Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

This is a post that I’ve had saved for ages now, but new material just keeps on coming, but I got to publish this now otherwise this becomes a book rather than a post.

Got this interesting piece from an old friend (no link, sorry) that details the current plight of the Republican party:

From the American Prospect, a quote from David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined “axis of evil”:

Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

This war is nothing if cultural. Conservative values have received a rather big gut check these past few years, and when the economy came down due to a lack of transparency (let’s just call it that, for simplicity’s sake) and when the White House was captured by Obama (who in many ways is really the antithesis to what Republicans stand for), that was the final knockout punch. Or at least then the crisis of conservatism became all too real for many of its followers.

You could sense a certain desperation from the conservative camp when John McCain pegged Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. It felt like a last-ditch effort for the road conservatives had been traveling for a while now (social conservatism, christian values, anti-elitism, free markets and tax cuts etc.) After the election, Bill Maher commented on Larry King Live that Sarah Palin was really a crossroads candidate for the Republican party. Now that the election is over, do they follow her, with what Bill called the “folksy, the candidate I’d rather have a beer with, know-nothing” rhetoric, or do they go back to their roots of being pro business, but not necessarily anti-intellectual?

Many who were “for” conservative values before the economic meltdown (or the Iraq war etc.) will and probably have jumped ship, rediscovering themselves as Keynesians (seems almost everybody swears by Keynes nowadays) and whatnot. And I’m not just talking about swing vote behavior, there might be more total transformations of identity for some, and given how easy people assume new identities nowadays through consumption and whatnot, many will not bat an eye over this.

These newly minted liberals are an interesting group to watch, but to me the “remaining” conservatives (both politicians and citizens) are even more interesting to watch. How do people react when much of their core beliefs are now being subject to such scrutiny, or even ridicule? After the election I saw quite a few calls from within the party to reinvent itself and appear more to the center – even make a more distinct break from the Christian right. So far the party has been pulled into opposite directions. The ones who want the party to stay where it is (or where it was going) are the ones who have used the most scathing rhetoric in attacking the centrists, and of course, liberals.

The selection of Michael Steele as the head of the RNC was widely seen as an outreach to minorities and possibly a first move towards the center, even though just putting a minority in such a position might not be that effective unless Steele shows some initiative on changing the party (there’s a black guy in the White House, remember?). By the way, in a rather candid interview with GQ, Steele himself said that the Republican party had trouble attracting minorities, because they give the impression that “we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them”. In the interview he also said some things about abortion and homosexuality that got the Christian right up in arms, and he was forced to apologize and retract those comments. As a side note, his critical comments on Limbaugh earlier resulted in an apology, too, showing the anxiety of the party trying to reinvent itself.

Paul Krugman has been hammering the GOP, saying that “I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis. [...] I suggested a little while ago that the GOP has become the party of Beavis and Butthead, reduced to snickering at line items in legislation that sound funny.” It’s kind of like the jocks at the back of the class who used to make jokes during math class, but are now seeing that nobody’s laughing with them anymore, and people are taking math seriously.

Anti-elitism that occasionally spills into outright anti-intellectualism has been a staple of the Republican party (justly or unjustly) pretty much from the times of Ronald Reagan, it appeals to much of their (christian) base. But the current level of anti-intellectualism and populism coming from the GOP does indeed seem almost excessive. My guess is that conservative values being challenged as they are might have this kind of polarizing effect, and I guess you could see some of that in how conservatives are attacking the left now. Like in a heated argument, if you are pushed or feel threatened, you will stick to your talking points even harder – even believing in them more. How long conservatives can keep going on like this, I don’t know. Perhaps at some point Obama’s political honeymoon will be over which will give conservatives a breather, but they have to address the major question of what they are going to stand for if they want to become relevant again.

From a popular culture perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how conservative values are going to be treated in cultural products or in advertising. My guess is that there might be some imagery not unlike the anti-yuppie stereotypes of early 90s, but also some lighthearted stereotyping of conservatism. Maybe conservatism becomes sort of a guilty pleasure for mainstream America? Maybe self-irony is the way out for conservatism? But this is a topic for another post.

But, as a last note, I leave you with this post by Tyler Cowen where he plays with the idea of a truly marginalized republican party from different angles. The lack of true, formidable opposition could spell doom for Democrats as well.