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SWEPT AWAY
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rant on!
After reading this and evaluating the tables, I really
will get run out of town on a tarred rail by the
multi-cultural bigots. Thank you Bubba and Bore for
your fast track immigration policy which sold our
primarily Judeo-Christian European heritage to the feast of
the lions.
Even Buckley has caved in on maintaining ethnic balance
(current population):
"It seems to me that the idea traditionally
defended of endeavoring to maintain
existing ethnic balances simply doesn't
work any more."
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--William F. Buckley Jr., letter to Jared
Taylor August 8, 2000 |
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Does Buckley mean defensible? We're not obligated either
to support the world or to change 200 years of history
where everyone coming to the US learned English.
Multi-culturism is an extremely short-sighted tool of
the Democrats, particular the fake bleeding hearts like
Bubba (who feels everybody's pain) and Bitch (The Ice
Queen). Their, and their friends', use of immigration to
re-define the political balance of America and therefore
its dreams and ideals might as well be the statement of
Martin Luther King "...out-breed 'em."
King was not a cultural and social emancipator of his
people: he was a core socialist establishing a power
base from which to rule by central planning and
supposedly redistribute the wealth --yeah, to him and
his close friends before it was over.
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In 1992, some 61.3 percent of whites over 18 voted;
in 2000, turnout was down to 56 percent. These
trends hurt Bush greatly because the Republican
Party is fundamentally a white party. Virtually all
of its votes--91 percent in 2000--come from
whites. The evidence is very clear that the
Republicans are failing to motivate their base.
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Bush's claim to have increased the Republican Spanish
vote by 50% was meaningless --in terms of the total vote
count, he lost ground since the Spanish voter base has
almost doubled. But:
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...the Republicans could try
"inreach"--appealing to their white
base. This would, in fact, be amazingly easy. A
brilliant
article by Steve Sailer, posted on the webzine
vdare.com, has demonstrated that if George W. Bush
had increased his share of the white vote by just
three percentage points, to 57 percent--and
remember, his father received 59 percent in 1988--he
would have won an electoral-college landslide of 367
to 171. There is no reason why achieving this
increase should have to alienate the Republicans'
few minority supporters, but that wouldn't matter
even if it did happen.
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All of this has major implications for 2004: Bush is
obviously can not plan on the Islamic vote and unless
the economic picture brightens dramatically, the
traditional pocketbook and feel-good issues will be a
factor regardless of W's "wartime" popularity --witness
Bush 41 in 1992.
What Bush does have going for him is that the tiger has
awoke and the people want real security, not money
security, and the liberal Democrats are obstructing
progress in defense.
But even more importantly:
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Overall, some 66 percent of white Southerners voted
for George W. Bush last November. We calculate that
if the Republicans could achieve 66 percent of the
white vote nationwide, they would remain the
majority party, regardless of immigration, until
2080.
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Is that reasonable? I doubt it, unless a significant
number of the liberal white Democrats who are alienated
and disenchanted by the multi-cultural pandering of the
Democratic party get sufficiently fed up to vote
Republican as the lesser of evils. But, 11 Sep changed
everything in the white vote, and Republicans have
always believed in a strong America whereis the liberal
Democratic multi-culturists are preaching FDR's
"chicken in every pot".
Hopeful? Maybe... but the sure way is to send the
aliens home, all of 'em: towel heads, wet backs, etc and
get back to the basics of what made America great: God
and country --and the willingness to do the work at hand.
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20 Oct 2001
"Unfettered immigration is rapidly shifting the ethnic and political balance of the United States."
By Peter Brimelow and Edwin Rubenstein
"Demography is destiny in American politics." That
was the stark opening of our controversial National
Review cover story
"Electing a New People" (June 16,
1997). We pointed out that voting patterns in the United
States correlate very closely with ethnicity, altering
very slowly if at all. But the U.S. ethnic balance is
shifting rapidly because of immigration. Therefore, a
concomitant movement of the U.S. political balance is
simply a matter of time. And since immigration is a
matter of public policy, it is literally true that the
federal government is dissolving the people and electing
a new one, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht's famous
advice to the Communist rulers of East Germany.
