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For years, I made a living as a cook. I discovered in that time that the secret to crafting a memorable dish was in the sauces, concoctions that could change the mundane to the magical.
If you needed more flavor in a sauce, the solution was simple: reduction. It was merely the art of slowly and surely removing the water, slowly simmering it until the taste was concentrated.
In American politics, we have seen a similar intensification within the Republican Party over the last decades. The conservative portions of their ranks have grown stronger, increased by greater involvement from social conservatives.
As time has passed, a new populism has taken hold and metamorphosed the Grand Old Party. A group once associated with country clubs and prestigious universities has become something else altogether. Intellectuals like William Buckley, Jr. who once led the Republicans became marginalized, pushed to the back of the stage as the party sought greater involvement from evangelicals and their plain spoken brethren. It was a bold and blatant attempt to retain political relevance at all cost.
What we have been left with is a populism that seemingly caters to the worse aspects of our nature, that eschews a struggle for refinement and fosters suspicion of those who don’t fit the most pedestrian of molds. It makes a virtue of selfishness and ridicules compassion. It is branded by anti-intellectualism, spurred by jingoism and girded by subliminal xenophobia and racism.
Until recently, Sen. John McCain’s career was characterized by a willingness to buck party trends, to stand and speak his mind freely. He was unafraid to play the role of party gadfly and that honesty earned him disdain from the growing power of the hard right. In fact, it likely cost him the bid for his party’s nomination to the presidency in 2000.
As McCain’s ambition rose to eclipse his conviction over the last few years, he capitulated to those he formerly eschewed and it cost him support as the 2008 campaign unfolded. Sensing a threat to his overwhelming desire to occupy the White House, he surrendered one last time to those he once deemed “the agents of intolerance” and offered partnership on his ticket to someone straight out of the hard right playbook in Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Palin’s nomination at first energized the base of the party, but as the campaign and eventual election showed, it alienated moderates.
So what the Republican Party has been left with is a political reduction sauce.
Looking at what Palin represented, at what energized the base of the party, it’s easy to see that the base has become, well, more base. Nastiness and meanness characterized her speeches and rallies yet she was the star of the ticket, the one who induced fervor among the party loyalists.
Palin even went so far as to proclaim all those who didn’t agree with her as not being “real Americans.” She seemed willing to marginalize their relevance and rightful place in the nation. And her crowds loved it.
In other words, Palin revealed that the heart of the Republican Party has become something distasteful and intolerant.
The result was that the party lost votes and power across the nation, with one notable exception. As other Americans turned in disgust from the innuendos and veiled racism employed by the Republicans, voters in the Deepest South were unfazed.
There was sharp voting along racial lines throughout the region. Election returns and polls show that while Barack Obama received 40 percent of the white vote across the nation, in the Deep South he only earned 10 percent.
Total Democratic votes rose in some portions of the region, but they were mostly driven by an unprecedented increase in African-Americans showing up to polling places.
So, while the rest of the country rebuked the politics of division and hate, the South had no problem with it.
So sad to see that yet again, the Deep South is dragging its collective feet as the rest of America is ready to head into a new future. The scenario is scarcely new but still just as disheartening.
Our nation is stepping through a threshold into a bold new world that more fully embraces the ideals contained in our country’s founding, an evolution that literally has the rest of the globe celebrating America in a way unseen during the course of human history.
It’s just too bad the South wants to rebuke that and head backward.
But they best be careful because when you reduce a sauce too much, all you’re left with is a singed and unpalatable mess of no use to anyone.
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