By Josh Gelernter
Saturday, August 06, 2016
Democrats, and journalists, talk a great deal about how
demographic changes are inexorably shifting the American electorate to the
left. But they’re wrong.
The Democrats have founded their political fortunes on
special-interest groups for more than 150 years — since at least the late
1850s, when Tammany Hall (the Democrats’ New York City political machine) was
taken over by Boss Tweed, who began to use its political influence to support
(and pander to) Irish immigrants (in particular), in exchange for votes. The
Irish were the largest immigrant group in the country, and an increasingly
powerful voting block. Thanks to Tweed and company, they became a voting block
that invariably voted Democratic. The Irish continued to constitute the largest
or second-largest immigrant group each year until the end of the 19th century,
and you would have been forgiven for predicting that they would help deliver a
permanent electoral advantage for the Democrats.
Starting with the 20th century, Irish immigration was
eclipsed by Italian. Italian immigrants quickly began receiving Democratic
patronage, and became a new core of the Democratic electorate. Italians
continued to be the largest or second-largest immigrant group each year until
the Second World War. Throughout that period, you could rely on Italians to
vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
But then, in the 1960s, Italian-Americans started
splitting their votes evenly between Republicans and Democrats. These days, the
Irish-American vote is a reliable 50-50 split too. Why? Because the Irish and
the Italians stopped being special-interest groups. After their initial
isolation, the Italians and the Irish stopped being easily divisible from the
average American. They didn’t want custom-tailored treatment, they just wanted
the same shot at the American dream that everyone else had. They’d been
assimilated. They stopped being primarily Irish or Italian and became, first
and foremost, American. And that meant that Democratic pandering didn’t work
anymore. There was no more distinct group to pander to.
When was the last time someone talked seriously about
courting the Italian vote, or the Irish, in a national election? Kennedy–Nixon
in 1960? “Italian” and “Irish” are no longer considered in pollsters’
demography. They melted into a pre-existing electoral block, ineptly called
“white voters.” Pollsters talk a lot about the “white vote” — but what they
really mean is the
Italian-Irish-Polish-Hungarian-Romanian-Jewish-Russian-Swedish-Norwegian-French-Dutch-Scottish-Welsh-English
vote. That’s the nature of the American melting pot.
And before too long, that ethnically indistinct pot will
include Latin-Americans too — Latin-Americans being the immigrant group that,
after WW2, supplanted Italians as the largest. I don’t buy the idea that
Latin-Americans are going to be separated by skin color. The fact is, the skin
color of the average Hispanic is no more different from that of the average
“white” American than the average Italian’s was in 1900. Remember that, just a
few hundred years ago, the only thing a Swede or an Englishman named John Doe
needed to be called “John the Black” was tan or tawny skin. Sometimes black
hair was enough. The average “white” American’s skin tone has been moving from
a British complexion toward the Mediterranean for 200 years.
Obviously, African-Americans have had an entirely
separate experience, qua immigration. But I don’t see that Hispanics have.
Sure, there has been, and is, plenty of anti-Hispanic bigotry. There was also
anti-Italian bigotry, anti-Irish bigotry, anti-Polish bigotry, anti-Jewish
bigotry, anti-German bigotry, and so on. Hispanic immigration is the latest
chapter, but it’s part of the same story. Before long, Hispanic-Americans will
overwhelmingly speak English as their mother tongue, prefer fast food to their
ancestral cuisine, and talk about the Minutemen at Lexington using the pronoun
“we.” Many do already. The melting pot works fast.
And that means, before long, the Democrats will — once
again — have to find a new core constituency.
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