America reaches a turning point

By Stephen B. Young The Daily Record Newswire America has hit a turning point, and there will be no turning back: For the first time in our history the number of births to racial/ethnic minority parents exceed the number of births to white parents. Latino, Asian, African-American and mixed heritage babies made up about 2 million, or 50.4 percent, of all births over the previous 12 months. This will really change America, and many whites will not easily adapt to the new situation. It will, at a minimum, complicate our racial policies around affirmative action and implicit quotas, as everyone will have minority status. America is on its way to having a white minority culture living amid a cosmopolitan majority of all races, including many whites. The central dynamic of racism in America will no longer principally circle around African-Americans and their past oppression and suffering under Southern white-imposed laws on slavery and segregation, or disadvantages they experienced due to generic majority white attitudes regarding discrimination and distancing. Latinos and Asians will bring their own immigrant histories to the American racial mix. The meaning of America can no longer be co-located with a European, Christian political and cultural tradition. The special American sense of exceptionalism and a blessed manifest destiny that descends from Calvinism in the hand of the Puritans and the Scots-Irish frontier Baptists and Methodists will either disappear or find itself rewritten in new ethnic settings as a land of opportunity for all. The coming cosmopolitan America will be more tolerant of diversity and more open to government programs that provide support for individuals. The new American demographics will also drive our politics. Basically, the Republican Party will suffer and the Democrats will benefit. The Republicans have become the party of the soon-to-be white minority. They will win elections most easily in white cultural enclaves, which will also be more old-fashioned, dogmatic and literalistic in their Christian faith as well. The Democrats, who have evolved during the culture war of the last 40 years into the more cosmopolitan party, will do better in national elections than the Republicans, being more open to minority viewpoints and identities. This division between parochial white homogeneity and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic heterogeneity will become, no doubt, marked, strident and permanent. The party of the whites will be a rump, uneasy and defensive, perhaps even angry, as they determinedly hold on to the past: kind of like lots of Southern whites after the Civil War -- a political culture that once belonged to the Democrats but, after the triumph of civil rights, has morphed into the core of the modern Republican Party. This imbalance between Democrats and Republicans will, in all probability, encourage Republicans to use ever more negative campaigning, mobilizing fears and resentments among whites and running down the good faith, character and abilities of Democratic candidates. We are already seeing the testing of this trend with Republican super PACs going after President Barack Obama in the presidential election. The Republicans will become the party of doubts and resistance -- the party that throws itself against the course of history yelling, "Stop, I tell you. Stop!" The Republican Party of white cultural heritage will not only have an ethnic foundation; it will also have the mobilizing passion and self-righteousness that a certain kind of religiosity can bring. Republican-oriented Christianity is an affirming code of being righteous in a doctrinal context that is said to bring eternal salvation. It is a conviction of being special, better, privileged by the transcendent, and thus not so beholden to human standards of conduct and judgment. It is an emotional and intellectual posture of "take no prisoners" and "don't tread on me!" It will be a politics of attack, not compromise. In this year's Republican primaries, we have seen this amalgam of white concerns and a fundamentalist and evangelical Christian morality and sense of Godliness. Such a combination will be hardy and determined. It will not yield to getting along with the cosmopolitans. Our political future, therefore, will be filled with divisive, argumentative, uncivil confrontations complemented by disdainful dismissal of opponents. We risk becoming ungovernable and putting our remarkable heritage at hazard. In this context, last weekend's takeover of the Minnesota Republican Party apparatus by Ron Paul supporters should come as no surprise. It is only the natural evolution of the party that seeks to represent the emerging white minority culture. The Paul movement seeks to take America back 100 years. Their belief is that our foundational white Protestant constitutional order has been eroding for the past century or more. They want to undo the Federal Reserve System of 1913; our international entanglements that began with the war against Spain followed by World War I; and the regulatory state brought on by Progressives to check robber-baron capitalism. Taking us back 100 years would also take us back to a time when whites were not threatened in any way by minorities. Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles and southern Slavs were then being assimilated into an American melting pot resting on a Protestant majority, though they made up the more Catholic/Democratic Party part of that mixture. The Paul movement would also take us back to a time when educated professionals were proposing to reform the American government and economy to achieve greater social justice and rational efficiency. These professionals were socialized by new universities upholding a faith in science, both imitating the German model where theory governs practice. In the thinking of Paul and his followers, a purist ideal of Americanism was then undermined when Franklin Roosevelt used the Great Depression as an opportunity to forge a ruling coalition of new white immigrant communities and the professional elite of reformers. (Ironically, Roosevelt needed the Southern whites to keep his coalition in power, so he sought no end to segregation.) What the Paul movement objects to can be called the creeping "Europeanization" of American culture and politics made possible by New Deal policies and social ideals. Thus, Roosevelt's political heir Obama, who is very cosmopolitan in his origins and social experiences, is labeled a European socialist to clearly distinguish him from pure "American" mores and ideals. But this Europeanization -- embracing Catholic ethnics, Jews, secular intellectuals and big government -- is the new American cosmopolitanism that is embracing the coming majority status of ethnic minorities. This strident opposition to what is changing America is all part and parcel of constructing a new identity for the Republican Party as the defender of a white heritage. This party is growing less intellectual in its conservatism and more viscerally ethnic-parochial in its views. It is also emphasizing more overtly the secular side of traditional Americanism -- liberty, individual freedom and limited government. Cosmopolitan Americans will not easily give in to this nativism. Another way of putting it: Our politics is going to become a lot less fun and constructive. Published: Fri, Jun 1, 2012