Commentary: Demographics and the American Prospect

by Pedro Gonzalez

In the summer of 2018, journalist Vivian Yee amused herself with the thought that Orange Country, California, was once an agricultural, “conservative (think Richard Nixon and the John Birch Society) and white (very, very white),” slice of America. But “Chinese and Korean immigrants, and Asian-Americans from other states,” she wrote on the eve of the midterm election, “have made Irvine nearly half Asian.”

Asians, Yee noted, are reliably liberal on gun control, climate change, and public spending. Indeed, Michelle Malkin recently took a deeper dive on the same topic in these pages:

According to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 78 percent of Asian voters surveyed showed strong support for stricter gun control laws. Half of Asian Americans said police are racist. The AALDEF survey found 65 percent showed support for illegal alien amnesty and the LGBT agenda. Enrollment in the Democratic Party was highest among South Asian ethnicities; 84 percent of Indo-Caribbean, 83 percent of Bangladeshi, 79 percent of Pakistani, and 64 percent of Asian Indian American voters were enrolled as Democrats, compared to 59 percent of all Asian Americans surveyed nationally.

With the midterms at the time of Yee’s writing just over the colorful California horizon, Yee, along with the Democratic Party and left-wing intelligentsia, saw the writing on the wall. Five months later, analysis of the midterm vote by the Pew Research Center showed that 77 percent of Asians went for the Democratic candidate on the ballot, compared to 69 percent of Latinos and 90 percent of blacks. By November 17, all of Orange County had been delivered to the Democratic Party.

That former Republican State Assemblywoman Young Kim, a South Korean immigrant, ran and lost in Orange County to Democrat Gil Cisneros—even though she criticized Trump’s “hard-line anti-immigration stance”—should have worried conservatives. Kim’s fate indicates that minorities increasingly view members of their own racial groups who join the Republican Party as traitors, self-servingly embedded in the architecture of “white supremacy” on which the GOP purportedly is built. But these are bad and forbidden thoughts with which the doyens of conservatism do not permit themselves to be concerned.

Losing Texas

Then came the trouble in Texas. The Lone Star State has long offered conservatives in denial of demographic realism a rhetorical redoubt: the state is diverse, yet still conservative, or at least a pleasant shade of purple. But 2018 showed us what lies beneath the purple robe in which the state has been politically garbed.

Texas’s “diversifying electorate and young people’s leftward shift,” wrote Juan Carlos Huerta and Beatriz Cuartas in the Washington Post, “appear to be weakening the GOP’s grip on the Lone Star State.”

The duo noted that Robert Francis (Beto) O’Rourke received support from 84 percent of blacks, 74 percent of Latinos, along with 66 percent of Asians and Pacific Islanders. Come the midterms, 73 percent of all “people of color” voted for O’Rourke, compared to just 31 percent of whites.

Elsewhere, the gubernatorial races of Democrats Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia were buoyed by minority voters. “White voters all voted for the GOP opponents of the aforementioned candidates,” writes David Dennis, Jr., adjunct professor of journalism at Morehouse College.

Huerta and Cuartas are confident that Texas will surrender sooner rather than later, and there is reason to believe that they are right.

Democrats systematically have taken control of every large city in Texas over the last decade. Worse, the suburbs that supplied Republicans with large margin wins not long ago are slowly but surely turning blue.

“Democrats captured six Republican-held state House seats in the outskirts of Dallas alone,” The New Republic reports, and six others statewide.

Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, warns that conservatives should not dismiss concerns of a blue wave on the horizon for Texas.

“It seems a stretch,” writes Trende, “but remember that Mitt Romney won Texas by 16 points, Donald Trump won by nine, and Cruz won by just three.” And it’s not those pesky white women in the ’burbs who are to blame. “White women,” as David Dennis notes of Georgia, “voted against Abrams at a higher rate than any other female group.”

“All of suburbia has grown more diverse,” writes Robert Gebeloff in the New York Times, “but inner-ring neighborhoods have a much higher share of nonwhite residents than outer-ring neighborhoods do.” Naturally, “the inner ring is more likely to support Democratic candidates; the outer more likely to vote Republican.”

The New Southern Strategy

With Orange County and Texas in rearview, mainstream conservatives kept their noses turned away from the winds of demographic change, hoping that the political crisis of Virginia would show the cynics that minorities are prepared to leave the “Democratic plantation” en masse.

