The GOP's Coming Diversity Breakthrough

The current crop of Republican minorities running in the 2010 midterm elections will force the public to reexamine many of their own ideas about the GOP and race.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was famously quoted as saying, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Bearing this in mind, the crop of Republican minorities running in the midterm elections poses an intriguing IQ test for the general populace, as the debate rages over the Party’s decades-long struggle with race.

In response to my post discussing the GOP’s Rand Paul problem, one commenter suggested that my personal membership in the Party could either be ascribed to confusion or masochism. When it comes to my political party, at least, I can confidently declare these both to be false diagnoses. Yet the question of why any minority would support the Republican Party persists, with those choosing to do so generally viewed askance. Candidates in the Rand Paul mold do nothing to assuage these suspicions, despite the Party establishment issuing its early support for Mr. Paul’s opponent.

Paul described his victory as a clear-cut message from the Tea Party movement, an assertion readily seized upon as proof positive of that body’s racial intolerance. The current electoral landscape for 2010, however, paints a more complicated portrait: Many professed Tea Party candidates—most notably Florida’s Marco Rubio—are themselves minorities, with Allen West also seeking election in Florida while unabashedly claiming the mantle of this nascent political force. In Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District, Charles Djou was recently elected to the House of Representatives, having turned President Obama’s home district red for the first time in nine years. Djou will appear on the ballot for a full term again this November.

Are these Republican candidates masochists, or worse, “confused”? The latter condescension is worthy of abject contempt for its implication: Conservative minorities must be somehow led astray by distracting red herrings, in turn violating their own political self interest. Djou, a graduate of the Wharton School and the University of Southern California Law School, is presumably aware of the two parties’ distinctions. Marco Rubio may have become familiar with our political system while serving as the Speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives. West—a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of 32 African-American Republicans running for Congress this year—presumably learned the tenets of the Republican Party while earning at least one of two master’s degrees.

All three of these candidates will appear on a general election ballot this November for reasons other than some sort of collective confusion. What drew these disparate men from varying backgrounds to the so-called “Party of No”? In examining the ideas that encompass these broadly diverse candidacies, the keys can be found to the intellectual rebirth of the Republican Party. Some may consider a person’s race and party label to be two oppositional ideas, but a national discussion of how the two are reconciled would be a conversation of first-rate intelligence.