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I don’t think it will matter.
Even if America becomes more and more diverse, that diversity will be limited to a handful of large cities and blue states. So those blue states and blue cities will become more left leaning, but huge chunks of america will still be lily white and just as republican as they’ve always been.*
America is about 40% non-white (although the electorate is only 30% non-white due to non-whites having lower turnout and many non-whites being ineligible to vote for various reasons).
Even if America is 50% non-white in 30 years, and 40% of the electorate is non-white, we will still have a lot of mostly white states that will continue to vote GOP.
So I doubt it’ll matter.
Plus as time passed, the ‘in group’ becomes broader. It used to be 100 years ago that you had to be the right kind of white and the right kind of christian. You had to be an anglo-saxon protestant. So eastern europeans, russians, italians, germans, spaniards, french, catholics, mormons, etc. were out-groups and faced persecution.
Now you just have to be white and christian. So in the future the definition of ‘in group’ will probably broaden and the far right will have a lot of latinos and LGBTs in it promoting persecution of other people.
Anyway, I doubt it’ll matter.
*Having said that, states like Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. will ideally move to the left as demographic changes. But the plains states and much of the south will still be very right wing.
That’s true in a vague sense but these days it seems like we are going backward with regards to Latinos and the GOP, and perhaps society in general. It seems that before this millennium, anti-Latino prejudice was more casual even if it was still as virulent. But casual racism can be counteracted by exposure and education. If you’ve already firmly othered Latinos, then you’ll always be convinced that many of them are getting free shit from the government and are engaging in voter fraud.
I think this is spot on.
Not saying they should of course, but if the Dems embraced the 2nd Amendment or pledged to outlaw abortion, the Republican bloc would fragment into political insignificance and none of its descendants would bear the Republican name.
I don’t agree with that. The obsession with guns and abortion is more a proxy for the two parties attitudes on multiculturalism. Even if you removed these two wedge issues, some other wedge issue that is a proxy for multiculturalism would rise up to take its place.
At root that is what politics is about. On one hand you have a multicultural, pro-democracy party and on the other side you have a party that believes in social heirarchies and views democracy as a hindrance to their goals because it empowers the multiculturalists.
Eliminating the gun debate won’t solve it. For all intents and purposes, the democrats have totally give up on the gun debate and it hasn’t made a difference anyway. Under Obama gun control was barely mentioned and the conservative base still screamed ‘they’re coming for our guns’. Even if democrats give up and let the GOP legislate away women’s rights to their own bodies, the religious right would still scream about abortion.
The root cause of our political divide is due to attitudes on authoritarianism and multiculturalism. High authoritarians who reject multiculturalism are republicans and low authoritarians who embrace multiculturalism are democrats. Wedge issues are a symptom and expression of this divide, not a cause of it.
I’ve been hearing prophesies of the demographic doom of the Right or the Republicans for a long time. I’ll wait to see it happen. People somehow seem to forget that conservatives have and raise children too. And that, for example, Latino and Black communities can be *very *conservative when it comes to things like LGBT.
Which in an age of information being narrowcast into self-selected targeted bubbles through the troll-susceptible direct communication platforms, may be even easier. Never mind fake news that your safety net is being eliminated, what’s that anyway – here’s 50 posts from your subscribed feeds about how they’re coming for your guns, making your daughter use the men’s room, and saying the Bible’s not that great.
Helps if you can keep them fawning over celebrity and “success” as ya extract, redistribute and concentrate societal wealth.
People change politically as they age. Someone 65 is a baby boomer. Remember what baby boomers were doing when they were in college? The general image then was that they were protesting the war in Vietnam, smoking pot, wearing long hair, and were sexually promiscuous. They were not generally Republican then; they were very strong supporters of Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.
All areas of the U.S.–urban, suburban, and rural–are becoming more diverse. The suburban areas (the traditional Republican strongholds) are increasing in diversity at the greatest rate, the rural areas at the least rate. But all are increasing.
The Republican Party has known about this for a while, and their plan to survive is to continue to do what they’ve already been doing, as mentioned above: gerrymandering, and the use of propaganda to create single-issue, die-hard voters.
It doesn’t matter that, in reality, most of the nation is not “divided” to the degree that is always parroted in the media. As long as a certain core of voters can be duped into latching onto certain issues, (by whatever spin the party and its network, Fox, can devise), the gerrymandering will create strategic voting blocks. The false narrative of the “divided nation” is one that the Republican Party pushes (and the media mindlessly repeats), because it is really the only way they do have to survive.
They’ll first have to become sane again. It’s been a long time since they were a normal party. The Republicans had to first become sick and crazy to allow a guy like Donald Trump to win the primaries in 2016. So, before they thrive or survive, first they must lose the insanity that produced Trump.
Accomplishing that will not be easy. And if they don’t accomplish it, they will cease to exist as a party in my lifetime.
