Demographics.
On a personal note, I was walking on the Ped Mall in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, yesterday and remarking to myself how many multi-racial and multi-ethnic couples there were out and about. In addition, I have been observing more racially and ethnically mixed groups of high school students, too. It's obvious here at least that old divisions are falling, and America is "browning" gracefully.
Salon
Enjoy it while it lasts! GOP base is still white and aging
William H. Frey | demographer and senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution
See also
AARP Bulletin Today
Older Voters Tilt Strongly to GOP in Senate Battleground States
Richard E. Cohen
See also
AARP Bulletin Today
Older Voters Tilt Strongly to GOP in Senate Battleground States
Richard E. Cohen
15 comments:
Enjoy what while it lasts? And who should do the enjoying? Newsflash: White people are not the enemy, except to someone with demagogic intentions.
Also, Frey's idea that white desires and minority desires don't dovetail in meaningful electoral ways is simply false. Hispanics are especially a moving target politically speaking.
The liberals are always falling for this same stupid argument. Yes, conservative old people are always dying. But equally, a certain proportion of aging, younger people grow more conservative. This happens in every generation. Reagan was elected because a whole bunch of older Democrats rejected the countercultural drift of their party and went conservative.
NPR did a piece today on how Hispanic voters in Texas identify as Democrats when asked but tend to vote Republican which contrasts with California hispanic voters which go Dem all the way.
I'd say all of the (male) Latino arrivals are "wages & debt" cohort, not "slaves" .... they come here to work for wages...
I'd think they eventually will end up in the GOP as presently configured as I see the GOP as more "wages & debt" oriented than the Dems who seem better aligned with the "slaves" or "rations" cohort who dont want to work for wages....
Tom,
Virtually all ethnic groups practice identity politics. It's not a white thing. It's a completely normal function--that being self interest. Given the ginned up rhetoric by Frey and myriad others it's understandable why whites might feel more than a bit threatened. An excellent book that highlights this phenomena is Jason Weeden's and Robert Kurzban's, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, Princeton University Press.
As it stands, however, the only slam dunk reliable ethnic group electorally speaking are blacks. Asians are about 50/50 while Hispanics/Latinos go roughly 60/40 Democrat, but that isn't etched in stone. Hispanics , however, have diluted electoral influence (outside of presidential preference) because of migration factors which limits them to a narrower geographical base such as southern California.
I'm not sure what ethnic agitators are looking for or trying to prove. However, I don't buy into multiculturalism one bit if that's what they're pinning for. I'm all for what Robert Bellah called consensus. There is no such animal in a multicultural universe. I'm 100% behind a deliberative and rational immigration policy. Thus I want intelligent, skilled, high information voters (don't care what party they affiliate with), not the opposite. More importantly I want people who will assimilate into the larger culture, learn the language, buy into the heritage. I don't want low skilled, low IQ, low information immigrants who've flaunted our immigration laws. Whether Frey or his ilk want to acknowledge it it's perfectly legitimate for American citizens to fear for their future, especially when that future is endangered by dysfunctional, immoral and illegal immigration. That's cultural suicide. No thanks.
Here's are very granular racial dot map of the US:
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
Ethnic groups stick together and it's moistly self segregation, just like the lunchroom at your local suburban high school.
That is in the process of ending. In another hundred years it will be looked at like slavery. It used to be the same in the US both in cities and rurally where various European ethnic groups clustered. There are still remnants of those clusters but they are largely anachronistic now and have little cultural impact.
These clusters are still very present in some large US cities, where immigrants to the US from those ethnic groups first establish themselves just as they did during the great waves of immigration in the past.
But the US has become multi-cultural and multi-ethnic wrt European immigrants that arrived in successive waves, and it will happen in the case of other ethnic groups as well.
I hope for an America where ethnic groups don't coalesce together to the detriment of the larger polity. I'm not sure what you're getting at here, however. Are you claiming multiculturalism will be the majority report one hundred years from now? Or are you claiming a general assimilation will manifest itself?
Both multiculturalism and assimilation will be growing trends. Intermarriage is increasing and that's a powerful force for assimilation. But many of today's kids are also fluently (at least) bilingual, too.
Historically, the US has been a multicultural force along with assimilation. Many Americans are proud of their cultural roots and heritage, on one hand, and on the other, cultural differences get absorbed into mainstream American life. Just look at the ethnic restaurant franchises, for instance, and crossover, fusion, and world music. Religion in the US is also multicultural. So is spirituality. This is just taken for granted in the US now. Not so in many other places.
I get that, but the historic multi-culture you speak of was not illicit, illegal. Apples to oranges. Common culture is sustainable. Multi-culture isn't. There's an illegitimacy to present ethnic trends. I think you have naive view of where we go from here with that in mind.
The US border is porous, not only in the south. Eastern Europeans can enter Canada quite easily and slip across the border into the US and make their way to an enclave in a city where they will be taken care of and can get cash work. That's just the way it is. As long as there is work here, people will come to take it.
And as far as the southern border goes, the US has much more to gain from Latin America than the do Latin Americans from coming to the US. If the US doesn't take the opportunity, then China will and is already doing so.
Tom,
Oh please. The US Chamber Of Commerce/corporate America have much to gain form Latin American immigration. Rank and file Americans far far less so.
All economic units in the US would profit much more greatly by the US taking a partnership attitude toward Latin America rather than a colonial one. In five hundred years there won't be a North and South America divide but a single America. It doesn't have to take five hundred years though. Just some creative imagination.
Sigh
"I think that the idea is the older whites are basically white supremacists, and to at least some extent that is true even among liberal whites, because this is a visceral matter."
True enough. But that doesn't mean that the next generation of socially aspirant and successful asians and latinos will be any less likely to age into selfish conservatives anxious to elect a government to cut their taxes, protect their social standing and their economic stuff, and stop handing out free stuff to the lazy "others", whoever those others are by that time.
100 years ago, a bunch of mainline anglo protestant brahmins thought they were biologically and culturally superior to all of those repulsive Irish, Italians, Scotch-Irish and Jews. The latter groups were on the democratic side of the argument against the establishment hierarchy. Now many members of those groups make up core conservative constituencies. It's the political circle of life.
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