Peter Brimelow writes: For reasons that
are
obvious, Ed Rubenstein and I were not invited to
update our 1997 cover story in the Goldberg
Review (changed from National Review because
of the implication of nativism and hence Nazism). We
have now done so under the above headline in the Fall
Issue of the Hudson Institute's American Outlook,
whose Editor, Sam Karnick, recently wrote
"Give us Your Fanatics, Your Mass-Murderers", on the
failure of U.S. immigration controls.
In the present article, we review our
back-of-the-envelope projection of immigration's impact
on the political balance, then make a new projection
based on the results of the 2000 presidential
election. We conclude by analyzing the choices
confronting the Republicans, the party that seems most
likely to be the first victim of the changes.
Our view that demography is destiny was completely
borne out by the 2000 presidential election. The
Republican nominee, George W. Bush, was chosen partly
because of his
alleged appeal to Hispanics. The GOP made
desperate efforts, notably at its much-ridiculed
convention in Philadelphia, to present a
multicultural face. But the result was ignominious
failure--the ethnic patterns remained unbroken. In fact,
in significant respects they grew even more ominous for
the GOP. Only because Ralph Nader's Green Party siphoned
off some Democratic votes did George W. Bush squeak into
the White House, with a mere 48.4 percent of the popular
vote.
For our original projection of immigration's impact on
the political balance, we analyzed the 1988 presidential
race, which the GOP won with 53 percent of the
vote. This figure also happened to be the average vote
received by the Republicans in presidential elections
since 1968--the largest edge achieved by any party over
any six elections in American history. And it was the
vote received by Republicans in 1994, when they took
control of the Senate and House. It can reasonably be
regarded as the Republicans' high-water mark.
Then we lowered this high-water mark by adjusting for
the shifting ethnic balance that the Census Bureau
estimated would result from immigration, assuming that
the various ethnic groups continued to vote as they did
in 1988. It is important to note that these voting
patterns were established before the United States began
any serious public debate over immigration--so
Republican stands on the issue cannot be blamed for the
party's poor performance with these ethnic groups, as is
commonly and carelessly alleged.
Declining Support
The results were startling, as the figure shows. Even if
the Republicans could have won their 1988 level of
support again--which they miserably failed to do against
Bill Clinton--they would have had at most two
presidential cycles left. Then they would have fallen
inexorably into minority status, beginning in 2008. (See
Full Results in Table 1...)
But that was better than the prospect confronting them
after the 2000 election. George W. Bush came nowhere
close to replicating the 1968-1988 Republican
performance. As we have seen, he did not even get a
majority of the popular vote.
A closer look reveals how poor Bush's performance
was. He actually did
worse among African Americans than Bob Dole did in
1996, obtaining only 8 percent of African Americans'
votes, as opposed to Dole's 12 percent. He also did
worse among Asians than we allowed for in our original
projections (41 percent vs. 47 percent), which suggests
that this group may not be the natural Republican
constituency that the party's strategists so wishfully
think it to be.
Of course, Bush did pull a higher share of the Hispanic
vote than Dole did--31 percent versus 21 percent. And
this has caused a certain amount of innumerate glee
among those who fixate on the proportionate increase (50
percent) while ignoring the pitifully small base. But
the brute reality is that Bush still lost among
Hispanics in a landslide. And his performance was
squarely in the range of earlier GOP presidential
experiences, which run the gamut from awful (35 percent
in 1972) to catastrophic (24 percent in 1976). In no
sense could it be considered a breakthrough.
