Switching from competitive victimhood to policies beneficial for all citizens

I was thinking the other day that one of our national frustrations is a consequence of the fact that we have heterogenous political discussions.

I think most people are more interested in discussing policies - what is the goal we are seeking and will this policy achieve that goal with no unintended consequences and an acceptable balance between winners and losers? Those are meaty discussions dealing with hard trade-offs and compromises but worthwhile because they are consequential. Instead, what we usually get are political discussions - how does one party defeat the other?

The irony is that political parties are supposed to be the mechanism by which alternate policies are brought to the public but we have deracinated policy discussions and devolved into simple political discussions.

But other than political junkies and those whose well-being depends on political patronage, who cares who governs as long as they govern well and in accordance with the wishes of the majority and within the parameters of the constitution and the culture?

We do indeed have one of the worst political classes in our long history. People who are far more interested in governing than they are in governing well.

I was reminded of this thought by Redoing the Electoral Math by John B. Judis.

I cannot imagine that Judis and I would agree on much. He is clearly a Democratic partisan interested in helping Democrats win whereas I am a Classical Liberal with a streak of libertarianism and will vote for whichever party advances policies consistent with classical liberalism and which are intended to benefit the whole nation at the least risk and least cost.

While I disagree with some of his evidence and some of his analysis, we are like-minded in his conclusion.

If any force on Earth could be powerful enough to unite the Democratic Party, you’d have thought the words “President Donald Trump” would do the trick. Instead, Hillary Clinton’s defeat last November only served to intensify the split within the party. Nine months in, two warring camps continue to offer seemingly irreconcilable versions of what went awry and how to fix it. On one side, populists like Bernie Sanders and Rust Belt Democrats like Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio argue that the party lost by neglecting working-class voters while catering primarily to “identity politics.” On the other side, an equally vocal contingent makes the opposite case: that the Democrats will blow it in 2018 and 2020 if they take voters of color for granted and focus their energy on wooing the white voters who backed Trump.

Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress, a leading proponent of the latter view, argues that the Democrats doomed themselves in 2016 with “a strategic error: prioritizing the pursuit of wavering whites over investing in and inspiring African American voters.” In the wake of the election, Phillips wrote in The Nation that “the single greatest force shaping American politics today is the demographic revolution that is transforming the racial composition of the U.S. population.”

Taken together, Phillips writes in his book, Brown Is the New White, “progressive people of color” already combine with “progressive whites” to make up 51 percent of voting-age Americans. “And that majority,” he adds, “is getting bigger every single day.” The strategy prescription logically follows. Rejecting the notion that Democrats must woo Trump voters as a “fool’s errand,” Phillips says the party must be “race-conscious and not race-neutral or color-blind.” Demographics are destiny. “The concerns of people of color,” he concludes, “should be driving politics today and into the future.”

This isn’t a new argument, of course— and I bear some responsibility for it. The book I co-wrote in 2002 with demographer Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority, laid out an overly optimistic forecast of the party’s prospects in an increasingly diverse America. By and large, Teixeira still holds to the view that the growth of minority populations will provide a long-term “boost to the left.” In his new book, fittingly titled The Optimistic Leftist, Teixeira notes that by the 2050s, eleven of the 15 largest states will be “majority-minority.”

On one level, there’s no arguing with the math. If you take the percentage of Americans that the U.S. census defines as “minorities” and project their past voting habits into the next decade and beyond, you’ll come up with a very sunny version of the Democrats’ prospects. There are only two problems with this line of thinking, but they’re pretty big ones. For starters, the census prediction of a “majority-minority” America—slated to arrive in 2044—is deeply flawed. And so is the notion that ethnic minorities will always and forever continue to back Democrats in Obama-like numbers.

I have long thought that the left wing of the Democratic Party's obsession with Identity Politics (and the attendant competitive victimhood that goes with identity politics) has been not only noxiously bigoted but ill-founded.

The optimism of the postmodernist, critical theory multiculturalists on the far left of the Democratic Party has always been anchored on a sleight-of-hand in the Census - the peculiar category of "Hispanics." All the other categories are racial or, at least, ethnic. Hispanic is a geographic/linguistic category that has no correspondence to race or ethnicity. A point made by Judis.

The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely. History shows that as ethnic groups assimilate into American culture, they increasingly identify themselves as “white.”

Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it’s a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as whites. “This town has 8,000,000 people,” a young Harry Truman wrote his cousin upon visiting New York City in 1918. “7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” But by the time Truman became president, all those immigrant groups were considered “white.” There’s no reason to imagine that Latinos and Asians won’t follow much the same pattern.

In fact, it’s already happening. In the 2010 Census, 53 percent of Latinos identified as “white,” as did more than half of Asian Americans of mixed parentage. In future generations, those percentages are almost certain to grow. According to a recent Pew study, more than one-quarter of Latinos and Asians marry non-Latinos and non-Asians, and that number will surely continue to climb over the generations.

Unless ethnic identification is defined in purely racial—and racist—terms, the census projections are straight-out wrong and profoundly misleading. So is the assumption that Asians and Latinos will continue to vote at an overwhelming clip for Democrats. This view, which underpins the whole idea of a “new American majority,” ignores the diversity that already prevails among voters lumped together as “Latino” or “Asian.” Cuban-Americans in Miami vote very differently from Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles; immigrants from Japan or Vietnam come from starkly different cultures than those from South Korea or China. While more than two-thirds of Asian voters went for Obama in 2012 and Clinton in 2016, they leaned the other way in the 2014 midterms: National exit polls showed them favoring Republicans by 50 to 49 percent.

In that last paragraph, Judis makes a point about which postmodernist critical theorists seem completely blind. Identity Politics is grounded definitionally in racism. I can see how postmodernists elide from "the underdog" to "the marginalized" to "racial miniorities" but in the process they move from a moral position of "protect the weak" to a racist position of "we define people and their rights based on their race." I think most people see this and are repelled by the explicit racism but most postmodernist critical theorists are entirely blind to their own tautological racism.

Judis makes this racism explicit.

Going forward, the real demographic question is not whether voters of color will combine with progressive whites to form a new American majority; it’s whether Democrats, without abandoning their commitment to racial justice and to America’s immigrants, can succeed in crafting a message and an agenda that steers clear of the liberal version of racial stereotyping: assuming that people of color will inevitably vote alike.

Amen - we need competitive parties. The Democratic Party cannot be competitive if it is focused on perpetuating structural racism. And the solution is easy - propose policies that are beneficial to all Americans, regardless of race, religion, orientation, region, ethnicity, education attainment, etc.