Last decade, George W Bush and Karl Rove greatly harmed the U.S. through their support for massive immigration. Their efforts also helped the leaders of the Democratic Party while greatly harming the electoral prospects of the GOP (particularly the California GOP).

For his next dirty trick, Karl Rove wants the GOP to go whole hog on identity politics. From this:

GOP strategist Karl Rove said Saturday [at the state GOP convention] that rebuilding the Republican brand in California will be a tough task that will require them to diversify and create a strategy to spread their message to a wider audience.

Referring to the state party's deep losses in recent years, Rove said it needs to focus on larger themes of restoring jobs and reducing government spending.

He also said the party must recruit candidates who reflect the diversity of the country, and in particular, California. By next year, Hispanics will overtake whites as the state's largest demographic group.

"We need to be asking for votes in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we're asking for the vote from," Rove said.

It shouldn't take much to see how that would be a miserable failure for both the GOP and (much, much more importantly) the U.S.

No matter how the GOP panders, the Democrats will always be able to out-pander them. The Democrats are masters at it; it's what they do.

By pandering, the GOP will be giving more power to far-left concepts on race: affirmative action, tokenism, the idea that people should vote their race, the race card, and the idea that all members of a racial or ethnic group must think alike. The Democrats will then use those concepts against the GOP. If the GOP promotes someone like Marco Rubio or the Irish-Italian-Cuban, Pat Buchanan-looking Ted Cruz in order to appeal to Hispanics, the Democrats will promote those who are more echt and with greater racial appeals, such as Antonio Villaraigosa. Rubio has already gotten a taste of that, even though he hasn't learned from it.

At the same time, those concepts will be foreclosed to whites: Rove isn't about to support a candidate just because he's white but would rush to do so with one who's Hispanic. Thus, whites will feel marginalized despite being a majority (so far, in most places) and many won't bother to vote for the GOP.

All of the racial divisiveness that both major parties will be engaging in, needless to say, won't be very good for U.S. society.

The only way out of the mess that Rove and Bush made for the U.S. and the GOP is to de-emphasize race, to work to be more colorblind, and to vigorously challenge and discredit far-left ideas on race. Instead of giving more power to far-left ideas, work to deprive those ideas of their power.

Please write @KarlRove with your thoughts.