The Great Debate

The Republican Party is in danger of reaping what it has sown.

Much has been written about the GOP’s problem with minority voters.  Quite simply, the party has managed to alienate every nonwhite constituency in the nation.

This is not an accidental or sudden phenomenon. Ever since Republicans chose almost 50 years ago to pursue a Southern strategy, to embrace and promote white voters’ opposition to civil rights, the party has been on a path toward self-segregation.

Successive Republican administrations have pursued agendas that included retreating on civil rights enforcement and opposing government programs that increase minority opportunity. That steady progression culminated in Mitt Romney’s disastrous showing among African-American, Latino and Asian voters.

Now, even as Republican leaders are openly lamenting that the party is doomed unless it can reverse its downward spiral with minority voters, the Supreme Court has announced that it would hear Shelby County v. Holder next month — the latest challenge to the constitutionality of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Clear-eyed GOP strategists must have cringed with recognition that the five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices are threatening to put the final nail in the party’s coffin.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a long-standing racial controversy – without any reverberations on the presidential campaign.  This reveals a lot about emerging racial politics of the Obama era.

The court is deciding whether public universities can consider race in their admissions process, and a broad ruling here could make affirmative action illegal across state and federal governments. That means, among other things, less diversity in the halls of power.

The solicitor general for America’s first African-American president cautioned against that fate. The United States needs affirmative action, he told the court, because it helps groom “effective leaders in an increasingly diverse society.”

Last week’s ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional has thrown conservatives into consternation. Rick Santorum says he is “very disappointed … It was a folly of a mistake.” Conservative radio host Michael Savage suggests Roberts must be on mind-altering medication. Even those, like John Boehner, who said they respected his jurisprudence disagreed with his decision.

Roberts now finds himself in the same bad standing with conservatives as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Bernanke’s credentials as the heir to Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan’s monetarist guru, have not been enough to save him from abuse either. When good conservatives like Roberts and Bernanke are traduced by their own side for being closet liberals, letting Barack Obama introduce European social democracy through the back door, something strange is afoot in the conservative universe.

The definition of a conservative used to be someone who values institutions above all as the bulwark against tyranny. That is the lesson left by the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke. But America’s most valued institutions, and those who operate them, are under attack from the very people who at one time would have been their stoutest defenders. People who like to call themselves conservatives, and set themselves up as arbiters of who is a true conservative, now despise the very institutions that safeguard our fragile freedoms from tyranny.