In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

What would hold this multiracial conservative coalition together? The answer is: (a) conservative social values (shared by many whites, East Asian immigrants and Hispanics); (b) redistribution (the coalition ’s partisans in Congress would tax the Northeast and subsidize Republican defense contractors and agribusiness in the South and West); (c) a live-andlet -live states’-rights compromise (for example, different affirmative action policies for the white-majority states and the nonwhite-majority states); and, last but not least, (d) a common hostility to the black urban poor, everybody’s favorite scapegoat. —Michael Lind,“The End of the Rainbow:The Poverty of Racial Politics and the Future of Liberalism” (1997) c o n c l u s i o n A Multicultural Right? Prospects and Pitfalls Given the nature of the often heated debates within the New Right, the Religious Right, and the Republican Party, it seems fitting to conclude with the question of whether the already diverse coalitions that have emerged on the Right will successfully congeal into a truly multicultural conservative movement. If conservatives aspire to fully diversify their movement—and it is far from certain that all conservatives would agree to the efficacy of such a plan—is it actually possible to do so? Can one party, let alone one movement, contain gay men and fundamentalists women, conservative Catholics and moderate Jews, free-market idealists and anti-abortion activists? Further, could such a diverse contingent find the language to attract a black woman worried about liberal immigration policies, a wealthy white businessman who welcomes new immigrants as a source of cheap labor, and a Latino family divided on the questions of affirmative action and bilingual education? Despite frequent false starts, setbacks, paradoxes, and inconsistencies, a number of African American , Latino, Asian-American, women, and homosexual conservatives, along with their allies in the Republican Party, believe they will be able to construct a large enough tent to encompass them all. 171 If a viable multicultural conservatism is in fact to evolve from faint possibility to concrete reality, a number of troublesome issues will have to be addressed.The first step in realizing the potential of a multicultural Right, particularly within the political arena, requires that mainstream conservatives take this potential seriously. This transition may seem fairly simple and straightforward in theory, but it has proven problematic in practice. For good or ill, the Republican Party remains the central public face of the movement at large. While the Party has made overtures to African Americans, Latinos, Jews, and, more recently, Asian-Americans, it has a track record of sabotaging its own efforts. The idea of building a “new majority” inclusive of African Americans began in the late 1960s and expanded incrementally throughout the 1970s and 1980s.When Lee Atwater assumed the helm of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1989,he confidently declared that“making black voters welcome in the Republican Party is my preeminent goal.”1 But Atwater was probably not the best choice for such an endeavor. Not only had he cut his political teeth in the 1970 Republican senatorial campaign of South Carolina ’s StromThurmond (ex-segregationist,ex-Democrat,ex-Dixiecrat);Atwater was in 1989 fresh from orchestrating the notorious racially encoded Willie Horton ads for George Bush’s presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis. Not a propitious start.With little concrete success to show for its efforts, Atwater’s Outreach division was subsequently subsumed into the RNC’s Office of Political Coalitions,which also sought to establish alliances with Latinos,Asians, Eastern Europeans, and labor.2 Given his past, the choice of Atwater to heal the breach between the Party and African Americans is a small but representative indication of the schizophrenic tendency to reach out to communities of color with one hand and slap them in the face with the other. Regardless of this historical tension, the RNC has recently reorganized yet another new effort in this direction. In 1998 it announced, with much fanfare, the creation of the New Majority Council, with plans to spend over 1.2 million dollars a year on recruiting candidates of color and spreading the conservative message to minority communities. On hand and visible for the public launching were Representative Henry Bonilla and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell , who, along with Representative J. C.Watts, remain statistical rarities within Republican ranks.3 Since the Council appears to have adequate funding, perhaps it will exceed the gains of its predecessors. Indeed, inadequate funding, along with lack of support from the party establishment, has...

Share