With its presidential frontrunner a hateful billionaire, its next-in-line a Tea Party politician who has shut down the government in the past and its efforts to oust John Boehner nearly gone horribly wrong, one would think the Republican Party couldn’t be worse off.
Apparently, it can.
Shortly after rising Republican star Nikki Haley responded to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, some Republicans created #DeportNikkiHaley on Twitter. The hashtag was a response to some of the more moderate sentiments expressed in Haley’s speech, such as her call to accept immigrants who are “willing to work hard, abide by our laws and love our traditions.” It was also a response to her critique of the GOP being partly responsible for the ongoing governmental dysfunction and her attack on Donald Trump.
This knee-jerk reaction showed just how racist some of the members of the Republican Party actually are. For anybody who has been following the Republican presidential race, this will come as no surprise. After all, how else can one explain the rampant support Trump has received, despite his numerous hateful and unfounded comments? Take his recent call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States or his outrageous claims about Mexican immigrants, for example. Regardless of what you think about The Donald, you have to admit that this hashtag reveals a disturbingly dark and xenophobic vein in the heart of the GOP.
First of all, Haley was born in South Carolina. This means she is a U.S citizen and cannot be deported, despite the wishes of certain GOP members. In light of this information, the tone of this entire hashtag campaign becomes unmistakably racist. It indicates that a powerful and highly influential group of Republican leaders assumed that Haley, who is of Indian descent, could and should be deported solely on the basis of her skin color.
The main evidence for this assumption exists in the near constant chorus of “send Haley back to India” that pops up in many GOP supporters’ tweets. The fact of the matter is that Haley, despite her skin tone, is just as much an American as any of the people who are nonsensically calling for her deportation.
This situation also carries some troubling implications for the health of honest, productive debates in our society and within the Republican Party itself. Although our society has become increasingly inept at debate, ideally, debate is a two-way conversation where one side lays out their rationale and the other side lays out theirs. The fact that some GOP members would rather have an individual with differing opinions deported instead of engaging in a meaningful debate is extremely worrying. Perhaps it is simply a symptom of the extreme polarization the country is experiencing. Regardless, this refusal to hear the opposing side does not bode well for the future of the Republican party.
If the party wants to remain competitive, it is going to have to change some of its more radical and implicitly racist positions in order to appeal to a broader voter base. If members of the GOP refuse to acknowledge that some of their policy approaches need to change or if they are incapable of engaging in meaningful debate about how the policies need to be changed, they risk destroying the very party that they claim to support. Although change may be painful, all organizations need to go through it at some point if they want to remain relevant, since the conditions that they exist in are also constantly changing. This is a reality that those simple-minded politicians and political commentators who want to send Haley off to India refuse to acknowledge.
Those who are responsible for creating this hashtag should reexamine their actions. They should realize that banning, deporting or silencing those who agree with you is not only wrong, it is also detrimental to the health of our democratic system of governance. If they really want to help their party, and by extension the entire country, they should engage in a rational, measured debate instead of sending dissenting individuals away.