In the wake of the Republican defeat, there is the inevitable soul searching and jockeying for control. The project of defining the Republicans is quite a bit harder than for the Democrats. The Democrats don’t have an identity problem, at least since they got rid of the Southern contingent and unions (apart from government unions) began to be fairly irrelevant. They’re the party of the minorities, government workers, sexual non-conformists, and diverse beneficiaries of the leftist entitlement culture. These people all get along with each other and have no problem supporting each others’ pet projects, notwithstanding the little falling-out between the cultural leftists and the minorities over the California ballot proposition banning same-sex marriage. At least they can agree on looking forward to a post-European future.
But who are the Republicans? Even though 90% of their votes come from European-Americans, these are people who really aren’t on the same page at all. So after each major defeat it’s a Herculean effort to try to keep it all together. You’ve got the big business–globalist–Wall Street Journal–open borders–free trade crowd (the ones with the money). These people actually get along quite well with the neocons whose main agenda is to make the world safe for Israel and are liberals in every other way, especially on immigration. Then there’s the libertarians — people far too principled to find any reason to oppose the mass immigration that has gutted the America they grew up in and not seeming to realize that the people coming here are definitely not on page with their vision of America.
And there is the Republican base — working class and middleclass whites with various ideologies, mainly Christianity. They are remnants of the Reagan coalition and they were critical to the electoral victories of George W. Bush.
There is an obvious incompatibility here. There is deep anxiety in the Republican base because immigration has transformed the country and, along with free trade policies, gutted the labor market. But, as Pat Buchanan notes, the Republican Party is “hooked on K Street cash.” So in the end, the money people get their way on the big issues like free trade and immigration, and then they nominate someone like Sarah Palin to a figurehead position to try to patch things up with the base.
It didn’t work this time around, since enough European-Americans defected to the Democrats to seal McCain’s fate. Indeed, the amazing thing is that more European-Americans didn’t defect from the Republicans given that the Bush administration was arguably the worst presidential administration in history. And they managed to cap it off by presiding over the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. This indicates that European-American identity politics is already a reality in the Republican vote.
But the European-American defectors from the Republicans can’t possibly be happy with the multicultural–sexual deviate–leftist entitlement Democrats. They are likely to return to the Republicans if there is any reasonable excuse for doing so. As a result, one counsel among the Republicans will be to simply stay the course.
There is every reason to think that this might work, at least for an election or two. It’s quite easy to imagine a Republican candidate reclaiming essentially the same electoral victory George W. Bush achieved in 2004 in better economic circumstances. In fact, it probably would have happened this year, except for all of the headwinds of the Bush presidency.
But the problem with that strategy is that it can only work for one or two more presidential election cycles at most. The European-American percentage of the electorate is continuing to decline—around 70% in this election and is slated to continue to drop ever further. (This percentage is based on excluding non-European-Americans such as Jews and Muslims from CNN’s count of white voters — a correction that certainly makes sense given that their interests and their voting patterns are not at all similar to those of European-Americans.) Amnesty for illegal immigrants and continuing high levels of legal immigration will erode the European-American majority even further—and quickly.
Republicans can’t expect to continue to win national elections much longer. There is a ceiling effect for the percentage of European-Americans who might be induced to vote for the Republicans. Some European-Americans are so immersed in the leftist counterculture that there is no hope that they would ever abandon the Democrats. A great many other educated European-Americans are part of the hopelessly liberal educational establishment or they are government workers. Many benefit from the leftist entitlement zeitgeist themselves. And many, especially the young, have become multicultural zombies, having grown up with MTV and intellectually seduced by their college professors. These people may well become Republicans when they get a family and start looking for a mainly white suburb where they feel comfortable with the schools, but by then they’ll be part of a permanent electoral minority.
It’s difficult to say what this ceiling might be. Around 60% of European-Americans voted for Bush in 2004. But even if 70% of European-Americans voted Republican, it would not be enough to win an election when European-Americans make up 65% of the electorate. And that will happen very soon — probably by 2012.
