Politics Is Demography Still Destiny After 2024? Party coalitions change, but group ideological preferences are more persistent. Credit: Vibe Images/Shutterstock In winning reelection, Donald Trump lost the Hispanic vote by a much smaller margin than he and other Republican candidates lost it in the past. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won Hispanics 66–28 when she faced Trump in 2016, but this year Kamala Harris won the group by just 52–46. Contradicting the Republican National Committee’s 2013 “autopsy,” which claimed that the party needed to embrace amnesty as an outreach tool, Trump managed to attract Hispanic support while still taking a strong stand against illegal immigration. Party strategists will hopefully internalize this lesson. Republicans should be skeptical, however, of another possible “lesson,” which is that they need not worry about the political effects of immigration. Hispanics are no longer a reliable Democratic voting bloc, as this argument goes, so fears that immigration will shift the political center leftward must be unfounded. This argument confuses ideology with party. The U.S. will probably always have two major parties, with each garnering the support of roughly half the country through coalition politics. The potentially transformative effect of mass immigration is therefore not that Republicans will disappear, but that they will weaken their traditional conservative ideology in order to stay competitive. Put more succinctly, many Hispanics could be Trump Republicans but not Reagan Republicans. For a straightforward illustration of how voting groups can change parties without changing their basic ideology, consider 1988. That year Democrats suffered their third straight blowout loss in a presidential election. The party’s nominee, Michael Dukakis, managed to win only in progressive bastions such as Oregon, Massachusetts, and… West Virginia? Yes, today’s Trump-loving West Virginia was one of only 10 states that Dukakis, a liberal technocrat, managed to win in 1988. What accounts for West Virginia’s rapid journey from blue to red? Few would argue that the state’s electorate has transformed. The same brand of economic populism and cultural traditionalism that we observe there today was also present in 1988. What has changed is the coalition of voters that each party recruits. Democrats still counted blue-collar union workers as a core constituency when Dukakis was their standard bearer, and social liberalism was less ascendant within the party at the time. Gradually, however, upscale voters concerned about environmental and social justice issues gained more influence among Democrats, while the Republican party’s economic appeals turned increasingly populist. West Virginia is now a natural fit with the GOP—not because the state’s voters changed, but because the parties changed. In maintaining similar political attitudes over time, West Virginians are hardly unique. Data show that group ideological preferences persist to a significant degree across generations, and those preferences appear to have deep cultural roots. My new working paper provides a good illustration. It compares the preferences for economic redistribution among Americans of European descent with the preferences for redistribution in their ancestral countries today. The correlation revealed by Figure 1 is remarkable: Source: Richwine, “Cultural Preference for Redistribution in the United States” Preference for redistribution is measured on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 indicating the greatest preference. In Europe, represented on the horizontal axis, Italy has a greater preference for redistribution than Ireland, which in turn prefers more redistribution than the Netherlands. In the U.S., represented on the y-axis, the same order emerges—Italian Americans want more redistribution than Irish Americans, who want more redistribution than Dutch Americans. This relationship is present even among fourth–generation Americans, and it remains significant when controlling for age, education, income, and other demographic variables. The results imply that immigrants bring some of the values of the Old Country with them to their new homes, and then they partially transmit those values to their descendants. The economist Garett Jones calls this phenomenon “culture transplant,” and political preferences are a key aspect of it. A recent study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics illustrates the transplant of political culture in a different way. It finds that when millions of white Southerners moved away from the old Confederacy to parts of the Midwest and West, they did not adopt the views of their new neighbors. Instead, they brought their conservative politics with them, eventually joining the Republican party in a Northern “New Right” coalition. Once again, the parties changed more ideologically than the voting groups themselves did. Given cultural persistence as a general phenomenon, the primary driver of increasing Hispanic interest in the GOP is unlikely to be these voters’ own ideological transformation. Although better data on long-term political attitudes among Hispanics are needed, a major turn toward conservatism is not yet evident. On the question of redistribution, for example, native-born Hispanics have consistently favored more of it than native-born non-Hispanic whites, with only modest relative changes occurring since the General Social Survey began identifying Hispanics in 2000. Figure 2 uses the same 1-5 scale as before, with 5 indicating the greatest preference for redistribution: Furthermore, earlier this year the Pew Research Center asked a sample of U.S. adults whether the government “should do more