Racial Politics in America

By Rod Dreher • March 13, 2012, 3:38 PM

Ross Douthat has a really interesting post about race and American politics. He takes issue with Jonathan Chait’s contention that white identity politics holds the GOP together. Ross concedes that there’s something to that, but that introducing race into the discussion makes it hard to discern important differences. Ross says that works both ways, then analyzes how the appeal of the Democratic Party among Hispanics depends on an explicit promise to make Hispanics beneficiaries “with very explicit and specific promises of special legal treatment (in hiring, government contracting, college admissions, immigration policy, etc.) based on their ethno-racial background.

If these promises help cement a new Democratic majority, then (to repurpose Chait’s analysis) the new progressive era he envisions will depend, no less than the conservative era that preceded it, on “ethnocentrism” and “racial resentment” and “ingroup solidarity.” If anything, the racial element will be even more explicit: Chait’s emerging Democratic majority will be less a rational coalition of ideological interests and more a kind of a race-based spoils system, in which progressive elites exploit a system of racial preferences designed to provide temporary assistance to the descendants of slaves to supply a permanent form of race-based patronage for America’s fastest-growing ethnic group.

Is this an unfairly reductionist take on liberalism, the Hispanic vote and Democratic coalition politics? Absolutely. But it’s no more reductionist or unfair than Chait’s race-based analysis of what makes modern conservatism tick.

14 Responses to Racial Politics in America

JT says:

March 13, 2012 at 3:54 pm

The big difference is that there aren’t enough Hispanics (or African-Americans) to put together a coalition that simply appeals to them. The white vote for Democrats will continue to be the plurality vote, and probably the majority vote. So there are limit conditions on promises to Hispanics (which, I think, is why you don’t see Obama trying to force an immigration bill through).

It’s different if you’re the powerful majority. You can just address the problem brutally, as was done in Germany or, for most of the last century, the South.

And on that account, you don’t need particularly good Hispanic Americans or even particularly bad Republican White Americans to feel very differently about the two situations..
Mr. Patrick says:

March 13, 2012 at 4:03 pm

The Democrats operate by legalizing, naturalizing, and distributing patronage to immigrants in exchange for electoral loyalty? I’ve never heard that theory before. I’ll have to vote Whig or Anti-Masonic instead.
Fran Macadam says:

March 13, 2012 at 4:05 pm

So few non-whites self-identify as political conservatives (even if in many ways they actually are personally conservative in outlook and philosophy) that it is difficult to test what portion of racism is really linked to conservative ideas.

As a movement, however, historically political conservatism hasn’t ever worried much or done anything for minorities when they have been genuinely oppressed, and some who are conservative do spend a lot of time bloviating about the fears of cultures that aren’t the ones they were insulated within. And harbored within what is called political conservatism are some genuine racists, who are tolerated, even if this is not an essential characteristic of conservatism. In close elections, even a small percentage matter and thus racist views can become outsized in all influence to their actual numbers as one is tempted to pander to worst instincts in order to win.

The great impediment to citizen immigrants voting conservatively is that the perception is that for the sake of a general philosophy, they will certainly be voting against their own group’s practical well-being in the face of a generally hostile political party.
MikeCLT says:

March 13, 2012 at 4:22 pm

If liberals are worried about whites acting and voting in ethnic solidarity like other minorities, then our elites really shouldn’t have adopted policies to turn whites into a minority.
Bruce Ross says:

March 13, 2012 at 4:32 pm

Unfairly reductionist and then some. Really, anyone who can only see politics through the lens of ethnicity needs to get out and about more.

But this piece seems to suggest Chait’s got the better of the argument, at least in the Deep South: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-stump/101634/the-south-too-republican-republicans?utm_source=The+New+Republic&utm_campaign=f53926a0f5-TNR_Daily_031312&utm_medium=email
Noah says:

March 13, 2012 at 5:32 pm

I strongly second MikeCLT’s comment.

The Republicans have always been a majoritarian, WASP bloc (what Peter Brimelow has called the GAP: Generic American Party), while the Democrats have been a coalition of minorities, usually aggrieved, resentful ones. Michael Barone (a conventional MSM pundit, yes, but one with a wealth of knowledge on American political history) has written how the Republicans have always attracted the support of those who saw themselves (for lack of a better term) as “standard Americans,” while the Democrats were for those who saw themselves, in the cultural context of the times, as “Other.”

In the 19th century, it was the Puritan-descended Yankees vs. the Southern-Scots-Irish-immigrant-Catholic coalition. Today it is married-with-kids, church-going white Christians (still mostly Protestant: white Prots voted 67% for Bush ’04, 65% for McCain) vs., well, the everybody-else coalition (Brimelow wrote in Alien Nation, if memory serves, that the Democrats are the black-Hispanic-Jewish-white-scalawag party).