Recall that in Virginia, just days after Governor Ralph Northam defended infanticide, photographs emerged that appeared to show him in blackface beside a man wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit. When calls for Northam’s resignation intensified, Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax suddenly had multiple allegations of sexual assault directed against him. Finally, Attorney General Mark Herring revealed that he, too, had worn blackface in his younger years. Democrats ran hither and thither in damage control, while conservatives assured themselves that minority voters would secede from their political union with the Democrats, whistling Dixie all the way.

Blackface and sexual misbehavior notwithstanding, Virginia’s legislative elections came and went with no such secession.

Joe Morrissey, a Democratic lawmaker who was jailed for six months for having sex with his underage secretary, sailed comfortably into the state legislature with 64 percent of the vote.

Juli Briskman, the woman who held her middle finger up at President Trump’s motorcade in 2017, won a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors by defeating incumbent Republican Suzanne Volpe.

Four female Muslim Democrats—Ghazala Hashmi, Abrar Omeish, Lisa Zargarpur, and Buta Biberaj—won various races across Virginia. Hashmi unseated incumbent Republican Glen Sturtevant for a state senate seat; Biberaj defeated Republican incumbent Nicole Wittmann to be the new commonwealth’s attorney of Loudoun County. In the end, Democrats had seized control of both the state House and Senate.

“I’m here to officially declare today, November 5, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue,” Northam told a crowd of supporters. Northam subsequently announced that he would push gun control measures and “welcome refugee resettlement in Virginia” with open arms. The next day, Tram Nguyen of the progressive New Virginia Majority group declared that the Left is “winning because we recognize the power of an electorate that includes and reflects the diversity” of “voters of color.” Northam and Nguyen have it figured out.

The Coalition of the Ascendant

Virginia and Texas, to say nothing of California, are harbingers of what is to come across the country.

“One way Democrats could capture states like Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan,” said MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, “boils down to mobilizing hundreds of thousands of ‘new American citizens.’” Data from the progressive group New American Leaders show that in these key states, “new citizens” outnumber voters who, as Velshi said, “separated Trump from Clinton in 2016 by a lot.”

An analysis of Census Bureau statistics for the 2018 midterm elections by Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, found that “Democrats now control more than 80 percent of the House seats in which minorities exceed their national share of the population, and nearly 90 percent of the seats with more immigrants than average.”

In other words, every congressional district across the country where the foreign-born population exceeds approximately 14 percent had a 90 percent chance of being dominated by Democrats. Note that in 1990, Virginia’s foreign-born population was 5 percent, compared to 12.5 percent in 2017.

“About 23 percent of Virginia’s foreign-born population arrived from Central America,” journalist John Binder reports, “the largest share of migration from any one specific region to the state. More than 11 percent of those Central Americans arrived from El Salvador.” In 2000, Texas was split 47 percent nonwhite to 53 percent white. By 2017, figures from the Texas Demographic Center showed a massive shift: 58 percent nonwhite to 42 percent white.

In the background of all this has been the oft-repeated fact that black, Hispanic, and Asian unemployment rates have fallen to historic lows under Trump. The president even pushed progressive criminal justice reform to court minorities, contra the interests of his base who voted for him as the “law and order” candidate. Trump’s support among minorities, however, remains low.

Neither Blexit nor Lexit has materialized. Black and Hispanic support for the president hold respectively at 10 percent and 25 percent, while 76 percent of 18-34-year-old Asians disapproved of Trump in 2018. In fact, Republicans who have attempted to make the economy their focus in hopes of defusing the American identity question have fared poorly.

In Virginia, Ed Gillespie barely edged out Corey Stewart in the 2017 primary, even though Gillespie spent significantly more. Stewart ran as pro-Trump, pro-confederate flag, pro-confederate monuments, and pro-border wall—that is to say, as a culture warrior in the same vein as Trump during 2016. Gillespie, by contrast, tried to avoid controversy and focused on the economy of Virginia, only to lose in the general election by nine points.

‘It’s a much more poisonous atmosphere,” Gillespie said, compared to 2014 when he nearly defeated Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.). “I don’t know if there’s causality or correlation, I leave that for others to determine,” he said, seemingly alluding to demographic sands that shifted beneath his feet. “But I could not honestly say to someone that I like and think is a halfway decent human being, ‘Yeah, you ought to run for office’.”

Trump lost Virginia in 2016 by 5 points but won white voters 59-35. On the other hand, he won Georgia by just 5 points, even though he took white voters 75-21. It is not, therefore, “college-educated white liberals”—another favorite conservative scapegoat—who are the mainspring of the Democratic Party’s march. Pew Research data show 6-in-10 minority Americans are Millennials, Generation Z, or younger. The most common age for minorities is 27, according to Pew, compared to 58 for whites. Analysis of 2018 Census data by the Brookings Institution found that less than half of children under 15 are white.