to solve problems” or “is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” While 70 percent of Hispanics said government should do more, just 44 percent of non-Hispanic whites took that position. A better explanation for Republicans’ shrinking deficit with Hispanic voters is the same shifting party coalitions that produced West Virginia’s Dukakis-Trump voters. Republicans under Trump have de-emphasized free market economics in favor of more populist appeals on issues such as trade, entitlement spending, and even union support. Meanwhile, Democrats have increased their focus on social activism and lifestyle issues affecting educated professionals. It’s unsurprising that Hispanics, a predominantly working-class group not traditionally animated by social issues, are taking a greater interest in Republicans. Evidence for these coalition changes comes in part from the resentments expressed by the old guard of each party. In announcing that he would not run for reelection during Trump’s first term, then-Senator Jeff Flake lamented that “a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets” is less welcome in the modern Republican party. He later endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Shortly before this year’s election, National Review published “An Elegy for Reaganism,” wondering what happened to limited government as the GOP’s organizing principle. On the other side of the aisle, senator Bernie Sanders is bitter as well. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he argued. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.” Whether one favors the new party coalitions or instead shares the old guard’s distaste for them is not the issue here. The point is that the Democratic and Republicans parties do not represent static sets of principles. Instead, the parties are engaged in a dynamic ideological process—modifying their platforms, recruiting and shedding coalition partners, battling for control of the political center, always in search of 50 percent plus one. When voting groups move from one coalition to the other during this process, it is the parties that are more likely to have changed their ideological commitments, not the voting groups themselves. Of course, there is a way to alter voter ideology in the aggregate, and that is to import new voters. The political impact of immigration remains very real—and very concerning, if one is a traditional conservative—because immigrants bring persistent values and beliefs that can shift the political center that each party is trying to attract. The coalitional changes discussed above suggest the impact is already being felt, as Republicans have downplayed free markets to accommodate working-class voters. “Partly as a result of continued high levels of legal immigration, the percentage of the electorate that supports small-government conservatism is going to shrink,” concluded the political scientist George Hawley. The shrinkage could move America in a progressive direction, even as the Republican party remains alive and well. The post Is Demography Still Destiny After 2024? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics A MAGA Left-Right Coalition? Trump’s second term could present an opportunity for principled conservatives and progressives to team up in challenging the establishment. Credit: Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images On the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the longtime left activist and pundit Cenk Uygur posted on X, “I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m more optimistic now than I was before the election, even though I was so against the guy who won. I know now. MAGA is not my mortal enemy (and neither is the extreme left).” “My mortal enemy is the establishment. And they have been defeated!” Uygur declared. The host of the progressive “Young Turks” program was obviously referring to President-elect Donald Trump, his victory and his movement. He also IDed the bipartisan Washington “establishment” as the true enemy, not necessarily Trump and his supporters. Matt Gaetz, the MAGA devotee and former Republican congressman for Florida, retweeted Uygur’s post, along with this note of encouragement: “MAGA is not your enemy if you want to replace the mindless establishment with creative thinking, unburdened by the special interests which have ruined Washington.” Gaetz added, “Cenk makes some good points here and people should welcome these types of coalitions in our era of political realignment.” An “era of political realignment?” What, exactly, was Gaetz talking about? Two days later, on Sunday, left-wing independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) posted on X, “Elon Musk is right.” Musk is “right?” Bernie, of all people, really thought this? Do tell, O socialist maven of America. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” Sanders wrote. “Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud.” “That must change,” Sanders insisted. Musk retweeted Sanders’ post approvingly. So did Gaetz, writing, “Welcome home, Bernie.” Cutting Pentagon spending is certainly something where antiwar conservatives and progressives can come together. The concept of populist conservatives aligning or cooperating with populist progressives on points where they agree is not new. In protesting war, militarism, defending basic civil liberties and opposing corporatism, the principled right and left have historically circled around to find common cause against a centrist right and left that often agitate for war, are keen on mass surveillance, censorship, overclassification, and serve, first and foremost, elites. The American Conservative’s co-founder, Pat Buchanan, won the 1996 