And you do that without appealing to racism how?
And you do that without appealing to racism easily. 'Ware false equivalence. Racism and anti-racism are not equivalent.
Well, you see, its the liberals who are the real racists. They inflict racial quotas and preferences that disadvantage white people, smugly claiming that they are interested in justice and progress. Naturally, white people resent such intrusions.
Keep in mind, such resentment does not necessitate a confession of racism. One can hold such opinions and assure himself most firmly that he is not a racist. Of course, it doesn’t speak well of such black people who accept such undeserved advancement on the basis of their race. Black people are simply unwilling to travel the hard road like other people did…the Irish, the Italians, so on and so forth. They want it handed to them by the government, and paid for by the people who did come up the right way.
And recognizing all of that isn’t racist, its simply a hard-headed, no-nonsense realistic assessment of the facts! (Conservatives love to think of themselves as hard-headed and realistic. Gives them wood.)
Above the neck, anyway.
Again, this is just handwaving away evidence you don’t like. I gave you exactly what you asked for, but as is your usual MO, you just declare it invalid.
A previous poster mentioned that anti-racism was not equivalent to racism. True:
Even African-Americans think black people are more racist than white people. When I said “White resentment” I wasn’t referring to resentment at the end of Jim Crow.
You were not referring to anything essentially different from that.
Opposition to busing, racial preferences, and concerns about crime are not inherently racist, but because liberals tended to think they were they alienated white voters.
Heck, I imagine liberals STILL think opposition to busing is racist.
Opposition to those things is usually racist and you know it. Not in all cases, but definitely in all cases involving anything that might be characterized as “white resentment.” To see the difference, read The Next American Nation by Michael Lind, which includes an argument against affirmative action* which is free of white resentment, by a commentator who split with the GOP and the conservative movement because they were getting, among other things, too racist and too racism-friendly, a story he recounts in Up From Conservatism.
- Calling not, however, for its simple abolition, but for its replacement by a color-blind AA system that would look only at socioeconomic background/disadvantages. This is not the sort of thinking to which the GOP white-resentment strategy appeals; no RW would get behind it.
If you believe that, then the logical conclusion is that the white vote is mostly motivated by racism.
The white vote is not mostly motivated by opposition to busing or racial preferences.
So Republicans don’t actually win the white vote by appeals to race?
The white, conservative Republican vote is mostly motivated by racism.
There’s no need to use racial appeals to win over conservatives. The Republicans win the white vote by winning over white moderates.
By a combination of factors. Dog-whistle racism definitely is in the mix, as are other sociocultural appeals such as opposition to gay marriage, etc.
But the divide that really matters, the one that demographically dooms the GOP in its present formation, is not ethnic but generational. See the Pew Political Typology 2011. Nearly half the GOP’s base is now the “Staunch Conservatives,” which is also the oldest group (and the whitest, BTW) – and, when they die off, they will not be replaced in commensurate numbers. Their children and grandchildren may be conservative in some sense, but not in anything like the same sense. Because the Staunch Conservatives’ politics and general world-view are not a result of people growing more conservative as they grow older (actually, people tend to grow more liberal as they age), but a matter of generational culture, of having been shaped by a world that no longer exists.
That’s not a problem, because the Republican Party is not conservative in the same sense it was conservative in the 1980s.
Indeed not; it is far more RW now. As mentioned in post #859. Which does matter, because it also means the party now has a core-base that won’t be around in 20 years. RW, as distinct from conservative, politics might have appealed to the young in some generations past, but they do not appeal to the GenXers or the GenYs/Millennials and there is no sign that will change.
And how do they do that? Nothing about the party’s message is moderate any more.
Yet they won the white vote by 20 points in 2012. And by 30 in 2010. Win the white vote by 30 points regularly and Republicans win every election with ease.
Well, if they can carry a white 30% advantage, I can see the Republican candidate (barely) winning the popular vote in 2016, and after that it’ll have to be a… what?.. 35% advantage for 2020?
With a 30% advantage in the white vote, they win easily in 2016 and 2020 and don’t start to run into trouble until at least 2050, and probably not even then. Current demographic projections have whites pegged at 75% of the population in 2050. Democrats wishfully believe that because a third of those whites will be Latino in origin, that they won’t really be “white” in terms of voting behavior. That’s what Dems thought about Italians too, didn’t work out so well for them.
Those demographic trends are poor predictors anyway. Latino immigration is in decline and those projections are based on heavy Latino immigration. Meanwhile, Asian immigration is on the rise, and those old demographics are based on lower Asian immigration. We may also be set to see a rise in European immigration, maybe even another great wave if the EU implodes. Reproductive rates are also very hard to predict.
The other big problem for Democrats is the decline of the black population. It’s not just whites that are projected to decline, primarily due to immigration, it’s also African-Americans. And that’s the only truly reliable voting constituency they have. Hispanics and Asians are groups the GOP has been able to persuade to support them in decent numbers in the past, no reason it can’t happen in the future. Running up 90% of the black vote won’t mean much if Democrats win Hispanics and Asians by only 10-20 points and continue to lose whites by 20.
In other words, it’s all hope and a prayer for Democrats. You might consider actually trying to persuade people, rather than just hope that people naturally gravitate towards you because of their ethnic, religious, or cultural identity.