Your words are plain for everyone to see. I don’t know why you’re playing this game and trying to deny what you clearly said. You changed the term we were using in our discussion because “people whose views I disagree with” sounded like it reflected better on you than “xenophobic white nationalists” or better than just simply racists and bigots, which, again are the people we have been speaking about. You wanted to distance yourself from them rhetorically. There was no other reason to all of a sudden change the term we were using for the entire discussion up to that point aside from trying to abstract away from less comfortable terminology. As I previously mentioned though, changing to more innocuous terms does not change the underlying truth being discussed. It may make it more palatable to you personally, but that’s about it.
Thanks for the unnecessary condescension. I’ve noticed that’s a common tactic here. When better arguments can’t be produced, just insult your opponent by accusing them of not understanding your argument. If this is where this discussion is going, I’m not really interested in continuing. By the way, this quote once again proves that you are in fact saying that you are ok with whoever and whatever it takes to win, if you are saying that you’re cool with Serial killers and despots and terrorists as long as they help you win. You seem to be denying saying something and then reiterating that same thing that you’re denying in the same post. Very curious.
The only thing I’m failing to understand here is how you can both deny saying something and then say exactly what you’re denying saying in the very same post, and somehow think that you have any grounds for condescension and insults toward me. That is what is truly baffling here.
The argument you and the author are making are both unfounded though.
You are making 2 assumptions:
Lots and lots of latinos are identifying as white in the current time period (not some far off time period 30+ years from now).
If/when they do, they are going to vote the same way white people do (majority GOP voters, Trump lost every racial demographic except white people).
What proof is there of this? As I mentioned, the % of the electorate that self identify as hispanic is growing, and their voting habits have been fairly stable for at least 40 years. Roughly 65-30 for the democrats. W Bush did a little better, losing hispanics about 54-44, but they went right back to supporting the dems in 2008.
Claiming ‘yeah, but despite the fact that the % who are hispanic is growing, even more hispanics are identifying as white and voting like white people’ isn’t really valid without evidence.
It’s valid without evidence. It’s a logical argument, based on patterns that have historically happened with other groups.
You can disagree. But you can’t prove it - as you attempted here - by pointing to percentages of self-identified Hispanics who support Democrats/Republicans, since the premise you’re disputing is not that the percentage of self-identified Hispanics who support Democrats/Republicans will change. In sum, you’re citing to numbers that don’t address the premise that you’re disputing. You are free to disagree to dispute that premise, but not based on numbers which don’t address it.
I believe I’ve pointed out above that the reason the % who identify as Hispanic has grown is due to tremendous immigration in recent decades. If that immigration slows down, then the numbers could reverse, but even if it doesn’t, the impact could be blunted.
Blacks have been reliably democratic for 50 years now, and that hasn’t changed. They don’t all self identify as white. Obama was half white, had he had kids with a white woman that child wouldn’t have self identified as white.
Asians vote democratic. Jews have voted democratic for quite a while despite integrating well with mainstream society.
So basically the arguments you and the OP were making are speculation. Yeah, it could happen. The opposite could happen too. That is why one author retracts his views while the other author still stands by them.
As it stands, I see no reason to think the demographic trends are stopping. The next 5-30 years will see more and more non-whites, millennials, single women, educated professionals, etc. as a % of the electorate and all these groups are moving to the left (or have moved to the left).
Mixed marriages increase the projected number of whites though, which is his main point. Except for African-Americans, a large percentage of children of immigrants, mixed or otherwise, will consider themselves white. Whether they do or not, society will label them white. See: George Zimmerman.
In 2050, due to changing definitions of who is white, we will probably be an 80% white country. What matters isn’t birth rates, but immigration rates. When immigration is high, we have more “non-white” voters, because immigrants from places other than Europe will tend to regard themselves as non-white. But their children and grandchildren probably will not. And I do see a future with ever declining rates of immigration, in part due to a nativist turn in this country, which historically has always tended to happen after periods of high immigration, and second due to the increasing prosperity of the rest of the world. That will tend to reduce the desire to emigrate. It also creates more desirable places to emigrate to, which also takes some of the pressure off the US.
As for the main thesis, it was always a bad idea to rely too much on demographics. The primary reason is simply human nature. A party that assumes that people will just vote for them based on identity is a party that isn’t going to try very hard to win elections. Such a party will especially show a lack of interest in winning persuadable voters.
In 2020, it probably is true that identity will matter a great deal, and that a base turnout strategy might be the path to victory for Democrats. But this may not be true in 2024 and beyond. And it has nothing to do with how racist the GOP is. One of the things that has surprised me is that the GOP has chosen to fully embrace identity politics. The thing is, though, when you are practicing identity politics on a 70% majority, you WIN! Countering that with identity politics on the remaining 30% of the population is not likely to yield the results you are looking for. In fact, it’s more likely to make the GOP’s majoritarian identity politics more effective.
In large national presidential elections, and to a lesser degree in large statewide elections, the demographic trends have favored the party that promotes diversity and inclusion because the audiences that vote are more diverse. Once you get away from the larger races, however, the diversity advantage are taken away.
