Krugman in 2008 (true today): conservatives win elections by exploiting white resentment BUT

[pampango]

are “on the verge of losing their grip thanks to demographic change.”

Many conservatives, including old-line relatively moderate conservatives, were outraged by the political thesis of my book The Conscience of a Liberal (first published before the 2008 election) — which was that extreme movement conservatives took over the GOP a long time ago, were able to win elections by exploiting white resentment, but were on the verge of losing their grip thanks to demographic change.

But that’s pretty much exactly what Sam Tanenhaus, the Times book review editor and (posted below) a long-time conservative, is now saying.

In COAL I also argued that the place to begin a new liberal agenda was with health care reform, more or less along the lines of the Massachusetts reform, which I believed was finally achievable. (I hoped for a public option, but oh well).

I sometimes get people declaring that I don’t know anything about politics; I’m willing to agree, with the proviso that you also admit that *nobody* knows anything about politics. But I don’t think that I’m doing all that badly here …

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/the-rights-stuff/

Book review: Original Sin Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

**snip**

It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide. Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.

The Eisenhower campaign also saw potential advantages in Brown—and a possible route, through the nation's cities, to recapturing the House, which they had lost in 1954. "GOP strategists regard this election as a period of maximum opportunity in their dream of shattering the Roosevelt coalition and regaining the allegiance of the Negroes," James Reston wrote in The New York Times. In 1956, the GOP improved its totals in black precincts by double digits in New York and Chicago, and made gains below the Mason-Dixon Line. Overall, Eisenhower received between 35 and 40 percent of the black vote, about 5 percentage points more than he did in 1952.

Then, within weeks, an authentic crisis arose. Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, defied a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, bringing in the National Guard to surround the school and block a group of black pupils from entering, while a shrieking mob threatened violence. Unable to compromise with Faubus, Eisenhower federalized the Guardsmen and also sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. government troops, armed with bayonets, "occupied" a state in the old Confederacy.

A Republican president and his party now stood at the forefront of civil rights in America. Yet within a few years, this advantage would be lost and the party would be defined thereafter by its resistance to civil rights. Why did this happen? The reason was a historical coincidence: Just as the civil rights movement became a national concern, movement conservatism was being born.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112365/why-republicans-are-party-white-people#

Hard to imagine that 60 years ago republicans were "at the forefront of civil rights in America and received 35% to 40% of the African American vote. Republicans were different back then, of course. (And conservatives in the South still elected conservative Democrats back in the day.)

[ananda]

1. For the last 12 years they have won elections by cheating and gerrymandering.

..