Picture yourself in a room full of people you don’t know. It’s too awkward to stand there alone, so you survey the scene, looking for a group to join. The progression is always the same. Anyone I know? Nope. Anyone who’s like me? Nope. Anyone who looks like they might like people like me?
The “like me” can be almost anything, including sexual orientation, gender and ethnicity. The event might be a new employee orientation, the first day of school or the party you were dragged to by a friend who immediately ducked out to avoid a former paramour. If the superficial scan fails to identify your crew, look for the most diverse group, because they might accept your differentness, too. It’s why every new kid in a high school starts out with the “artsy” clique – call it the Cady Heron principle. Republicans would be wise to keep it in mind as they regroup from their 2012 losses.
Any thought that Mitt Romney would continue to speak for the party died with the release of his post mortem with donors, which laid the blame for his loss on President Obama’s “gifts” to voters. With no official leader, the hydra of conservative punditocracy offered as many ways to reanimate the party as it had talking heads. Endorse immigration reform. Convince working people we are on their side. Cut out the tongue of anyone who calls rape anything other than horrific.
All are steps in the right direction, but they miss the point. The problem isn’t simply demographics. It’s diversity, specifically a lack thereof, which is obvious from photos of the new delegations to the House of Representatives.
The Democratic caucus is a mosaic with a majority of women, people of color and members of the LGBT community (though that’s not obvious from the photo).
The Republican caucus actually has a higher percentage of white men than in 2010. Regardless of how big a tent they build, it is difficult for an increasing number of Americans to look at the Republican Party and say “I might fit in there,” much less “that’s where I belong.”
The optics may get better if you add GOP governors and senators, but the audio doesn’t. Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley can’t solve the diversity problem alone, and certainly not while spewing vitriol against same-sex marriage while remaining mum on attempts to disenfranchise voters in their state.
One of the messages of this election is that the Obama coalition increasingly sees issues such as voting, immigration and fair pay not as special interest gifts but as companion civil rights issues. Nowhere was that more clear than in the four state marriage equality sweeps, aided by increasing support from communities of color.
Nor will piecemeal policy outreach, the equivalent of sticking a “Welcome [insert group here]” sign on the Republican tent, be effective. America isn’t a black and white and brown country. Its Tiger Woods country, a land of “Cablinasians” (Tiger’s own moniker) and lesbian Latina immigrants who identify foremost as themselves and sometimes only for today.
Diversity and inclusion is about accepting people as they are and as they might be tomorrow, not a calculated initiative to access a percentage of their ancestry.
What Romney saw as Obama’s “gifts” weren’t cynical payoffs to constituencies. They were the natural policy results of a belief that diversity is desirable and brings opportunity. Traditionally conservative constituencies, like the military and the Fortune 500 already agree.
When GOP leaders accept that embracing diversity is the better answer to their “demographics” problem, many more Americans will feel at home in their tent.
