November 8 was a bad day for Hillary Clinton, who has lost both of her two tries to become the first woman president, her goal since 2001 when her husband left office, and her obsessive ambition since the mid 1970s, if the stories about her are true.
It was also a bad day for Barack Obama, who failed to install his successor and will now see his legacy, such as it is, be taken apart in installments by the Republican Party. It was a very bad day for Vogue magazine, forced to cancel its plans for back-to-back, wall-to-wall photo-shoots of Madam President, celebrating Year One of Her Eminence. But it was the worst day of all for identity politics, the race/gender grievance industrial complex, and the “emerging majority” that was supposed to rise from it.
Women may be 53 percent of the population or voters, but 53 percent of white women voted for Trump, undeterred by the lure of the First Woman President and the much touted threat of conservative judges. And John O’Sullivan of National Review is here to explain why the Hispanic voting surge that is always predicted failed to present itself in this year’s election, and indeed may never happen at all.
As he explains, the premise that this will soon become a minority-majority country is based upon one single thing: The fact that the United States Census counts any child with one black or Hispanic grandparent as black or Hispanic, which would yield a majority non-white population in a few generations. But three-fourths of the minority children born in 2013 had at least one white grandparent, which means that if the rules were flipped as to partial race parentage this would remain a majority white population, and in reality these dramatic distinctions are not quite as harsh as they seem.
People whose ancestry is partial Hispanic may self-define as Hispanic, or white, or both and/or neither, and may marry out among other mixed-ethnic people, having children the census continues to count as “Hispanic,” but who in reality become something else. As he informs us, “minorities tend to intermarry into the American mainstream, to lose their minority consciousness over time, to have children born without one,” and to swell the generic American mainstream as they dilute it, making it something that is neither white nor non-white exactly, but something that might be “white plus.”
“White Plus” is stage three in the American story, which started out being composed of the North Europeans; became Anglo Plus in the mid 19th Century as it took in the Poles, Jews, Italians and Greeks from southern and eastern Europe; and is becoming Euro Plus if you will in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, as it takes in the Hispanics, the Asians, and, for the first time ever on an egalitarian basis, its own home-grown blacks.
As stages one and two have become mixed genetically, so too will both with stage three, holding out, O’Sullivan says, an escape from the race war the left is so eager to promise in which an ascendant non-white contingent battles for spoils with a retreating white fringe. Despite initial unease, the Anglos, Poles, Jews, Greeks et. al. did not fight, but befriended and married each other, so much so that all are now linked together as part of the angry white fringe. The census aside, the future is not brown versus white, but a subtle and gradual blending of colors, that will become the new norm in a new generation, that is growing more beige by the day.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