The problem is that while Democrats were promoting diversity and using that platform to its advantage in larger elections, it curled up more deeply in its bubble zones of coastal states and inner cities and failed to consider any strategy for winning over less diverse voting districts. And I think that when pundits talk of left wing elitism in politics and in particular the perceived snobbishness of the Democratic party talking heads, this is really one of the things that they’re talking about. How does a party expect to win white voters when it basically stops talking to them and stops campaigning in white communities? Sure, you might lose in Newt Gingrich’s old district, but you might be able to get these voters to help you in larger elections and district boundaries shift all the time.
The election of Obama was a blessing but in other ways, it was also problematic for the democratic party in that served as false evidence that they could double down on diversity and pay less and less attention white voters in rural and suburban America. It has been haunting them all along in the mid-term regional and local elections, with once left-leaning Wisconsin and moderate Ohio becoming redder and redder, and it haunted them in a big, big way last November.
Democrats absolutely need to be known as the party that supports diversity, but they’re not going to win elections by being the ‘safe space’ party and the party that fights microaggressions. They need to be a party that pushes back against voting restrictions and other forms of discrimination, but they also need to be the party that promotes economic growth and prosperity for everyone, which is a race-neutral message.
It’s not as if Bill Clinton’s version of the party wasn’t diverse. But it was basically an “All Lives Matter” party. They considered the concerns of middle class white guys to be just as important as the concerns of gay black women. Now one of the problems with that is that when groups have conflict, you have to resolve it and Clinton and the party as a whole often took the path of least resistance. It’s actually understandable that now the party has decided to come down firmly for the concerns of society’s marginalized groups and figure that Christian straight white men will take care of themselves. But even then, there’s still conflict and I think the tendency has been to manage that group conflict poorly. It’s one thing to tell white men to “get over it” on sexism, racism, and homophobia. It’s another thing entirely to tell your own constituents to do it. In a close race, it doesn’t take many African-American men, white women, and Jews to be annoyed with how the Democratic party manages identity politics to swing elections.
As soon as you (plural you, since there are so many of you) use “all lives matter” as an opposite to “black lives matter” you prove that not only do you not understand the world, you are committed to denying the true situation in the world.
It’s exactly that denial of obvious reality that will be the foremost issue in future elections. Nothing is more important. It will either be addressed or the country will explode.
I understand it very well, I was just using it to illustrate where the Democratic Party used to be. Under Clinton, they were against gay marriage, sorta for gays in the military, very harsh on crime, and wanted to reform affirmative action(while defending it from those who wanted to end it.
I wasn’t using “All Lives Matter” to show that the Democrats were better back then, just different.
Except Hispanics and Asians have been here at least as long as some current white ethnicities and they never get identified as “white”
This is part of the “otherness” of Asians. I see no reason why darker skinned Hispanics would ever be seen as white. Some of it is about skin color, at least for now.
Darker skinned probably not, but a) Latinos intermarry a lot, and b) there are a lot of light skinned Latinos.
As for Asians, as the Judis article points out, while Asians will always identify as Asian, they also intermarry a lot and half-Asians often identify as white. Or black, if they are black and Asian.
I think the focus is too much on skin color. It’s more about what counts as a minority. If a company or university was under fire for a lack of diversity or minorities them saying: “Look at all the Asians and Indians we have!” doesn’t work. That’s the important thing, IMHO. Whether or not an ethnic group counts as a minority rather than whether they count as white.
All this talk about demographic shifts have pushed some Democratic political thought too far ahead of the curve. This country is still 75% white and voters are even more white. Democrats stopped falling on their sword for unions a long time ago and without unions, the Republican party might seem more attractive to working class whites than Democrats. The Democrats may be focusing too much on social issues and not enough on economic finance issues. I don’t mean their ideas aren’t as good for the economy but their focus is not there. IOW, too much BLM and not enough AFLCIO.
Democrats are falling on too many swords and probably the wrong swords if they care about winning elections and governing. And sure, you can walk and chew gum, but at some point focus is a zero sum game (you can’t do everything) and people recognize this.
After gay marriage, people thought, well, they’ve had their turn, now its someone elses turn. But LGBT issues remained from and center.
Regardless of what the truth of the matter is, people see LGBT as a single community and it seemed like an awful lot of focus was being spent on that community almost to the exclusion of other communities.
I suppose its possible that “strike while the iron is hot” is a principle that could explain the Democratic focus on LGBT issues it is also possible that at some point they are burning all their political capital to achieve social justice in one area when they could achieve more social justice for less political capital in other areas.
To poor working whites it seemed like everyone was getting a turn but them. The Democrats only seemed to care about them to the extent that their interests coincided with other groups that the Democrats cared about. But there were very few things that Democrats pursued to help poor white communities that were intended to help them and not just all poor communities.
Another aspect of that is that if you’re focusing on LGBT issues and immigration, then guess who is going to get really upset about being “taken for granted”? African-Americans, and sure enough there was a lot of talk about that during 2016. And then they didn’t turn out as expected. The big problem with identity politics Democratic-style is that there are just too many groups, and while some people like to paint a picture of white males vs. everyone else, in reality it’s more like everyone vs. everyone else. YOu don’t think some black and Latino voters were turned off by focus on LGBT issues? The media doesn’t have to look hard at all for nativist African-Americans either on the immigration issue. The Republicans just have an easier time here. They only have to play identity politics with one group, the majority group. Doing it with 15 different groups is impossible.