The Mandela Problem of the AWM Wing of the GOP

http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/mandela-problem-wing.html

The Mandela Problem of the AWM Wing of the GOP
By Juan Cole | Dec. 8, 2013

The US Republican Party has become the party of the angry white man (AWM) in the United States, which is a large part of the reason it has had trouble winning presidential elections. There are more female than male voters, and if you add white females to Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, gays and agnostics, you have a natural majority for the Democrats.

The modern Republican Party was a product of the Nixon strategy to pick up southern whites for the GOP when the Voting Rights Act had swung African-Americans to the Democrats. Apparently in South Carolina and Georgia it is awkward for whites and blacks to go to the same church or meet in the same party convention. In 2008 when the Republicans took a real drubbing at the polls, the deep south was the one place they survived.

In the past year Republican-dominated state legislatures, freed from DOJ oversight by Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts and conservative colleagues, have rushed to pass laws discouraging minorities from voting.

So the funeral today of South African leader Nelson Mandela has presented a conundrum to the AWM wing of the Republican Party. Mandela is universally admired for the role he played in national reconciliation as of the fall of white Apartheid (keeping races Apart) rule in 1994. The GOP has to at least try to be gracious, or it will look mean-spirited. But they can’t help themselves.