Racialization of American Politics

Racialization of Politics in the UK

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A major theme at TOO is the racialization of American politics—the tendency for politics to reflect racial/ethnic identities rather than economic interest, as was the rule in pre-multicultural America where the Democrats were the party of working class Whites. The racialization of politics means that the Democrats’ “ascendant majority” of non-Whites is likely to dominate in the  future, as they do in California where they had supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature (until two representatives of the ascendant [Ronald Calderon and Roderick Wright] got involved in scandals) and are urging Governor Jerry Brown to spend yet more money on social programs.

It’s interesting that one aspect of the new American identity politics is that Republicans are likely to continue to do relatively well  in the Senate because each state gets two senators. That means that rural states with larger percentages of Whites, and especially older and working class Whites, are likely to vote Republican as racial identities increasingly dominate the political landscape (Ron Brownstein, “Parties trading places for 2014“). Clearly the White working class and older Whites are conspicuously absent from the coalition of the ascendant; Obama’s popularity is about 30% among these groups. Although these groups show the clearest pattern, Whites in general haven’t jumped on board the multicultural bandwagon as it heads into our glorious and vibrant future: majorities of all age groups and both sexes of Whites voted Republican in 2012; this trend will be more extreme in the future.

There are similar trends in the UK, where an observer described British political elites as posing “as champions of progress yet their fixation with multiculturalism is dragging us into a new dark age. In many of our cities, social solidarity is being replaced by divisive tribalism, democracy by identity politics.” And as in the U.S. where Whites and especially  working class and older Whites are defecting from the Democrats, in the UK the White working class and older Whites are defecting from Labour to the UKIP (The Guardian: “White face, blue collar, grey hair: the left-behind voters that only Ukip understands“).

To truly understand Ukip’s appeal you need to go much deeper. The roots of this revolt can be traced back over decades. Divides in the social and economic experiences of voters have appeared, their values and priorities have been widening, and a new electorate of “left behind” voters has grown up. These voters are on the wrong side of social change, are struggling on stagnant incomes, feel threatened by the way their communities and country are changing, and are furious at an established politics that appears not to understand or even care about their concerns. And it is these left-behind voters who have finally found a voice in Farage’s revolt. Read more

Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Politics in the United States

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This is a recent talk which was intended as a  general overview and designed to appeal to the unconverted.

My background is in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists study how the human mind has been shaped by the needs of survival and reproduction over long expanses of evolutionary time. When we look at how the human mind actually evolved, there are troubling implications for multiculturalism.

Social Identity Processes

There are several systems that are relevant for how people respond to others from different groups, but I think the most important one stems from social identity theory. An early form of social identity theory was stated by 19th-century anthropologist William Graham Sumner, who concluded:

Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war. . . . Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.

This essentially states that for humans, identifying as a member of an ingroup is a source of conflict with other groups. We are all aware that around the world there are many countries that are engulfed in conflict stemming from religious and ethnic differences—from different social identities. Right now the civil war in Syria is a good example, pitting Sunnis against Shiites, and within these larger groupings there are particular ethnic groups, such as Alewites, Arabs, Kurds, Druze, and Assyrians. Azerbaijan is no stranger to ethnic conflict, as in the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Read more

The Tea Party and the GOP: Heading for Divorce

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, William A. Galston makes some points that reinforce the still expanding racial fault lines in America (“The Tea Party and the GOP Crackup“) noted in my previous post. The take home message is that there is a rift between (White) Tea Party Republican base representing traditional American conservative rural and small town values versus corporate America and the emerging non-White majority. As always the rhetoric does not explicitly mention race, but it’s looming in the background like the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla. Tea Party Republicans are in the Jacksonian tradition of American politics.

Jacksonians care … passionately about the Second Amendment …. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts ….

These Republicans believe that their country has been taken away from them. They are

aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values.

That’s the crux of the problem in a nutshell. The new hostile elite that has been ascendant since the 1960s has solidified its power by importing a new people—people who want big government, high levels of government services, more immigrants that look like themselves, and who care nothing for the traditional people and culture of America.

Galston points out that most Tea Partiers think that minorities get too much attention from government; 65% view immigrants as a burden on the country. Contrary to elite opinion, they are better educated than the general population and are more likely to be middle class (50%) or upper-middle-class (15%). They are socially conservative on issues like gay marriage. Many are small businessmen who abhor high taxes and government regulation. They have strong economic reasons to oppose the current trend.

Galston concludes:

It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.

The problem is that corporate America is part of the hostile elite—with a globalist outlook, favoring policies that gut the US labor market and highly susceptible to lawsuits by activists and race hustlers if they deviate in the least from the path of righteousness as defined by the diversitycrats. They are not going to switch sides. Indeed, corporate America is a major employer of diversitycrats.

And so much of the really big corporate-derived money in the Republican party comes from ethnically motivated members of the hostile elite, like the Republican Jewish Coalition (which supports gay marriage and the immigration surge) and Sheldon Adelson in particular. According to ProPublica, Adelson donated at least $98 million and perhaps as much as $150 million to Republican candidates and causes in the last election cycle, mainly motivated by his obsession with Israel. This is the highest total for any individual in American history. But Adelson is no fan of anything remotely resembling Tea Party attitudes.  VDARE’s Patrick Cleburne notes that Adelson describes himself as a “social liberal” in favor of “socialized-type” health care. Definitely not a Tea Partier.