There have been exceptions, of course. Blacks were originally a solid Republican bloc, and today Mormons and Cubanos are Republican minorities; from the other side, Franklin Roosevelt was through-and-through of founder lineage.
Mitchell Young says:

March 13, 2012 at 5:53 pm

“The Democrats operate by legalizing, naturalizing, and distributing patronage to immigrants in exchange for electoral loyalty? I’ve never heard that theory before”

Just because you’ve ‘heard it before’ doesn’t make it untrue. In fact, I reckon it increases the probability it is true.
Mitchell Young says:

March 13, 2012 at 6:03 pm

The problem is that the Republicans are not, really, the party of white people just yet. No Republican leader has suggested actually restricting *legal* immigration, and certainly not having legal immigration reflect the countries ethnoracial demographics. The business-libertarian wing of the party, i.e. most operatives, have actually attacked disproportionally white sectors, such as the public sector unions. Newsflash, teachers, nurses, etc tend to be white. Attacking them, like, say, Whitman did in California, assures you’ll get about 50% of the *white* vote, and no Republican can win with those numbers.

I’d also like to challenge the idea that ‘Hispanics’ are wedded to mass immigration. Economically they are the worst hit by it. Racial/ethnic pride certainly makes it somewhat of an issue, but decisive action on the immigration front would result in economic gains for them, and 20-30 years down the road, most probably won’t care that the numbers of their ‘cousins’ entering was restricted, anymore than the vast majority of Italian or Polish Americans really care that immigration was restricted in the 1920s.

Finally, there is the very real option that the US could seek to exist in its present form. More ethnically coherent states could emerge. That would be a plus for most whites.
Don Quijote says:

March 13, 2012 at 7:08 pm

If liberals are worried about whites acting and voting in ethnic solidarity like other minorities, then our elites really shouldn’t have adopted policies to turn whites into a minority.

If our business elites primary goal in life wasn’t CHEAP LABOR, all those emigrants (legal & illegal) would still be living in their native countries.

If you’re going to blame someone for the presence of minorities in the US, blame the business community which by the way is primarily republican.
EngineerScotty says:

March 13, 2012 at 7:15 pm

I sometimes wonder, if anti-urban sentiment may be just as strong, if not stronger, in conservative politics. Virtually nobody in conservative circles had any issues with Herman Cain, considering him “one of them”, despite being black. Romney, on the other hand, is a quintessential urban politician–originally from Detroit, and then later Boston, both locales that seem to be viewed as dens of iniquity by conservative America.

This should not to be construed to paper over the racism rather easily found within the GOP coalition–far from it. But how much of GOP popular resentment is explained by race, I’m not sure.
Sean says:

March 13, 2012 at 7:28 pm

“Franklin Roosevelt was through-and-through of founder lineage.”

Hence the epithet, “traitor to his class.”
JonF says:

March 14, 2012 at 5:49 am

Romney was from Detroit? Nope. He grew up in Bloomfield Hills which is decidedly the unDetroit– for those not savvy in matters Michigan, Bloomfield is the nouveau riche suburb about fifteen miles north of downtown Detroit (I know the distance because the roads up that way are conveniently named “14 mile road” and so forth).
Boston of course was Romney’s home as governor of MA, just as Austin TX weas George W Bush’s as governor of Texas, despite its reputation as Texas’s version of Boston.
JonF says:

March 14, 2012 at 5:53 am

Re: I’d also like to challenge the idea that ‘Hispanics’ are wedded to mass immigration.

I think you’re right about this– but the problem is that the anti-immigration folks on the Right soft-pedal the economic side of the issue (they don’t want to sound like they agree with the Democrats about working people getting screwed) and instead they drill down on cultural issues, and that does target legal Hispanic immigrants as well.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

March 15, 2012 at 2:42 pm

The last “white man’s party” in America was the Democratic Party.

But the Democrats not only needed the southern vote, they also needed Tammany Hall.

Then they even needed The Negro Vote.

There won’t ever be a “white people’s party” of any size again. Republicans need ex-Hindus to look good in the south, and are also working valiantly to bring forth more Hispanics. In fact, the Republicans’ best hope might be to cast the Democrats at the white people’s party.

In 1956, Thurgood Marshall was predicting a massive shift of black votes back to the Republican Party. Eisenhower had sent troops to Little Rock, the Dixiecrats had a hammer lock on the Democratic Party… somehow, Nixon dropped the ball and Kennedy picked it up.