By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Some ideas are just too intellectually satisfying to
abandon, even long after they’ve outlived their use. Among Democrats, one such
idea is that the arc of history bends inexorably toward Democratic governing
majorities based primarily on America’s rate of demographic change.
Dick Durbin, the Senate Democratic whip, was the latest
to pay fealty to this theory of his party’s historic inevitability. “The
demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party,” the senator said on Monday. “The new voters in this
country are moving away from them, away from Donald Trump, away from their
party creed that they preach. Instead, they’re moving to be independents or
even [to] vote on the other side.”
This is an overly simplistic articulation of a theory
posited by political analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their 2002
book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. In it, the authors suggest
that as minority voters made up an ever-increasing portion of the electorate,
the Democratic Party to which they are predisposed will assume more and more
power—at least, as long as the party could keep the New Deal-era coalition
together. The theory has been the subject of much critical scrutiny, even by its own authors. And yet, the presumption of
permanent interests based on demographic identity persists.
Durbin made these remarks within the context of
denouncing GOP-led state legislative efforts to pare back pandemic-related
emergency voting regulations along with the emergency that gave rise to them.
In some cases, those efforts did seem like they would have the effect of limiting minority participation in elections, which
only speaks to how firmly the
political class has internalized Judis and Teixeira’s thesis. But
“demography is destiny” has long since proven itself to be a misleading
explanation for voters’ behaviors; external physical features are no match for
the power of ideas.
Contrary to expectations set in the aughts, the Latino
vote has not drifted inexorably in the direction of the Democratic Party. In
2020, Joe Biden underperformed in heavily Hispanic districts in South Florida
and along the Rio Grande. “Across the Southeast, majority-Latino precincts in
Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina swung 11.5 points toward Republicans since
2016,” the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed. He added that
there is evidence that Biden and his party saw their standing slip in counties
dominated by black voters, though by smaller margins. Nor was this a one-off
event. “In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of
the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican,” the Democratic pollster David
Shore told New York magazine. The results of 2020 only
contributed to an already observable trend.
Are these merely shifts at the margins? Yes. But they are
shifts at the margins that shouldn’t have happened at all if identity trumped
ideology and persuasion.
As the New York Times detailed in a pre-election
dispatch, the Trump White House mounted a full-throated campaign to convince
black voters that Democratic doctrine and the policies that result from the
party’s ideological preferences represented a threat to their immediate
interests. And some of the targets of this outreach campaign concluded that Republicans
had a point. “I don’t see these protesters marching in these neighborhoods,”
one Detroit resident told Times reporters. “A 7-year-old girl
gets shot in the neighborhood, and there’s nothing. It’s real hypocrisy.”
As Vox.com detailed, the black voters who were skeptical of
Democratic proposals to raise taxes did so in observance of their own financial
incentives, yes, but also with the understanding that doing so to expand access
to government services yields diminishing returns. None of the voters with whom
these reporters spoke had any illusions about which political party they
regarded as less hostile toward minorities. But nor did they predicate their
vote exclusively on what they saw when they looked in the mirror.
Likewise, the ideological convulsion that rocked the
Democratic Party in the restive summer of 2020—during which prominent
center-left figures dismissed violent rioting as “mostly peaceful” and concluded that the cure for
urban crime was to “defund” or “abolish the police”—contributed to the GOP’s unlikely
victories in places like South Florida. More interesting, though, it seems that
Republican efforts to highlight Democratic lawmakers’ increasingly vocal
affinities for “socialism” worked—particularly among voters with living
memories of or relatives attached to places like Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, and
elsewhere in Latin America. A 2020 post-mortem conducted by center-left advocacy
groups concluded, “The socialism attack was called out by many Members of
Congress and candidates who were not successful who believe it hurt campaigns
in states and districts with immigrant populations that fled socialist
governments.”
Democrats could be tempted by their own ideological
affinities to subsume these calculations into a fashionable framework that
boils all complex individual motives and actions into a story about race,
gender, creed, and sexual preference. That does a profound disservice to
voters. Though that outlook goes
by many names, it is not just another idea battling it out in the arena of
public opinion. It is an idea that seeks to do away with ideas, insofar as it
posits that ideas don’t really matter. All that matters is the body into which
you were born, and the predestined trajectory your accidents of birth set you
upon. The more Democrats embrace this notion, the more likely they are to leave
the persuasion game to Republicans. The GOP would like nothing more.
No comments:
Post a Comment