In this election, overwhelming percentages of all the minorities voted for Obama—ranging from wealthy and middle class Jews and Asians to impoverished blacks and Latinos. If Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic candidate, this tendency would have been somewhat muted, but there would have been a similar general pattern. In fact, greater percentages of minorities voted Democrat in this election with a non-white candidate than when, as in all previous elections, the choice was between two European-Americans. The message is clear: An unambiguous assertion that the Democrats are the party of the ethnic minorities draws a greater percentage of minority votes.
Of course, the globalists and neocons urge the Republicans to solve their problem by trying to appeal to minorities. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute writes, “If the Republican Party cannot make significant, lasting inroads into … minority voting populations, it has a long-term disaster on its hands.”
Apart from the fact that such a strategy amounts to surrender for European America, the problem with this is that it’s really hard to see how the Republicans could have reached out to minorities any more than they did. McCain is the poster boy for amnesty for illegal aliens, and he said nothing against legal immigration. For his efforts, he received around 30% of the Latino vote. He said nothing to oppose affirmative action, and he studiously avoided linking Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright because he didn’t want to offend blacks. For his efforts, he received less than 5% of the black vote. McCain surrounded himself with neocon operatives with a long history of allegiance to Israel. For his efforts, he received just over 20% of Jewish votes. McCain even discouraged any mention of Obama’s Muslim-sounding middle name.
So what more are Republicans supposed to do? The simple fact is that the coalition of minorities in a powerful Democratic Party is their best strategy for achieving their dream of a post-European America, and there is nothing that the Republicans can do to change that.
The only long term choice that makes any sense for the Republicans is to acknowledge that they are a party of European-Americans and that the purpose of their party is to further the interests of European-Americans.
First and foremost, they must publicly state that it is a legitimate interest of European-Americans to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in a country where substantial percentages of non-Europeans — blacks, Latinos, and Jews — have historic grudges against them. And they should advocate policies aimed at improving the status of their base — middleclass and working class European-Americans.
Nothing short of adopting a European-American identity will do. It might be possible for the Republicans to adopt a Sarah Palinesque identity of Christianity and traditional small town values. But even if they do, they would still have to oppose legal and illegal immigration in order to remain a majority. The left has shown repeatedly that they will label as racist any criticism of immigration—even those based on economic or ecological arguments. And they would surely do so if a party composed almost exclusively of European-Americans advocated an end to immigration. It won’t matter what surface ideology they adopt.
Fundamentally, the Republicans have to be able to say to the New York Times, the SPLC, the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza: “We are the party of European-Americans and we wish to remain a majority. We are advocates for our people in the exactly the same way that other groups are advocates for their people.”
The Republicans would certainly lose some of their constituencies if they did this. The neocons would be in high dudgeon, although they are nothing if not pragmatic in pursuing their main goal of helping Israel. And the globalists might leave. But neither of these constituencies is numerically significant.
And on the plus side, the new Republican Party would doubtless gain the allegiance of a lot of European-Americans who voted for the Democrats in 2008 while holding their noses.
Of course, the Republicans won’t do this. Not for nothing did Sam Francis call them the Stupid Party. For one thing, the Republicans would have to find new sources of funding. But more importantly, very few people can withstand the accusation of being called a racist by the mainstream media. Conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly studiously avoid saying anything that could be construed as “racist”; nor do they dare to oppose the massive legal immigration that will make them a permanent electoral minority even if we stopped illegal immigration immediately; nor do they openly advocate for European America even though the vast majority of their audience are European-Americans who would love for them to do just that.
Nevertheless, despite their timidity (or their concern with keeping their advertizers), the bottom line is that advocacy for their own people is entirely legitimate and intellectually unassailable.
But unless Republicans become the explicit party of European-Americans, they will surely die — quite soon, and right before our eyes.