Current frontrunner for the best one graf description of today’s GOP goes to left of liberal Harold Meyerson, writing for the Washington Post. How’s this?:
The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
What struck me first was the marxisant phrase “crisis of capitalism,” so evocative of those distant college and graduate school days when four different biographies of Rosa Luxembourg graced the bookstore window. But what else do you call it? Europe is terminally stuck in stagnation, America’s economy better only by comparison. It’s clear the corporate chiefs would like nothing better than to deport half of the American population, because outsourcing has made their labor pretty much redundant. Capitalism’s saving grace used to be that whatever its failings and supposed contradictions, it clearly provided the greatest amount of freedom and prosperity to the greatest number of people. But that was in comparison with “really existing socialism.” Now there is no socialism, not existing, not even dreamed of — except perhaps in the fevered imaginations of those GOP pundits unable to distinguish between the economies of Gaullist France and Maoist China.
As for Meyerson’s charge of racial resentment, sure, there is a racial tinge to the GOP campaign: the welfare ads in particular. Generally people make too much of the “racial transformation” — most people aren’t terribly concerned about it. I haven’t noticed that professional sports have become less popular, though they have been minority-majority for a very long time. But that was in the context of an economy where most people can find jobs to more than adequately sustain themselves, and sense improvement from generation to generation. Take such pillars away, and yes, you can see a lot of potential for resentment. How about “crisis of multicultural capitalism” to describe the current juncture?