Okay, I can't resist passing this on: the Republican presidential primary is taking place in an alternative universe. Timothy Egan explains in the New York Times:
Go read the whole thing.…the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
None of that is a surprise. But when you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States. They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
This is no surprise to any Californian. Ever notice that our state went from spawning Ronald Reagan to becoming one of Barack Obama's bastions? We've become radically diverse demographically and culturally, the very opposite of the Republican party. In the 1990s, California Republicans -- at the least the segment that in 2009 became the Tea Party -- tried to hold back the demographic tide of the young and brown through a series of racially tinged initiatives that would structurally impede the absorption of young people of color into the political system; they sought to stigmatize and expel immigrants while ending state sponsorship of affirmative action. Since they were then the majority, they won.
But their barriers could not hold. Today they are a dwindling minority and California is a solidly Democratic state. So is New York. Even the coastal old South -- Virginia, North Carolina, Florida -- is changing in this direction as demographic shifts work their way into the electorate.
So we get to watch the Republican clown show. These people are wacky. Ever notice that Mitt Romney's Super Pac is named "Restore Our Future"? There's an instance of linguistic incoherence if I ever heard one; haven't these people noticed that time runs in one direction only? This is usually thought of as forward. Perhaps not.
Concurrently, as Joan Walsh points out, Rick Santorum is
That's not likely to go far. There's no sign that most of us want a Pope.running for Pope, not POTUS.
1 comment:
Mainline Protestantism is over 95% White, middle/upper middle class and has a median age of between 54 and 62 (depending on denomination); how are you different from them?
Frankly, you don't impress me as someone who actually does more than light a candle or genuflects or makes rhetorical calls for "progressive change". You probably send you kids to private schools-or live in a neighborhood wealthy enough so that you don't "have to" send them there. Middle class, middle aged and middle brow, you busy yourself with the boutique activism (Chris Hedges' phrase)of gay marriage and abortion and think you're doing something useful.
Ridiculous. The more I see of "progressive" religion, the more I'm amazed at its delusions of relevance.
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