Fade to Darkness?
No, the Republican Party isn't doomed...
March 6, 2012
By JAMES TARANTO
It's now or never for Republicans, or at least for conservatives, claims the nasty liberal writer Jonathan Chait of New York magazine. "The modern GOP--the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes--is staring down its own demographic extinction," Chait claims. Republicans, in his view, are right to worry "that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests."
It's not an original argument. As Chait acknowledges, it dates back at least a decade, to John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority." In brief, it is that demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic--blacks, Hispanics, college-educated professionals--are growing in number, whereas working-class whites, now the GOP's base, are diminishing. Within a few decades, by most estimates, whites will no longer even be a majority of the U.S. population. Chait doesn't think the demographic tipping point has quite arrived yet--unlike many of his fellow libs, he believes Barack Obama could lose--but he thinks this year may be the Republican Party's last chance to win a presidential election unless it reconstitutes itself as a considerably more liberal party.
There are, to say the least, some problems with this analysis. Most obviously, the three Democratic demographics are actually quite different. Blacks have been overwhelmingly Democratic for almost half a century. But Hispanics, while usually trending donkward, do so by considerably smaller margins.
As for college-educated professionals, it is true (and we can confirm from personal experience) that what Charles Murray calls the "narrow elite"--those who wield cultural influence in the most prestigious professions--are overwhelmingly left-wing Democrats. It's also true that voters with advanced degrees tend to vote Democratic. But among those with a bachelor's degree or less, more education tends to be associated with a higher propensity to vote Republican.
Exit polls from 2008 confirm this: Obama's vote total was 63% among high school dropouts, 52% among high school graduates, 51% among those with some college, 50% among college graduates and 58% among postgraduates. (Two caveats on these numbers: First, they are irrespective of race, so that racial disparities in educational achievement may account for some or all of the results. Second, it would be interesting to see a breakdown of the "postgraduate" category by profession, so as to see how much the numbers are skewed by the liberal domination of higher education and union domination of lower education.)
Chait has an antithesis paragraph in which he allows that "no coalition is permanent," and political analyst Sean Trende, in an interview with National Review's Reihan Salam, argues persuasively that "this whole 'demographic doomsday' scenario is overblown." Republicans will adapt, he expects. In some ways, this may involve becoming more liberal: "Thirty years from now the GOP will probably not be opposed to same-sex marriage, for example." That seems a reasonable extrapolation of recent trends. But while public opinion about homosexuality has consistently (if gradually) shifted to the left over the past 25 years, we cannot think of another social, economic or foreign-policy issue about which that can be said.
The biggest problem with the demographic doomsday scenario is that it is a static analysis--that is, it classifies voters into groups and assumes that those groups will change only in size, not in political attitudes. Trende correctly notes that this assumption is baseless:
Judis and Teixeira sketch out one path for the future, but there are a host of other possibilities. For example, are we really sure Latinos continue to go into the Democratic Party? Immigration is an important issue for these voters, but it isn't the only issue, nor is it the predominate issue, nor is there even consensus on the issue. One-third of Latinos who thought immigration was "very" or "extremely" important in 2008 voted Republican. As Latino immigration drops off, and Latino population growth increasingly comes from second- and third- generation Latinos, the salience of the issue will likely decrease as well.
This has further implications, because as Latinos become more assimilated in the country, they tend to pick up GOP voting habits. . . . My guess is that the future of Latinos is the future of the great wave of European immigration from the turn of the 19th Century, whose descendants generally vote Republican today. But we can't really know for sure.
A related point is that even if whites are shrinking as a proportion of the population, Democrats cannot afford to write them off:
What about the "Arizona effect?" Jan Brewer certainly pushed Latinos out of the GOP coalition there, running well behind John McCain's '08 margins with Latinos. But she actually ran ahead of McCain's statewide '08 showing, because she ran better among whites. As Democrats increasingly tend to Latino interests, why does Chait believe that the electorate becomes less racialized, rather than more? That seems counterintuitive to me.
Ultimately, coalitions are like water balloons. You push on one side, and the other side pops up. In Arizona, Brewer took steps that alienated Latinos (though she still won 28% percent of Latinos), and it cost her. But the Democrats' stance alienated white voters.
Salon's Joan Walsh has a very long essay, inspired in part by the Chait essay, impatiently titled "What's the Matter With White People?" As the headline suggests, it's basically a rehash of Thomas Frank's false-consciousness argument (echoed in 2008 by the future president in his infamous "bitter clingers" comment): that less-affluent whites vote Republican, against their own economic interests, because they are fooled, in part because they resent minorities, into adhering to socially conservative values. Here's a sample:
[Rick] Santorum blames all struggling Americans for giving up on the father-headed, nuclear family that makes this country strong. "When the family breaks down, the economy breaks down," he's said repeatedly, not allowing for the possibility that the process works the opposite way. And in the last GOP debate, Santorum quoted Charles Murray on the scourge of "the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America," without mentioning that Murray was attacking white people.
That last phrase--"attacking white people"--is terribly revealing. We are reading Murray's new book, "Coming Apart," and it is an equanimous analysis of disturbing social trends. Murray is no more attacking white people than Daniel Patrick Moynihan was attacking black people when he issued similar warnings in the 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."
But the left for years has portrayed frank discussion about illegitimacy, welfare dependency and other social problems among blacks as race-based attacks. As a political strategy, this has succeeded, as evidenced by blacks' overwhelming propensity to vote Democratic. As a program for improving the lives of blacks, the results have been less impressive.
When Walsh accuses Murray of "attacking white people," she seems to be hoping that persons of pallor will be open to a similar appeal--that they will finally wake up and start voting what the left considers to be their "interests." Essentially that means embracing government dependency: "Today, many white folks who are voting Republican don't seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the 'takers.' " Once they figure that out, Walsh thinks, they'll join the blacks and the Hispanics and the professional elite, and the Democratic hold on the electorate will be secure.
But what if this liberal triumphalist narrative has it backward? What if, as Jeff Bell has argued, working-class whites vote conservative not out of resentment but for aspirational reasons? What if it is not less-affluent whites but blacks, and perhaps Hispanics to a lesser extent, who harm their economic interests by casting votes based on racial identity? Perhaps the result of changing demographics, helped along by the lessening of racial suspicions occasioned by the election of the first black president, will be to allow the GOP to develop a multiracial appeal based on universal American values.
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