Ron Brownstein (along with Tom Edsall, the only establishment political analyst I respect) had a solid post-election piece on the idea that Republicans are the party of restoration, Democrats the party of transformation. This part gets to the key idea — that most conservatives believe they are outnumbered by the vile takers, even the conservatives Bobo touts as New Jack Burkeans:
For better or worse, this election more clearly stamped the Republicans as a Coalition of Restoration, overwhelmingly dependent on the votes of whites unsettled by those changes. After Obama’s victory, conservative grandees such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly portrayed the election as something like the Alamo, with true Americans overrun by hordes of benefit-grubbing minorities and young people. “We are outnumbered,” Limbaugh despaired. Romney capped this keening last week with his postelection diatribe to donors about Obama’s “gifts”–possibly the bitterest screed from a loser since Richard Nixon declared, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” after he lost California’s 1962 governor’s race.
Romney’s remarks weren’t just sour grapes; they reflect a widespread fear among the Right that a heavily nonwhite class of “takers” will vote itself ever-expanding benefits at the expense of mostly white “makers.” Romney earlier expressed that conviction in his broadside against the “47 percent,” and running mate Rep. Paul Ryan has made similar arguments for years. Yuval Levin (identified this week by David Brooks as one of the Right’s “two or three most influential young writers”) recently described Democrats as “an incoherent amalgam of interest groups … vying for benefits … at the expense of other Americans.”