Tribalism

Humans are tribal, it's probably in the genes. Some of us have bigger tribes that others. The Republican tribe is almost entirely white heterosexual and that's no accident - Lee Attwater and later Karl Rove designed it that way. They called it the southern strategy and it worked for awhile. But the white bigots are dying and their children increasingly don't share their views. The KKK morphed into the Religious Right - the same bigotry but it was now politically correct. This was great for the Republicans for two or three decades but as Dylan said "The times they are a changing". This is the subject of Paul Krugman's column today:
Politics in Black and White

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

The bigot strategy of the Republican party is rapidly becoming the strategy of the parties demise for two reasons:

1. Demographics: the country is becoming less white.
2. The tribe of younger Americans is becoming bigger, less exclusive.

Krugman explains number one:

But to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base — and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.

And both Hispanics and Asians, another growing force in the electorate, are getting the message. Last year they voted overwhelmingly Democratic, by 69 percent and 62 percent respectively.

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.

But I think that number two may be even more important - for younger people the tribe just got bigger.