So we have one part of the Republican Party that is furious that their country is being taken away from them, while the other part—the one with most of the money—is actively involved in their dispossession.

This is not a marriage made in heaven. Again, the Tea Party Republicans are “aroused, angry and above all fearful.” In fact, it looks to me like fertile ground for an implicitly White third party. Republican votes, if not Republican money, come from its Tea Party base. A third party with such a Tea Party platform  may not win given that the hostile elite has imported a new electorate opposed to everything the Tea Party holds dear. But when it’s obvious that they can’t win, that’s what revolutions and secessions are made of.

Implicit Whiteness Sightings: Shutting Down the Government and Talk of Secession

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Always quick to spot a racial angle that they think will put White people in a bad light, there has been quite a bit of comment on the racial angle to the government shutdown/debt ceiling crisis. The New Yorker came up with “Where the GOP suicide caucus lives,” the point of which is that the Congresspeople who are shutting down the government are from rural areas where pretty much everyone is White. Here’s where the villains live:

congressdistricts_final-01

While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district). …

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed. Read more

Decline of the economic position of Whites: Implications for Republican Strategy

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In his series of articles on the future of the Republican Party, Sean Trende proposed that one explanation for increasing numbers of Whites voting Republican was simply that they were continuing to get wealthier—that it had nothing to do with race. I argued against this on a number of grounds, including the generally difficult economic times for Whites.

Now a new report emphasizes that the economy has gotten worse for all races, but in particular for Whites  (“Signs of declining economic security“).

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. …

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.” … Read more

Sean Trende: A Rosy Future for the Republicans Without Immigration Reform — if they appeal to downscale Whites

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It’s interesting that The Weekly Standard has published two articles opposed to the amnesty/immigration surge bill—interesting because we tend to assume that neocons are in favor of non-White immigration, their attitudes stemming from the Jewish identity of the core neocons. But we find none other than Bill Kristol in the opposition camp (‘Comprehensive’ Immigration Reform: Just Say No), along with Jay Cost (“The Wrong Fix for the Wrong Problem“).

I suspect that Kristol et al. realize that if the Republicans give in on immigration, it will speed the demise of the Republican Party—which is obviously true. (No wonder so many leftists, including the virulently anti-White Harold Meyerson, argue that the Republicans absolutely must vote for the bill to remain viable. Surely Meyerson has nothing but the best interests of Republicans at heart.)

And if the Republican Party ceases to be competitive at the national level, the neocons will lose their dominant position within its foreign policy establishment, to the detriment of their favorite country. (Although they have made a point to infect both parties, they are clearly much more powerful in the Republican Party, and war mongering on behalf of Israel is inherently more difficult to sell to the hard left that runs the Democrats these days.)

It goes to show that the fundamental commitment to Israel can trump a long history of the neocons moving the Republican Party to the left on diversity issues and immigration even as they lined up solidly behind the racialist, apartheid-promoting right in Israel. After all, Ben Wattenberg, who famously wrote in 1984 that “the non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality” is rightly considered a neocon. Read more

Asian-Americans are part of the non-White coalition

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Voting sign in LA County. Notice the prominence given to the English version, obviously a residue of America’s racist past.

An op-ed today’s LATimes argues that Asians have signed on in overwhelming numbers to the non-White coalition that has become dominant in the Democratic Party. Based on their experience studying the Asian American community, two political scientists, Taeku Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan, claim that the main reasons that Asians voted overwhelmingly for Obama have to do with seeing the Republican Party as too concerned with limiting immigration and too much associated with Christianity (Asian Americans turn Democratic).

The 73% of Asians voting for Obama was indeed remarkable—higher than Latinos (71%) or Jews (~70). Given their income profile, Asians are voting much more like Jews who, as the old saw goes, vote like Puerto Ricans but earn like Episcopalians. The point here is that their motives for doing so are similar to those of Jews—a lack of identification with the traditional people and culture of America (although doubtless with far less fear and loathing than is typical of Jews).

Since 2000, the Republican Party has moved more sharply to the right than the Democratic Party has to the left, especially on issues that resonate with Asian Americans. For example, Republicans in Congress escalated their heated rhetoric on immigration and, despite the Bush administration’s efforts, consistently scuttled efforts toward comprehensive immigration reform.

[During the Obama Administration,] the Republican Party has not been helped by its close liaison with the tea party movement, which received low favorability ratings in our 2012 survey, nor by presidential candidates and party activists emphasizing Christian values. Thus a Pew report on Asian American religion showed the highest Democratic Party support among Hindus and the religiously unaffiliated who, together, account for more than 35% of the Asian American population.

Taeku and Ramakrishnan also mention Obamacare and ending the war in Iraq as issues that helped Obama with Asians. But the bottom line is clear:

 If Republicans …  are able to project a more inclusive image of the party on immigration and religious diversity, they can hope to reverse their steep descent among Asian American voters.

So, once again, the Republican Party is encouraged to abandon any allegiance to the interests of its White base. Implicitly, Whites are urged to give up any attitude that immigration should be limited—Whites should have no concern about their displacement and should get on board with transforming the country away from its historical people and culture as soon as possible by admitting even more non-White immigrants.   Read more