There’s no doubt the Republican Party needs to do some work.
With hooting ignoramuses that made insane quips about rape,
abortion
and evolution,
I’d hate to see the candidates they turned away.
But the demographic argument is the one that is the most
one-sided and simplistic and fails to look at the entire picture of racial
politics.
Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are growing in number and since
they all are voting predominantly Democratic now, the Republicans need to adopt
policies that will appeal to these groups on nakedly racial lines if they want
to cobble together electoral victory, so the theory goes.
It quickly became a tired mantra: The Republican Party needs
to expel all those mean old racist white men who don’t believe in open
borders or affirmative action or else the GOP is going to lose every
national election.
What this account leaves out is the opposite side of this
equation: If non-white ethnic groups are on the increase and are voting in
large blocks, then whites are expected to vote as a block as well. The same
forces of racial demography that apply to nonwhites apply to whites.
Mitt Romney got a higher percentage of the white vote than
John McCain, so whites are already voting more along racial lines. Why should
they not? It’s somehow the cool thing to do in our “post-racial”
America. A ham-handed candidate, Mitt Romney got a sizeable majority of the
nation’s largest ethnic voting block without taking any really substantial
stand on controversial issues like immigration. That should scare the bejesus
out of liberal Democrats thinking in the long-term.
The left has successfully demonized any criticism of illegal
immigration or affirmative action as inherently “racist.” Never mind that
illegal immigration disproportionately harms blacks and Hispanics, as even respected
liberal economists have pointed out. And affirmative action and other
racial preference policies have the effect of excluding Asians and Jews at
higher rates than whites. Asian and Jewish voters still vote predominantly
Democratic, for
now.
The dream among Democrats today is that this new multiethnic
America will see blacks and Hispanics unite with the enlightened whites to
defeat the evil cabal of Caucasian Scrooges and usher in the progressive
American utopia that was meant to be.
But as machinery meant to realize this dream of a harmonious
multiracial society keeps humming along, more and more whites and Asians will
come to the realization that it’s them on the losing side of the multicultural math.
Again, it’s not going to be due to anything but a shift in numbers. The greater
number of nonwhites in the population, the greater number of whites pushed
aside by government policies meant to do just that. More whites will start
voting Republican (or whatever party replaces the GOP as the new “white”
party). And now that the genie of racial demarcation is out of bottle, white
voters are going to begin to vote more in a block than before.
Another giant misperception of the “demographic dilemma”
perspective is that the nonwhite coalition forged by the Obama campaign is
going to hold in the long-term. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians don’t all give
each other giant hugs and sing “Kumbaya” in the celebration of not being white.
They are as different and distrustful of one another as any other ethnic
coalition that’s stapled together. Asians gain the least out of this bargain,
being disproportionately injured by affirmative action. And blacks and
Hispanics will need better reasons to remain in the same voting block other
than not voting for a white candidate.
The Republican argument that blacks and Hispanics are
forever lashed to the Democratic Party by entitlement programs, even if 100%
true, is an argument with a short shelf life. The U.S. government is broker
than broke, and it’s only a matter
of time before the ax comes down, even on the sacred cows of Social Security
and Medicare.
Just as our systems of cash-and-carry corporate government
and rampant speculative financial cronyism fell apart under their own weight,
so too will the multiple constructs meant to create a more racially balanced
society. There’s no way to create a multiethnic mosaic in every institution
without going to more
ridiculous and obvious lengths. Even the most reckless gambler will eventually
walk away from a stacked deck.
What this has meant so far has put whites on the losing side
of several issues. Unchecked illegal immigration puts pressure on the public
services of various municipalities all over the country. The U.S. government brings
lawsuits against states that try to regulate this on their own. And President
Obama’s second term promises more
of the same disparate impact-based civil
rights pursuits that has produced a de-facto racial spoils system.
The racial stratification of the American electorate cuts
deep, but it cuts both ways.