Counter-Revolution from the Right

It is not enough merely to produce books, articles, and movies in which the “Democrats are the real racists,” however true it might be. Talk of “trust the plan” will not save us from the gallows. Nor, as mainstream conservatives seem to think, do we have time to recapture the organs of culture, education, and government necessary to even attempt a grand “Americanization” scheme—the long march through our institutions took the Left a generation or more, and they encountered far less resistance than we would today. It’s not even clear that education is the answer to minority voting patterns that consistently trend to the Left.

Instead of solutions, conservatives insist on pointing to exceptions to signal their enlightened “anti-racist” bona fides. Exceptions—Candace Owens, Michelle Malkin, and myself included—do not negate the rule: demographics are an engine of war against the traditional institutions, culture, and people of America. And the Left has become bold about this. As Jorge Ramos confidently put it, “there’s nothing really [Americans] can do against this incredible demographic revolution.”

If conservatives intend to do more than playfight, then, they ought to adopt a positive—that is, offensive—strategy while they still have time; the border wall yet to be built and making English the official language of the United States are strictly defensive measures.

To start, the president could finally make good on his promise to end birthright citizenship by executive order. Next, the Insurrection Act offers a mechanism by which illegal aliens can be deported en masse. It is “clearly lawful,” writes Stephen I. Vladeck in The Atlantic, professor of law at the University of Texas School, for the president to use the act for this purpose. “And although Congress in the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibited use of the federal military for domestic law enforcement,” Vladeck added, “the Insurrection Act was always understood as the principal exception to that general rule.”

In the same way that Obama used the Internal Revenue Service against conservative groups, Trump might turn its focus on organizations that provide assistance and advocacy for illegal aliens. These groups aid less resourceful illegal aliens to avoid identification and deportation, thus undermining federal immigration law and enforcement activities. Hungary’s government in 2018 passed a law that outlawed “promoting and supporting illegal migration.” It bars individuals and organizations from providing assistance of any kind to illegal aliens. Targeting, frustrating, and eventually putting these organizations out of business would make removal operations more effective.

A complete moratorium on legal immigration would effect a lull that has historically been conducive to assimilation and would come with other benefits. “A 40-year moratorium will lower the foreign-born share of the labor force and raise native wages,” writes economist Edwin S. Rubenstein. The “immigrants make America great” conservatives, as Michael Anton put it, will either have to “discard or retcon America’s stunning victory in World War II, coming as it did during a 40-year immigration moratorium.”

Contrary to the opinion of many mainstream conservatives, ideological restrictions on immigration and naturalization are both good and historically normative, dating back to the 1798 Alien Act under President John Adams. Reintroducing such a barrier would have benefits whether a moratorium is imposed or not. “The reason we succeed as a society,” as William F. Buckley Jr. said, “is because we exclude certain things” and people from the “American system.”

E-Verify is not enough; businesses that knowingly hire illegal aliens must be hit with crippling fines. In Germany, employers who hire illegal aliens can be fined upwards of $550,900 and, in some cases, face prison time. Workers who protect illegals aliens are also subject to prosecution.

The application of a substantial tax on remittances—money sent out of the country by non-citizens—would reduce an incentive to come to America. At least $120 billion dollars were sent out of the United States last year alone. Revenue from that tax could be used to fund immigration enforcement activities.

Trump, following in the footsteps of the Obama Administration, has continued to denaturalize and deport foreigners who obtained citizenship through fraud. That operation should be enhanced with additional resources, which could be allocated by eliminating the Department of Education. With more than 80 sub agencies, some 4,000 employees, an annual budget of $70 billion, the Department of Education if eliminated not only would free up resources, it would eliminate an ineffective institution that has pushed everything from Common Core to anti-American revisionist history.

Conservatives might quibble over the root cause of minority voting patterns, whistle past the graveyard counting their change, and settle for losing nobly, or they can use what time remains to wage a full-spectrum war on this front. “I am not a cynic,” they say in the face of demographic doom. But this is the epitome of cynicism. “A cynic,” as Oscar Wilde observed, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

For mainstream conservatives, America is dollars, cents, and GDP—or worse, an “idea.” But America is more than mere economics or abstractions. For John Jay, America was, as he wrote in Federalist 2, “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” That is what Jay believed “Providence” had blessed his generation with, and that is what we stand to lose.

– – –

Pedro Gonzalez is assistant editor of American Greatness and a Mount Vernon Fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
Photo “Trump Protest” by TellingAdmire. CC BY-SA 4.0.