The Republican Party Needs More than a ‘Hip-Hop Makeover’ ~ DEMOCRACY AND HIP-HOP PROJECT: "hip-hop" is dead. long live hip-hop.

Sunday, March 08, 2009

The Republican Party Needs More than a ‘Hip-Hop Makeover’

I’ve been pretty entertained recently by the “Hip-Hop Makeover” going on in the Republican Party. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve been missing out. It seems like a faction of the Republicans, in crisis mode since the presidential elections as they attempt to rebuild the party and redefine the party’s vision, has been studying Obama’s popularity among young folks and think hip-hop holds the answer. Michael Steele, the recently-elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, has donned the cape and promises he is the man that will help the party in its soul-searching.

Steele plans to apply the party's principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” and invoke hip-hop to win over young people and people of color to a party typically known for being lily white. So what does Republican hip-hop look like? Some highlights:

- Steele told a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) audience that they should ‘fess up for their Party’s sins: “Tell America: 'We know the past, we know we did wrong--my bad.’”
- At the same conference, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann cheered for Steele, telling him, “You be da man! You be da man!”
- Steele offered Bobby Jindal some "slum love" for doing a "friggin' awesome job" as governor of Louisiana.

Horrifyingly out of touch, to say the least, but I suppose that’s what passes for diversity among those circles. That’s not all, though. Other recent efforts to merge hip-hop into the Republican Party include the “Hip-Hop Republicans” and the Republican Rapper.

I feel pretty strongly that the Republicans will never be able to fully hijack hip-hop – because of the racist character of the party itself, but also because the political content of hip-hop is diverse enough and rebellious enough that it cannot fit the narrow confines of official society without a serious overthrow of those very elements that make hip-hop what it is today. But there’s another reason why this “Hip-Hop Makeover” merits some attention.

These attempts among the Republicans actually represent a wider tension that is also facing the Democrats. Both parties are at an impasse because of the economic and political crisis. The old methods of “fixing” the economy (lower interest rates, pile on more credit to reinflate consumption, etc.) are not working. More importantly, the old ideas of justifying the neoliberal economic order have rapidly lost whatever legitimacy they once held. For the Democrats, they have been pretending to be the party of Civil Rights, the party that cares for people of color and labor. Yet it - alongside labor union bureaucrats and a new layer of people of color elected officials that arose out of Black Power and the upheaval of the 60s and 70s - demobilized that very constituency over the past 3 decades so that today, any pretense to having a base rooted in social movements is mere rhetoric. Further, the Democrats have been complicit in implementing neoliberalism on a global scale; Clinton completed the Reagan Revolution and Obama is (for now) following in his footsteps.

The Republicans, on the other hand, do have a base, and the recent presidential elections showed that it can be mobilized around a white supremacist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. At the McCain/Palin rallies towards the end of the campaign, there began to appear serious elements of white supremacist mobilization with people shouting out to “Kill Obama!” But a funny thing happened: McCain, being pressured by other officials and leaders in Washington, had to pull in the reigns on those rallies. The party leadership didn’t want those angry crowds to turn into angry mobs. This wasn’t out of any genuine anti-racist sentiment among Republicans, rather it seems the Party wasn’t ready for, nor did it want, a truly mobilized base. It only wanted a base that was sure to turn out to the polls. It is this rightwing of the party, represented by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, whose own racist visions for the party are running up against Steele’s (still racist) vision for a hip-hop makeover.

Today, with the deepening of the recession, grassroots forces on both the left and the right are moving in ways that may quickly go beyond the confines of either party. The Democrats and the Republicans are not blind to this, but neither has been able to offer a coherent vision that can climb out of this crisis and keep in check the anger and frustration from below. The enthusiasm and historic turnout in the recent presidential elections indicate that across the U.S., people recognize the stagnation of the old ideas and are seeking a change, a new basis for society. Hip-hop is in a unique position to reveal that very impulse and what a new basis could look like, which is why it makes sense that both the Democrats and Republicans have sought, in different ways, to coopt elements of hip-hop. Luckily, the hip-hop generation is not so easily impressed as to buy into the nonsense of a Republicans “Hip-Hop makeover.”