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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

One Small Problem: Huntington Is Right

There are many problems with this argument, not least of which is that about a fifth of Hispanics in America are Protestants, mostly evangelical Pentecostals and Baptists. Almost all of Bush’s political gains among Hispanics have come from this group, which gave him 44 percent of their vote in 2000 and 56 percent in 2004. […]

There are many problems with this argument, not least of which is that about a fifth of Hispanics in America are Protestants, mostly evangelical Pentecostals and Baptists. Almost all of Bush’s political gains among Hispanics have come from this group, which gave him 44 percent of their vote in 2000 and 56 percent in 2004. Hispanic Protestants tend to be conservative on social policy.  And many conservatives, I’d be willing to bet, would feel more cultural affinity with Hispanic Baptists in their church pews than they would with Huntington’s colleagues in the Harvard faculty lounge. ~Michael Gerson

This is amusing to read.  Gerson knocks anti-immigration populists as “lowbrow,” but wants to stir the populist pot against pointy-headed academics by pushing a crude evangelical identity politics that will supposedly unite Anglos and Latinos in their shared derision for scholars.  Gerson joins naked anti-intellectualism to anti-patriotic policy proposals.  An inspiring combination!  His motto might be, “We’re ignorant and transnational.”

Note that Gerson doesn’t tell us about the four-fifths of Hispanics who aren’t Protestant.  He doesn’t tell us what their politics are like, nor does he tell us about the cultural values they possess, because he probably knows, or at least guesses, that this information would be distinctly unhelpful to the cause of selling out his country.  The final lines, deploring national chauvinism, might have some credibility if they did not come from a former speechwriter of an administration that has masterfully honed the rhetoric of national chauvinism for the purposes of promoting aggressive warfare.  About that rather un-Christian behaviour, Gerson naturally never has anything to say.

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