Subject: David Brooks: The American Idea and Today’s G.O.P.
From: Dan Schwerin <[email-masked]>
To: Jake Sullivan <[email-masked]>, Jennifer Palmieri <[email-masked]>, John Podesta <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 12:10:29 -0400

Today's David Brooks, relevant to our discussion about optimism and
American greatness... also maybe today's GDP report...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/opinion/david-brooks-the-american-idea-and-todays-gop.html?_r=3&referer=http://t.co/KHcHg6MqYy
The American Idea and Today’s G.O.P.
By David Brooks
SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

America was settled, founded and built by people who believed they were
doing something exceptional. Other nations were defined by their history,
but America was defined by its future, by the people who weren’t yet here
and by the greatness that hadn’t yet been achieved.

American founders like Alexander Hamilton were aware that once the vast
continent was settled the United States would be one of the dominant powers
of the globe. There was also a religious eschatology — a belief, dating
back to the Puritans, that God’s plans for humanity would be completed on
this continent, that America would be the “last best hope of earth,” as
Lincoln put it.

Herman Melville summarized this version of American exceptionalism in his
novel “White Jacket”: “The future is endowed with such a life that it lives
to us even in anticipation. … The future [is] the Bible of the free. … God
has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great
things we feel in our souls.”

Today there are some conservative commentators and Republican politicians
who talk a lot about American exceptionalism. But when they use the phrase
they mean the exact opposite of its original meaning. In fact, they are
effectively destroying American exceptionalism.

These commentators and candidates look backward to an America that is being
lost. Ann Coulter encapsulated this attitude perfectly in her latest book
title, “Adios, America.” This is the philosophy of the receding roar, the
mourning for an America that once was and is now being destroyed by foreign
people and ideas.

Out of this backward- and inward-looking mentality comes a desire to
exclude. Donald Trump talks falsely and harshly about Hispanic immigrants.
Ben Carson says he couldn’t advocate putting “a Muslim in charge of this
nation.”

During George W. Bush’s first term there wasn’t much difference between how
Democrats and Republicans viewed the overall immigration levels.
Republicans were about eight percentage points more likely to be
dissatisfied with the contemporary immigration flows. But now the gap is an
astounding 40 percentage points. Eighty-four percent of Republicans and 44
percent of Democrats are dissatisfied with the current immigration level,
according to Gallup surveys.

As Peter Wehner, a longtime conservative writer who served in the Bush
administration, wrote in the magazine Commentary
<https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/gop-nativism-2016/>:
“The message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by
people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable)
demographic nature of our nation. The G.O.P. is longing to return to the
past and is fearful of the future. It is a party that is characterized by
resentments and grievances, by distress and dismay, by the belief that
America is irredeemably corrupt and past the point of no return. ‘The
American dream is dead,’ in the emphatic words of Mr. Trump.”

It’s not exactly breaking news that this is ruinous to the long-term
political prospects of the party. In his book “2016 and Beyond
<http://www.resurgentrepublic.com/research/2016-and-beyond>,” the veteran
pollster Whit Ayres, now working for Marco Rubio, points out that given the
composition of the electorate, if the G.O.P. candidate won the same 59
percent share of the white vote that Mitt Romney won in 2012, he would have
to win 30 percent of the nonwhite vote to get a majority. That’s a daunting
number, given that, as Dan Balz of The Washington Post points out, Romney
only won 17 percent of that vote.

But it’s also bad for the spirit of conservatism. American conservatism has
always been different than the conservatism found on continental Europe and
elsewhere. There it was based on blood and soil, here on promise.

American free market and religious conservatives have traditionally
embraced a style of nationalism that is hopeful and future minded. From
Lincoln to Reagan to Bush, the market has been embraced for being dynamic
and progressive. The major faiths uplift in part because they are
eschatological — they look forward to a glorious future. They preach an
ethos of generosity and welcome. As the researcher Benjamin Knoll has
found, religious parishioners of all political stripes are more likely to
support more open immigration policies than others.

But this hopeful nationalism is being supplanted in the G.O.P. by an
anguished cry for a receding America.

This pessimism isn’t justified by the facts. As a definitive report
<http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=21746> from
the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently
found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They
are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans.
Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate
of American men.

Instead the pessimism grows from a sour, overgeneralized and intellectually
sloppy sense of alienation. It is one thing to think Democratic policies
are wrong. It is another to betray the essential American faith and take a
reactionary attitude toward life. This is an attitude that sours the
tongue, offends the eye and freezes the heart.