White Dispossession and the Racialization of American Politics Accelerate
Ron Brownstein’s aptly named “The Next America” is a tale of increasingly rapid White dispossession. Key quotes:
From every angle, the results showed that the nation’s transformation into a “majority-minority” nation is proceeding even faster than expected. Nationally, the overall share of the non-Hispanic white population dropped from 69.1 percent in 2000 to 63.7 in 2010, a greater decline than most analysts anticipated. In a mirror image, the minority population grew from 30.9 percent in 2000 to 36.3 percent in 2010.
Given that the White percentage includes Jews and Middle Eastern people who do not identify as White (or vote like most Whites), the White population of European descent is likely below 60%.
The change over the past decade was especially dramatic among young people. In the new census, 46.5 percent of people under 18 were minority, a dramatic jump from 39.1 percent in 2000. As recently as last summer, demographers projected that minorities would make up a majority of the under-18 population sometime after 2020. At the current rate of growth, however, nonwhites will comprise a majority of children in the United States by 2015. And because of the explosive minority growth in the youth population—the people who will form families and become parents in the coming years—the nonwhite share of the overall population is likely to grow even faster over the next decade, says Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.
If the minority share of the vote increases in 2012 by the same rate it has grown in presidential elections since 1992, it will rise to about 28 percent nationally. By itself, that could substantially alter the political playing field from 2010, when the minority vote share sagged to just 22 percent. It means that if Obama can maintain, or even come close to, the four-fifths share of minority votes that he won in 2008, he could win a majority of the national popular vote with even less than the 43 percent of whites he attracted last time.
This would mean that Republicans would have to come to the realization that only a super-landslide of White votes can win them the presidency. And they have to realize that their future as a competitive party in national elections is dim indeed–unless they do something to stop these trends while they have a bit of power. But they won’t. Texas is typical:
“Anglos still dominate the [Texas] electorate and will for a while longer, but every election for the rest of your lifetime will have a higher percentage of Latinos and a lower percentage of Anglos than the previous one,” says sociologist Stephen Klineberg of Rice University.
The only solution for the Republicans offered in the article (stop me if you’ve heard this before) is to court Latino support.
Republicans cannot win if they allow Obama to keep two-thirds of the Latino vote he attracted in 2008. The first step toward turning some of that support, he contends, is aggressively pursuing those voters with Spanish-language advertising.
But what do Latino voters want? More Latinos (aka “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”) and lots of government benefits. (Brownstein calls the Republican opposition to illegal immigration “a sharp right turn” [!!]) The result would a dystopia where the two major parties compete to cater to an increasingly large, poorly educated, low-IQ population of non-Whites. One would think that at some point Whites would wake up to the realization that this just isn’t working for them.
And to illustrate the gap between the priorities of the traditional White majority and what this new non-White soon-to-be majority wants, consider Texas, the topic of another Brownstein article (“Texas Hold ‘Em“). Brownstein makes it very clear where his political sympathies lie, and it’s not with White folks:
The census starkly frames the challenge of equipping minority children with the education and skills they’ll need to ascend into the middle class. Once, that might have been viewed as a question of social justice; it is clearly now an issue of economic necessity. The census found that nonwhites comprise nearly 47 percent of Americans under 18, with Hispanics and African-Americans representing almost four-fifths of that total. Those two groups lag whites in virtually all measures of educational attainment (such as high school graduation) and well-being (such as access to health care). Unless the nation closes those gaps, it will struggle to produce a labor force capable of attracting decent-paying jobs, competing internationally, and generating enough tax revenue to tame the federal debt.
As usual, the only thing needed to get Blacks and Latinos up to White levels of educational attainment is more money. IQ never enters the picture. But the evil Republican governor, Rick Perry, who got 84% of his votes from Whites, refuses to raise taxes to accomplish this. Whites probably also account a vastly disproportionate share of the total tax revenue for the state, and not surprisingly, they don’t want to provide yet more public services for people unlike themselves. This, of course, is a basic principle of evolutionary psychology, as scientists like Frank Salter have found: People are unwilling to contribute to public goods to people unlike themselves. This is a huge cost of diversity never mentioned by those who paint a picture of the harmonious multicultural future of America.
So we are headed to an Atlas Shrugged situation: An increasingly low-IQ population in need of massive levels of government services supported by increasingly reluctant racially different tax payers. Not a good recipe for a peaceful future.
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