Redoing US Electoral Math: I argued that demographics favored the Democrats. I was wrong. by John Judis.
Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress … argues that the Democrats doomed themselves in 2016 with “a strategic error: prioritizing the pursuit of wavering whites over investing in and inspiring African American voters.” In the wake of the election, Phillips wrote in The Nation that “the single greatest force shaping American politics today is the demographic revolution that is transforming the racial composition of the U.S. population.”
Taken together, Phillips writes in his book, “Brown Is the New White,” “progressive people of color” already combine with “progressive whites” to make up 51 percent of voting-age Americans. “And that majority,” he adds, “is getting bigger every single day.” The strategy prescription logically follows. Rejecting the notion that Democrats must woo Trump voters as a “fool’s errand,” Phillips says the party must be “race-conscious and not race-neutral or color-blind.” Demographics are destiny. “The concerns of people of color,” he concludes, “should be driving politics today and into the future.”
This isn’t a new argument, of course — and I bear some responsibility for it. The book I co-wrote in 2002 with demographer Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority, laid out an overly optimistic forecast of the party’s prospects in an increasingly diverse America. By and large, Teixeira still holds to the view that the growth of minority populations will provide a long-term “boost to the left.” In his new book, fittingly titled The Optimistic Leftist, Teixeira notes that by the 2050s, eleven of the 15 largest states will be “majority-minority.”
On one level, there’s no arguing with the math. If you take the percentage of Americans that the U.S. census defines as “minorities” and project their past voting habits into the next decade and beyond, you’ll come up with a very sunny version of the Democrats’ prospects. There are only two problems with this line of thinking, but they’re pretty big ones. For starters, the census prediction of a “majority-minority” America—slated to arrive in 2044—is deeply flawed. And so is the notion that ethnic minorities will always and forever continue to back Democrats in Obama-like numbers.
The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely. History shows that as ethnic groups assimilate into American culture, they increasingly identify themselves as “white.”
Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it’s a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as whites.
Maybe the US Democrats will rethink their strategy, and stop the anti-white campaign that they have introduced into Western politics?
Steve Sailer comments:
After all, who wouldn’t want all that White Privilege everybody keeps hearing about? …
Just as Barack Obama was 50% white genetically and 99% white culturally, but chose to identify himself on the 2010 Census as 100% black. …
Seriously, the reason why the Democrats’ KKKrazy Glue plan to demonize whites as Ku Klux Klanners and Nazis might not work in attracting Asian and Latino enthusiasm is because there is this other group who sees themselves as the rightful owners of the Democratic Party: blacks.
Blacks tend to feel that they deserve for the Democratic Party to be, first and foremost, the Black Party and everybody else needs to ride in the back of the bus.
If blacks were content to merely let the media demonize whites, this long-term Democratic strategy would have a fair chance of working. But instead blacks repeatedly assert their rightful ownership over the Democratic Party with gestures guaranteed to offend Asians and Hispanics.
For example, the celebrated Black Lives Matter movement began in Ferguson with giant Michael Brown roughing up a tiny Asian shopkeeper, and quickly emerged into a dogma in which the Most Racist Thing Ever was to say “all lives matter.”
Similarly, in December 2014, African-American Muslim terrorist BLM enthusiast Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley traveled from the Baltimore area to assassinate NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
