Quarantining the Right-wing Base

There's been some noise lately about immigration reform dividing the Republican Party. Peggy Noonan (via Matthew Yglesias) is shocked at the disdain which Republican supporters of the bi-partisan bill hold conservative opponents of comprehensive reform. With Sen. Lindsey Graham referring to opponents as "bigots" and Michael Gerson (the guy who wrote all of Bush's more soaring speeches) calling those "who oppose the bill . . . "anti-immigrant" and [suggesting] they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism," Noonan is getting the idea that a desperate Bush administration finally feels free to vent their disgust the right-wing.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its
problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Noonan's right. Neither the White House nor many Congressional Republicans care for the Christian conservatives (or religious kooks) to whom they've had pander on gay rights and abortion. I remember one gay Republican staffer referring to the campaign against gay marriage as "just politics." The White House doesn't care for anti-Muslim bigots like Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, doesn't respect the relentless war-mongers of "Savage Nation," and doesn't respect itself in the morning after its efforts to screw black people and Indians out of the vote. The White House has been more willing to inflame the passions of the popular right about the war, gay rights, partial-birth abortion, vote fraud, and other wedge issues, but Bush, Rove, Josh Bolten and the rest of the White House political crew essentially agrees with American liberals that the right-wing base is defined by it's ignorance and bigotry.

However, the problem of the Republican Party is not that they're in danger of losing their base, it's that they're in danger of seeing their popular base isolated from the rest of society. The Bush White House has always been good at inflaming their base in ways that also resonate with other sectors of American society. With the failure of the war in Iraq and Katrina, however, the Bush administration lost its touch to such an extent that they've lost credibility themselves, lost the support of many neo-liberals who had been sympathetic with conservatives, and lost support in the mainstream media. The same isolation has also affected the conservative media machine and Republican base that have supported them. Moderate students who take my classes, even moderately conservative students, have such enormous contempt for the whole right-wing sector of American society that it's much more difficult for conservatives to identify "wedge" issues that could split the moderate vote. The problem with the Bush administration is not that they're breaking up the conservative coalition so much as they're making conservativism contemptible to everyone outside the right-wing.