shouldn't be surprised when they turn their backs on you and vote for the people who will actually listen to their concerns. So, yes, alienating minority groups has political consequences. More importantly, it points to a moral and ethical failing on the part of conservative leaders. These 'special interest groups' are just as important to our country as white, middle-class Americans, and they deserve the same respect and acknowledgement. They are our neighbors, our friends, our co-workers. It should go without saying that they place the same emphasis on family and hard work as the rest of America. They are just as entitled to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as any other American. They should not be merely tolerated; instead, we should all celebrate the truly American way they enrich our nation.
I'd be mad, furthermore, that Republicans continue to alienate the 'minority' group that is really a majority group: women in America. There is simply no excuse for the misogynistic views, stances, and poorly-formed 'thoughts' that have been flying out of the mouths of conservative leaders as of late. One example: the shocking number of statements about qualified rape ('forcible' rape, 'legitimate' rape, 'honest' rape, 'emergency' rape, etc.) that have been buzzing around GOP candidates recently. These are supposed to have been a series of gaffes. A gaffe is a one-time slip. These comments betray an incredible disconnect between women in America and conservative politicians, not simply a one-time misstatement. But conservative antipathy towards women isn't limited to the horrible things that have been said, or the private thoughts of a group of privileged, powerful men. The GOP has taken very real and meaningful policy stances against the best interests of women in America. Take, for example, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Or the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, formerly garnering bipartisan support but now a political football for the extremist wing of conservative America that claims to be concerned about family values. Or the very real threats against funding for Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides a range of life-saving screenings and treatments for women, most of whom are low-income and would otherwise lack access to health care. And then Republican leaders have the nerve to tell the women of America that they don't need to worry about 'women's issues', that women have exactly the same concerns as men, and that the 'War on Women' is a liberal media fabrication to drum up fake outrage. All this while Rush Limbaugh, a figurehead of conservatism in America, describes women who use birth-control as sluts and prostitutes. Again, these are our wives, our girlfriends, our daughters, mothers, sisters, friends, co-workers. Heck, odds are pretty good you're a lady yourself. We all know that this is no way to treat people we love and respect, and we should not tolerate or excuse such actions from our elected officials.
I'd be mad, in short, that the Republican Party has painted itself into a very tiny corner. I'd be mad that, instead of facing the reality of an ever-diversifying America and embracing the whole width and breadth of the new American experience, conservative leaders have further hewn toward a policy of resentment, distrust, and alienation of The Other. I'd be mad that my party has become increasingly content to support candidates who lack the thoughtfulness, civility, and selflessness that should be hallmarks of a qualified civil servant, as the Richard Mourdocks, Todd Akins, Christine O'Donnells, Sharron Angles, Joe Walshes and Allen Wests of this world are completely inadequate to face the tasks that lie ahead for this nation. I'd be mad that the GOP has turned into an ever-more obedient servant for the greediest among those who have found wealth and success, and that conservative deference to their lust for increasing power has diverted attention from, and almost always come at the expense of, the working-class. I'd be mad that my leaders have been sitting on their hands and shouting down the honest efforts of those across the aisle instead of speaking and acting on my own behalf and in the interests of the nation. I'd be mad that my leaders have forgotten that America is a representative democracy (or have accepted the most narrow definition of the word 'representative').
Yeah, I'd be mad. I'd be downright furious. But I'd recognize that I have the power to do something about it. My voice, along with the voices of those around me who feel similarly, must steer American conservatism back towards the issues at hand. Because only when the GOP comes back to reality can we begin to have an honest and substantive debate about how to improve America. It is crucial for conservatives to ground themselves in the true nature of our nation before we can even begin to talk of compromise and bipartisanship. The role you will play in shaping the new America is entirely up to you, and depends in large part upon the lessons learned from the latest round of elections. The days of complaining about a Republican Party lacking true conservative credentials should be far behind us; it's time to find a different explanation as to how things went wrong, and it's time to forge a new path forward.
Or go ahead and support a Paul Ryan/Sarah Palin 2016 ticket. Something tells me I'd have another pretty awesome November night four years from now.