Innumeracy blinds some commentators to the full horror
of the Republican predicament. When an ethnic bloc is
growing rapidly, as the Hispanics are because of
immigration, it is possible to increase your relative
share of their vote and still be no better off in terms
of their absolute contribution to your total vote. This
is what happened to Bush. He increased the Republican
share of the Hispanic vote by ten percentage points, but
because the overall number of Hispanic voters increased
so much, the net effect was that he lost the Hispanic
vote by essentially the same absolute number as Dole did
(2.8 million vs. 2.9 million).
In other words, the Hispanics left him just as deep in
the hole. He needed help from the rest of the American
electorate to climb out.
And he didn't get it. In perhaps the most important and
underreported development of the election, Bush did
relatively poorly among whites, getting only 54 percent
of their votes. By contrast, his father received 59
percent in 1988, and Reagan pulled 64 percent in
1984. Moreover, white turnout has been falling. In 1992,
some 61.3 percent of whites over 18 voted; in 2000,
turnout was down to 56 percent. These trends hurt Bush
greatly because the Republican Party is fundamentally a
white party. Virtually all of its votes--91 percent in
2000--come from whites. The evidence is very clear that
the Republicans are failing to motivate their base.
No Laurels
So what happens now? Obviously, the GOP cannot rest on
its laurels. It has none to rest on. To make our new
projection based on the 2000 election, we redistributed
the third-party votes of Ralph Nader (2.7 percent) and
Patrick J. Buchanan (0.4 percent) equally to the major
parties. This is an extremely favorable assumption for
the Republicans and has the happy result of bringing the
party's 2000 share to 50 percent.
But after that, it's downhill all the way--(as Table
2
makes clear.) makes clear. Under these
assumptions and taking demographic changes into account,
the GOP loses narrowly in 2004 (49.7 percent) and by a
slightly wider, though still small, gap in 2008 (49.4
percent). Then, it sinks steadily as immigration shifts
the political balance against it. In fact, Bush's poor
performance, if replicated, will have the effect of
hastening the estimated date of the GOP's demise by two
presidential election cycles.
However, things may not work out even this well for the
Republicans. Although we redistributed the third-party
votes equally for the sake of clarity, we by no means
predict that this redistribution will actually
happen. In our 1997 National Review story, we
cited countries as far apart as
Australia and France to demonstrate that immigration
is preeminently an issue that, when ignored by
establishment parties, provokes insurrection. Pat
Buchanan duly broke with the Republicans and ran as the
Reform party nominee in 2000, with immigration reform as
part of his platform. His
weak showing (not that the GOP can afford to ignore
any votes at all) will comfort only those who do not
remember John
Ashbrook's equally weak primary challenge to Richard
Nixon in 1972, after which the conservative movement was
widely written off--four years before Reagan's similar
primary challenge to
Gerald Ford helped scuttle Ford's reelection
prospects and put the Gipper on the road to the White
House.
Buchanan may not have been the Messiah, nor even a John
the Baptist. But he could still be an Isaiah,
prophesying the Republicans' demise.
In our previous story, we also mentioned the
anti-immigration forces then mobilizing against
immigration enthusiast
Senator Spencer Abraham in Michigan. They duly
played a role in his very narrow defeat. We also noted
the rise of the Green Party, pointing out that it was
the Green Party's vote-splitting role that had caused
the Republicans to win a recent
congressional special election in New Mexico, rather
than the mass conversion of Hispanics that was being
proclaimed by the usual Republican Pollyannas. The New
Mexico Greens appeared to be Anglo Leftists alienated
from the worldly Hispanic machine that controlled the
state's Democratic Party. We suggested that without
Green intervention the Republicans would lose the seat
in the general election,
which they did.
It is not fanciful to suggest that what we are seeing
here are the first, indirect effects of the current
great immigration wave. The modern Democratic Party has
become preoccupied with the ethnic and patronage agendas
of the blocs that increasingly make up its base. White
Leftists, more ideological and perhaps idealistic, no
longer feel at home in that party, and they are leaving,
although no doubt failing to acknowledge the real
reason, even to themselves.