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary running on an antiwar and anti-corporatist platform that drew interest at the time from the left, who saw no such progressive agenda from the Democratic President Bill Clinton or the eventual establishment Republican nominee Bob Dole. During Buchanan’s independent presidential bid under the Reform Party in 2000, TAC’s contributing editor Bill Kaufmann called him “the only left-wing candidate” in the race. Four years later, Buchanan himself interviewed the veteran leftist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader for the magazine in 2004. A decade later, in 2014, a year plus before the emergence of Donald Trump as a serious populist political force, Buchanan reviewed Nader’s book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, in which he detailed how a left-right coalition had taken shape in response to the Iraq War.  “In 2002, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry joined John McCain and George W. Bush in backing war on Iraq,” Buchanan noted. “Teddy Kennedy and Bernie Sanders stood with Ron Paul and the populist and libertarian right in opposing the war. The Mises Institute and The American Conservative were as one with The Nation in opposing this unprovoked and unnecessary war.” He added, “The left-right coalition failed to stop the war, and we are living with the consequences in the Middle East, and in our veterans hospitals. As America’s most indefatigable political activist since he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, Ralph is calling for ‘convergences’ of populist and libertarian conservatives and the left…” Again, such a convergence of left and right, as Cenk Uygur, Bernie Sanders, and Matt Gaetz are flirting with, is not unprecedented. Buchanan noted former Congressman Ron Paul’s stance against the war, which animated both his 2008 and 2012 populist presidential campaigns. Those White House runs coincided with both the Occupy Wall Street protests and Tea Party movement that often found agreement in targeting elites, whether in government or on Wall Street. Paul was not only stringently anti-war; he also attacked NAFTA and would even openly discuss the racist origins of the drug war, all positions that also attracted liberals. This is basic but often overlooked or forgotten modern conservative and Republican history, but it is worth remembering at this moment. Over a month out from the beginning of Trump’s second presidential term, he has a team and potential cabinet of former Democrats like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, whose agendas line up with many traditional liberal concerns. Thorough progressives like Cenk Uygur now see some light from a left-wing perspective in what might come from his administration, and it makes one wonder how many disenchanted leftists are out there with a similar outlook. Even a hard-left senator as high profile as Bernie Sanders agrees in principle with probable future Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk that America’s military budget is just too much. It seems as if there are two political sides in American politics currently that defy mere left and right. There are certainly diehard MAGA-acolytes who are less interested in the issues and most obsessed with Trump himself. Then there are their mirror images in the Democratic party, for whom no matter what positive results might come out of Trump’s second term, even if those results square with traditional liberal concerns, will never acknowledge any of it in their blind rage and hatred for the person and symbol of Donald Trump. Both groups are fairly useless and hopeless. They are what they are. There’s just not much to work with there, in their mania and misery. But there are also so many Americans, a likely majority, who might lean left or right, or perhaps somewhere in between, who genuinely want what’s best for the country and see the real problem is the people who have been in charge for so long. For too long. There is something to work with there. Uygur and Gaetz don’t have to be enemies in this environment. How many Republican voters who can get past “owning the libs” might find some solidarity on certain issues with some Democratic voters? How many leftists might be able to clear their heads of Trump Derangement Syndrome long enough to finally see that the best hope of avoiding the next war or reclassifying cannabis might come in the unexpected vehicle of a Trump White House? In researching for this column, I came across a Chicago Tribune post from 1996 titled “Buchanan in Step with Mailer’s Ideas.” “Mailer” being Norman Mailer, the notoriously left-wing author and activist, whose political career ran the gamut from protesting the Vietnam War to being endorsed by anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard in his 1969 Democratic bid for mayor of New York City. Writing about himself in the third person, this line stuck out: “For years, Mailer, dreaming of a left-right coalition, had known it must start on the Right.” It’s funny Norman Mailer would say this, because it might be starting now. If so, if it actually takes a fuller shape, it is definitely starting on the right. A principled left-right coalition’s mortal enemy really is the current establishment. Cenk Uygur is spot on. May they be defeated. The post A MAGA Left-Right Coalition? appeared first on The American Conservative.

"All these wars were wars on Israel's behalf"!! "We are toppling Assad for the Israel lobby"!!! Piers can't really object much.....

Steal from the best. The post How Rage Against the Machine added some Led Zeppelin to their biggest hit first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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