A post-mortem on post-election post-mortems

Last updated on: October 8, 2013 at 10:42 am by Fred Clark

A post-mortem on post-election post-mortems 2013-10-08T02:24:24-04:00 Fred Clark

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I’m so old I can still remember the election of 2012 like it was just 11 months ago. BooMan reminds us of all the post-election talk of revitalized Republican outreach to Latino voters, women and youth.

Remember that? As BooMan writes, it didn’t quite work out that way: “Hispanic and youth outreach? Pfft. Let’s turn the Tea Party up to eleven!!”

Hand-in-hand with the Republican Party’s brief period of post-election introspection came a parallel process among the establishment institutions of white evangelicalism. They, too, briefly recognized the election — and particularly the four triumphs that day for marriage equality everywhere it was on the ballot — as a sign that they were swimming against a demographic tide that spelled their impending obsolescence. The white evangelical post-mortems were eerily similar to those of the political party to which they had bound themselves — so much so that for much of last November and December, I had to keep double-checking the name of the blogs in my RSS feed, because four or five paragraphs into an article I still couldn’t tell whether I was reading about the Republican Party or white evangelicalism.

The invaluable Rhetoric Race and Religion blog collected dozens of those post-election reflections — some about the GOP, some about white evangelicals, many about both at the same time. The headlines tell the story: “The Religious Right After the Election,” “What’s next for religious conservatives?,” “Election results raise questions about Christian right’s influence,” “What historically white denominations can learn from the Republican Party,” “Election 2012: A New Day for Religion in America” and on and on.

Click over to RRR’s list and read through some of those many pieces. They seem to come from a world much farther away than just 11 months ago, and yet the questions they raise and the issues they highlight remain just as pertinent today. The demographic trends have not changed — nor could they. And the old culture-war message has not suddenly acquired any new appeal.

So what’s the plan and the follow-through on the white evangelical side of all this once-much-discussed “outreach”? As BooMan says, the GOP quickly dropped such talk, preferring to double-down on the Tea Party Gone Wild strategy. But what about the religious right?

After the election, I wrote about what I saw as a split between “true believers” and “hucksters” on the religious right:

Broadly speaking, the hucksters of the religious right are advocating one response while the true believers of the religious right are advocating another.

The hucksters are urging their followers, supporters and partisan patrons to double down on all the same things they’ve been doing all along. They want the same stances, same agenda, same strategies, same tone — but a different result. That different result, they say, will come from doing all the very same things *even harder.*There’s no evidence that would work, but the hucksters don’t measure success by political outcomes. They measure success by fundraising outcomes — and an Obama win was probably more potentially lucrative for them than a Romney win would have been.

The true believers, on the other hand, seem to realize that more of the same approach won’t produce the societal changes they had hoped for. They’ve begun re-evaluating their political tactics, agenda and tone, considering if there might not be a better, more effective way of advancing the values they care about.

Here we are, 11 months later, and it seems to me that among white evangelicals, as with the GOP, the hucksters are winning.

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