America’s non-Hispanic white population is 197 million, not 2 million more than it was 20 years ago. In the same period, the black population has grown by 7 million, to 41 million, and the Hispanic population has nearly doubled to 60 million.
Conventional wisdom sees this cementing a permanent Democratic majority. I reject this, and not simply because I dislike left-wing government. Nor is it merely because I’m repelled by Democrats’ belief that skin color determines which way people vote. Perhaps the most repugnant assumption of the election was in Joe Biden’s challenge to an African American host: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
The reason I reject the orthodox analysis is that minorities, who’ve mostly voted blue since the 1960s, realize increasingly that Democrats keep them down rather than lift them up with egalitarian programs. The flip side is an understanding that freedom, not coerced equality, offers a real chance to everyone to thrive. Republicans, with lower taxes, school choice, and deregulation, have policies that deliver freedom and widespread prosperity. They’re terrible at explaining it, but they’re on the side of the little guy.
Terrible, that is, until now. President Trump, whose critics call him a racist, won a higher proportion of black and Hispanic votes than Republican presidential candidates have for a long time. He lost ground among his “deplorable” white base but grew Republican support in every other ethnic group. As the Washington Examiner’s Joseph Simonson wrote, “President Trump may not earn four more years in the White House, but he gave the Republican Party perhaps something far more valuable: lessons on how to win elections for decades to come.”
The prospect arises of racial minorities detaching themselves from the Democratic Party at precisely the moment they are achieving greater heft as a proportion of the electorate. If one looks at Trump’s 2016 victory in the Rust Belt, the tight race there again this year, and accumulating ranks of black and Hispanic support for him and his party, one can see battle lines emerging from the psephologist fog. It’s not hard to see how a middle- and lower-class Republican coalition will contend for power in election after election.
That question, “What’s Next?,” is the theme of our magazine this week before the election dust has settled. We’ve put together a symposium of some of the best political thinkers to discuss what Trumpism is, and whether its political fortunes live or die with its eponymous leader. Jonathan Tobin dashes hope that we will return to “normal” politics, no matter who’s in office, and Liz Mair looks into the future of Republican campaigns as one generation passes the torch to the next.
Life & Arts reviews the latest work of black conservative Shelby Steele and his director son, Eli, peers into the darkness of Goya, and pays tribute to the late, great Connery, Sean Connery.