One way Republicans can stay relevant for decades to come is that liberal ideas generally go through two phases:
- They are ridiculed, intensely opposed, and draw horror
- Over the course of decades, they gradually become mainstream
Since Democrats are the liberal party, there will always be causes that are in Phase 1# and not yet in Phase 2#. For instance, gay marriage would have been unthinkable and those who supported it would have been considered radicals half a century ago, but today it is mainstream, and those who oppose it are labeled bigots.
Today, race-based reparations (to use one example) is intensely opposed, but a decade or two from now, it may be as mainstream as gay marriage, and those who oppose it will be “bigots.” ***But no matter what, there will always be issues still in Phase 1#, for which conservatives can oppose liberals, and temporarily enjoy the support of the American majority in doing so. *** And that backlash can be very powerful, enough to give Republicans the presidency once every 8-12 years or so. If the Democrats push race-based reparations hard in 2020 and 2024, promising trillions of dollars to black Americans and blacks alone, that could very well lead to Republicans winning presidential elections, for instance. And even if black reparations passes…then what? Liberals will promptly move on to the next idea, which will be unpopular for its first few decades, and conservatives can oppose that temporarily-unpopular idea next.
I feel the Republicans have lost their sense of timing on this. They’re now the party that’s still opposing ideas that the mainstream has accepted. They’re still fighting yesterday’s battles.
The “general image then” was a media creation, foisted by music, clothes, and magazine companies. The 1946-1964 era was by no means monolithic, and even “weekend freaks” in (sub)urban settings held straight jobs and voted GOP. Young adults outside the ‘hip’ cities too often were stuck in flyover-land for life, same as their descendants.
Protesting the war? Many did, and many enlisted for whatever reasons, me too. Puff pot? So did Nixon supporters. Sexually promiscuous? One can only wish! But most were thinner then. Look at generational obesity. How many conservatives are too fat to fuck?
IMHO all generation stereotypes are crap. Do people go conservative with age? Some. Some keep the dream of an equitable world where our grandkids can survive and thrive. Do those today calling themselves ‘conservative’ really fit the label? Ha.
The phenomenon you’re describing often occurs when you have normal parties that deal with the reality of what’s going on around them. But under the current Republican party, I don’t see that happening. The idea of Universal Health Care via any mechanism (ACA-done-right or M4A or something in between) is soundly rejected still. Climate Change being driven by man is still rejected by a great many Republicans…not only doing something about it, but even acknowledging that it exists. They still argue that tax cuts pay for themselves even after numerous real-world experiments have destroyed that doctrine.
So, when something slips from #1 to #2, I don’t see the Republicans moderating their position to get with the times.
Core values are formulated in young adulthood and don’t change very often. The myth of the average voter drifting rightward as he ages is just that, a myth. He just appears more conservative relative to the new younger, more liberal generations that follow.
Even younger Republicans eschew the party line on social issues. The party may be able to adhere to its outdated economic models for years to come but it will have to drift leftward on many social issues or be left in the dust.
Hoteling theory.
As one party attracts new voters, the party changes to reflect those new voters. This then repels some old voters. Bill Clinton won 49% of the two party white vote in 1996 and his wife won 39% of the white two party vote in 2016. Since the white vote is 5 times as large as any other block there are still plenty of votes to move in the future.
Yeah, this. I’d be more worried about the Democratic Party in the near future.
10 years from now, the median state will look more like a current Red state than it does now. The gap between the popular vote and the electoral vote (and Senate representation) will continue to grow. The structure of the Constitution bolsters the primarily-rural party.
I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of how this stuff works. The party can’t make that change without the voters driving it. Otherwise they’d go vote for someone who was in favor of abortion and gun control. This is sort of arguably what happened with the GOP and immigration. The party saw the demographic writing on the wall and many members of it really tried to make inroads on multiculturalism and immigration, realizing that many Latinos shared lots of “conservative” ideology except the anti-brown-people part. But it didn’t work. The voters weren’t there, and what we got instead was borderline white nationalism.
There will always be a wedge issue, and one issue ceases to be a sufficient wedge, it’s basically dropped and forgotten. The most recent of these is gay marriage. It was the front line of national debate for quite a while and when the right lost, they just stopped talking about it. But that happens when public opinion shifts, not when parties or individual politicians decide to concede the issue.
Well, someone may say this, but they are wrong.
They said this 20, 30, 40 years ago, too. What do you think happened to make those predictions wrong?
Only thing the Dems have to do to win is to be the party they claim to be. Not the party of bombing hospitals, weddings and funerals. Assasinating Americans, hiring Debbie Wasserman after she retires from the DNC. The party of scolding and elitest celebrities. The party of “Well they do it too” The party of super-delegates. The party of Russian conspiracy theories and shaming third party voters. The modern McCarthyite party.
Just be the good guys and you’ll win. Is it that hard to do?
As I said above, I was wrong about that
Less income disparity back then? Less education? More ingrained prejudice? I’m not sure. What do you think?