Ostrich Party
Thus the vast complication of ethnic politics brought
about by current immigration policy may, in the end,
confound both parties. This has happened before in
American politics. Immigration, and the rise of the
nativist
American Party, destroyed the Whigs and ended the
Second Party System on the eve of the Civil War.
But it's clear that the Republicans are being confounded
first. Their options are few. First, they could continue
their clumsy, "me-too" multicultural
"outreach" as exemplified by the Philadelphia
convention. This should guarantee the party
irretrievable minority status in two or three
presidential election cycles.
Second, the Republicans could try
"inreach"--appealing to their white base. This
would, in fact, be amazingly easy. A brilliant
article by Steve Sailer, posted on the webzine
vdare.com, has demonstrated that if George W. Bush had
increased his share of the white vote by just three
percentage points, to 57 percent--and remember, his
father received 59 percent in 1988--he would have won an
electoral-college landslide of 367 to 171. There is no
reason why achieving this increase should have to
alienate the Republicans' few minority supporters, but
that wouldn't matter even if it did happen. Under this
scenario, Bush would still have achieved a tie in the
Electoral College if not one single nonwhite
American had voted Republican.
A cool reading of the Republican situation reveals that
it is serious but by no means desperate. The demographic
balance of many southern states that the GOP now wins
handily is in fact far more lopsided than that of
California today--or of the United States
tomorrow. African Americans, solid Democratic voters,
constitute 35 to 40 percent of the electorate in those
states, but the GOP wins handily because it
mobilizes its white base. In 2000, it achieved 81
percent of the white vote in Mississippi, 73 percent in
Texas, and 72 percent in Alabama. Overall, some 66
percent of white Southerners voted for George W. Bush
last November. We calculate that if the Republicans
could achieve 66 percent of the white vote nationwide,
they would remain the majority party, regardless of
immigration, until 2080.
Third, the Republicans could simply stop the ongoing
election of a new, non-Republican American people. They
could repeal the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act, which
accidentally triggered the current wave of immigrants
after a forty-year lull in which there was virtually no
immigration at all. That lull was vital to the
assimilation of the first, 1890-1920, Great Wave of
immigration. There is a strong case for resuming such a
moratorium. But at the least, Republicans could insist
that immigration policy favor applicants--skilled,
English-speaking, quite possibly European--who are more
likely to vote for them. After all, no state would be
admitted to the Union without the most precise
calculation of its partisan consequences. And
immigration is currently adding the equivalent of a
North Dakota plus some 30,000 more people every
year.
The inability of Republican strategists to understand
all this is fascinating. Some are marketing
professionals from the corporate world, people who never
saw a market they didn't want to penetrate and have no
experience with the zero-sum aspects of political
struggle. Some Republican strategists obviously just
can't count. Republican consultant Ralph Reed, for
example, told the Washington Post that the party
could no longer try "to drive its percentage of the
white vote over 70 percent to win an election."
(See "Bush Abandons 'Southern Strategy'; Campaign
Avoids Use of Polarizing Issues Employed by GOP Since
Nixon's Time,"
August 6, 2000.) Reed was apparently unaware that
Bob Dole, the candidate he supported in 1996, had not
even won the white vote, receiving only 49 percent.
Overall, though, the Republican paralysis has to be
judged a classic case of one competitor achieving moral
hegemony over another. The Republicans, it is clear,
have actually come to believe the Democrats'
propaganda. They now believe that appeals to their own
political base are immoral, even though the Democrats
play that very game themselves. That is a formula for
political destruction. And as immigration-driven
demographic change transforms American politics, it will
change the society as well, through the political
process and in countless other ways.
A great demographic storm is breaking over America. The
Republican Party may prove to be the least that it
sweeps away.
Peter Brimelow is the author of
Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration
Disaster (1996) and an editor of vdare.com.
Edwin Rubenstein is director of
research at the Hudson Institute.
Copyright © 2001 by
Hudson Institute.
This article
first appeared in
American Outlook Magazine.
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