GOP: Terminal case of patriarchal white privilege

There is something predictable and perhaps predestined about the current slow implosion of the Republican Party. After losing substantial ground in both the House and Senate last November, and after Mitt Romney received the electoral trouncing of his life, Republican politicians around the country called upon their own party to become more inclusive, and in effect, to tack towards the political center in a meaningful way.

Around that time, I penned an op-ed appealing to rational Republicans to jettison the ultra-conservative fringe and return their party to a state of reasonableness for the greater good of our shared nation. Now I have to wonder if such a thing is even possible. To exhume Calvinistic, Caucasian-centric social conservatism from the post-modem GOP may amount to an attempt at amputating gangrene after it has spread from the big toe halfway up the torso of its host. Indeed the GOP appears bent on eating itself alive.

So be it. If the egregiously gerrymandered Republican power structure can’t escape its own devices and embrace an evolving America, I retract my former call to reasonableness and say bring on the wolves of history. Let the current iteration of the GOP go the way of apartheid.

With the 2014 midterm elections right around the corner, most (but not all) conservative talking heads will at least have the good sense to refrain from explicitly lamenting the profoundly symbolic societal scale tipping that will occur if the current GOP fails to block the first (and undoubtedly not the last) African-American president from achieving stricter gun control laws. Nevertheless, despite 85 to 90 percent of Americans being in favor of universal background checks on firearm purchases, the GOP filibustered and derailed a bipartisan background check bill in the Senate. Thus the degree to which the current GOP has become subjugated to the NRA prevents the GOP from acting in the interest of nine out of 10 Americans on the issue of gun control.

On the immigration reform front, as the electoral base of conservative white males continues to shrink, many Republicans see the need to appeal to or at least appear less hostile towards Latinos. Yet a conservative “think tank,” The Heritage Foundation, recently published a highly speculative and foreboding immigration-reform fiscal-impact report containing statistical information contributed by Jason Richwine, a man whose doctoral dissertation proclaimed Latino immigrants to be less intelligent than white American nationals, an intelligence deficiency which immigrant parents supposedly (according to Richwine) pass forward through subsequent generations. Yet another example of how the social conservative fringe continues to torpedo GOP attempts at appealing to a broader swath of American society.

On many of the most pressing societal issues currently faced by our nation, firearm background checks, immigration reform, gay rights, women’s issues and so on, the greatest threat to the GOP’s ongoing political viability comes from within. This seemingly inescapable tendency of the GOP to ultimately self-devour can be systematically revealed by applying a statistical principle known as regression towards the mean.

In a nut shell, regression towards the mean denotes the tendency of extreme scores to average out over time. The Dallas Cowboys are a prime example. I can remember two fleeting eras in which the Cowboys seemed poised to totally dominate the world of football for years to come. Yet over time, they became just your average ball club. They regressed towards the mean.

What is true in football is also true in politics. Republicans are probably no more or no less corrupt on average than Democrats. In order to support a political position, Democrats are probably just as prone to bias data interpretation as Jason Richwine. Over a long enough period of time, regression towards the mean renders such variables as trustworthiness and integrity to constants equally applicable to both political parties. In other words, Democrats and Republicans will produce comparable numbers of (un)trustworthy politicians. In the long run, both parties will be swayed by individual self-interest and the desire to serve a greater good in comparable proportions. So where does the real difference between the two parties lie?

For the thinker ready to embrace the simple reality that politics along with all other manmade or natural systems are indeed governed by and cannot escape the laws of statistical mathematics, it is entirely possible to set aside variables that tend to average out over time such as level of corruption or biased data interpretations. Setting these statistical constants aside allows one to observe and objectively compare the true fundamental differences between social liberalism and social conservatism.

Social liberalism is a doctrine of inclusion. Social conservatism is a doctrine of exclusion. Social liberalism does not seek to preserve the societal dominance of one race, one gender, one sexual orientation, or one religion. Social conservatism does. Social conservatism springs from the root of Calvinism, a belief system founded on the idea that humans are pre-selected for ascension to heaven prior to birth, and their material wealth on Earth is evidence of their preordained status (i.e., that the wealthy really are a better class of humans). Social liberalism recognizes no such preordained birthright and sees all humans as being born truly equal.

Stripping away the political minutia to reveal the core differences between the two schools of thought goes a long way to expose the true cancer eroding the structural supports of the post-modern GOP. A party that has allowed itself to be so insidiously coopted by social conservatism is fundamentally incapable of evolving to reflect the diversifying face of America.

The GOP is suffering from a terminal case of patriarchal white privilege.

Cardin is a resident of Kalispell