11/27/2000
VDARE was interested by the editorial in the December 4 National Review. After cheerleading for the good Governor Bush for most of the campaign, and supporting implicitly or explicitly the Bush efforts to banish any issues related to America’s looming National Question, NR now surveys the current scene with not a little discomfort. The University of Colorado’s Christian Kopff gives the edit a critical but not unfriendly reading. His comments are in italics.
By Christian Kopff
NR: At present, Republicans are not a majority party — but they may usefully be described as the party of the majority. When the electorate is divided into voting blocs, the majority bloc favors the Republicans. Protestants, who were 54 percent of the electorate, gave 56 percent of their votes to Bush.
The percentages would be even more impressive if Blacks were not still largely Protestant. As The Wanderer pointed out, Catholics, who comprise 27% of the electorate, voted for Gore 50% to 46% for Bush.
NR: The pattern applied as well, of course, to race. Bush tried, more than any previous Republican candidate had, not to offend liberal sensitivities on race. He embraced immigration, supported bilingual education, obscured his position on race preferences, appeared before the NAACP, split the difference on hate crimes, and had Colin Powell guilt-trip the Republican convention. His reward: 35 percent of the Hispanic vote and a smaller share of the black vote than Bob Dole got in 1996. Asian-Americans, who favored Bob Dole and Bush’s father, supported Gore by a 14-point margin. So the kinder, gentler strategy on race flopped.
This is quite an admission. He did worse not only with Blacks but with Asians. The Republicans are advancing backwards.
NR: [Republicans] should have campaigned against race preferences. Doing so might have won some white-working-class votes in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Bush lost. It could hardly have inflamed blacks against Republicans any more than the Democrats did. And any substantial political realignment of blacks will in any case have to follow the destruction of the corrupt networks of racial patronage that keep today’s black political elite in power. The black electorate, in other words, has to be transformed; and not only the black electorate …
All it will take is (a) replacing the black political elite and (b) "transforming" the black electorate, presumably by getting them into the new investor class. (See below.) They can use their funds from Reparations to invest in the market.
NR: Every attempt to expand the conservative coalition — from Buchananism to "national greatness" — has failed, expelling more members from the coalition than it attracts.
Er, who has done the expelling, or evacuating? Who on the right denounced the John Birch Society, George Wallace, Rockford and Pat Buchanan? And abandoned immigration reform? /buckley.htm
NR: The Democrats are not content with the existing electorate. That’s why Clinton and Gore have sped up immigrant naturalization at election time. Unlimited immigration is expanding the Democratic constituency for big government and multiculturalism. (Immigrants from Asia may tend to be more conservative than their neighbors, but as Steve Sailer points out, that’s no comfort when they tend to settle in some of the most liberal enclaves in the country, from New York to San Francisco.)
Remember: "Asian-Americans, who favored Bob Dole and Bush’s father, supported Gore by a 14-point margin." They can tell who is winning.
NR: Republicans can change the electorate, too, in more salutary ways. The expansion of the new investor class is a case in point. Those Republicans who have paid any attention to it seem to believe that it is a trend that will inevitably benefit them, with no exertions on their part required. But the new investors are a natural conservative constituency, not an inevitable one. They favored Republicans in the election, but not by much.
1] What happens when the market goes down?
2] Since investors' income may depend on suppressing local businesses in favor of global free trade, they might be voting against their financial interests to support the policies implied by the next paragraph, but, as loyal Americans, they might do it.
3] One part, however, of the "investor class" (like Blacks when counted in the Protestant vote) votes overwhelmingly for the Democrats. Without them, the "new investor class" probably would be solidly Republican.
NR: In other words, conservative political success depends on a citizenry that is culturally cohesive and that sees its interest in liberty; and those tendencies within the citizenry can be encouraged. The point is not merely to understand the electorate, but to change it.
If NR is talking this way, imagine how bad the situation has become. The statistics suggest that, if the groups that vote Republican did so as heavily the groups that support the Democrats, the Republicans would have a majority.
It is the Republican and conservative leadership, not the electorate, that needs to be "transformed."
November 27, 2000
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