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For years I've been seeing conservatives arguing that that Democrat line about "demographics is destiny" was more the product of wishful thinking than facts on the ground. I'm starting to feel that way myself. After every Presidential election cycle, centrist Democrats redouble their efforts in encouraging the DNC to do some earnest soul-searching and recognise the fact that non-white voters are a demographic (or rather, collection of extremely loosely affiliated demographics, each of which has its own interests, many of which are zero-sum) that must be actively appealed to just like any other demographic, and cannot be simply taken for granted under the increasingly tenuous assumption that "Republicans are racist so people of colour won't vote for them". Then the next Presidential election cycle starts and the DNC immediately resumes taking non-white voters for granted, then react with shock and horror when they lose even more of them than in the last election.
Trump making historic inroads among Latino and black voters in 2016 may have come as a legitimate surprise to the DNC in 2016. No one should have been surprised by it last month. In November 2024, any white Democrat rending their hair and asking "how could a Latinx person vote for Trump??? Don't they know how racist he is???" just comes off as pathetic, like an ostrich. How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away from Charlie Brown before he learns pattern recognition?
I'm honestly wondering if, within the next ten years, we'll see Democrats claiming that they never claimed anything as racially essentialist as "demographics is destiny" and the whole thing was just invented by conservatives as an antisemetic dog whistle.
I think Hanania had an article along these lines a few weeks ago: for a long time "demographics is destiny" was the consensus among Democrats and Republicans. This served as a convenient fig leaf for Republicans who want to appeal to anti-immigration voters without being accused of racism: "we don't hate non-white people, we just want to win elections, which is impossible if non-white voters can be assumed to vote Democrat" (as Democrats themselves openly believe, to the point of it being a major component of their electoral strategy). So the increasing recognition that non-white voters are up for grabs by either party is a bit of a double-edged sword for the Republicans. On the one hand, a new demographic is voting for them, yay! On the other hand, if they want to keep appealing to their white nationalist faction while still appearing respectable, they're going to have to come up with some new justification for being opposed to immigration other than racial animus or the still-unacceptable euphemism of "cultural homogeneity", and so far the replacement fig leaf of "immigrants commit more crimes" doesn't appear to be playing ball. I don't think there's any conflict between being a social and economic conservative while also believing that Diversity is our Strength™ (i.e. we will welcome people of any colour or creed to America, provided you share our values and are willing to work hard), but the impression I get is that is that there is a very large Republican faction who will accuse any Republican politician who isn't aggressively opposed to immigration of being a RINO regardless of their stances on other policy questions - a faction that no serious Republican politician yet feels comfortable marginalising or alienating.
Ruy Texiera, who has been mentioned here a few times, is one of the most eminent names back in the late 2000s and early 2010s that crowed about the emerging democratic majority that would render the republican party permanently on the backfoot. He wrote the book 'The Emerging Democratic Majority', crowing about the electorates changing demographics rendering the traditional republican base of angry old white guys a diminishing minority. Its not like he was the only one presuming as such, Lindsay Graham himself said that there weren't enough Angry White Guys for the republicans to rely on forever.
Yet, if anyone has followed Ruys work since about 2014 onwards, it would almost seem that Ruy is a hardcore conservative. While the argument tracks that the republicans may have moderated their rhetoric about migrants and social conservatism, the much more attributable fact is that the left went fucking crazy after Obamas 2012 victory, and thought that they had free license to go full progressive. Following Michael Browns shooting in 2014, the cultural left which was in the ascendancy in the USA went in the direction of intersectionality, merging disparate disparate outcomes into a semicohesive web that castigated all achievement as unfair exploitation by a legacy white male establishment. The leftward sprint was so fast (I blame Elevatorgate, frankly) that people who were actually succeeding on what they (mostly rightly) perceived to be their own merits started questioning the reality that was being presented by the left, and simply by questioning they were cast out as uncle toms. These unmoored agents were now receptive to the siren calls of normalcy. As Ruy keeps saying in his interviews (like in The Bulwark where the comments all call him a delusional ultraconservative), he didn't leave the left, the left left him. His language now has some cope that he never claimed the emerging democratic majority was inevitable and that he maintained that it required the democrats to continue representing the white working class fairly, and while I think this is a bit of an ass-covering exercise, it still somewhat tracks.
One of the most amusing aspects of media post-election 2024 cope is that the normie voters were tricked into believing a lie from a right wing media ecosystem that had been totally unknown and impenetrable to the left, and if only the democrats had just reached out even harder to spread their message to the unwashed masses they would have been converted to their point of view and have agreed that Trump was so manifestly unfit that there was no real choice but to vote for the democratic platform. Till now I have not actually seen any lefties consider that maybe the unwashed normie masses had actually listened to what the left had been saying nonstop since 2016, and that the message was rejected on its own merits. The left likes to pretend that the election started from July 2024 when Harris was appointed the knight to slay the dragon trump, ignoring that reality existed before 2024 and all the language spread nonstop by democrats and democrat activists was on public record for all to see. The greatest enemy Harris had in 2024 was not Donald Trump, it was Harris 2019.
I have been seeing this in online circles — by people who consider anyone who understands and knowingly rejects the democrat party message is a Fascist in need of reeducation:
Its the same as Islamic fundamentalism - apostates must be killed because to have read the quran and yet reject it is proof of the foundational incompatibility of the heretic with logical existence.
The difference of course is that I can unironically find at least five jihadis in my 1st order peer group who will take a few weeks break off their comfortable lives to go on a beheading spree throughout the holy land if airfare was covered and their legal immunity upon return was covered. Despite decades studying and working in the educated professional world I cannot think of a SINGLE progressive/leftist who would actually even pull the trigger themselves. The leftists want Someone Else to do the dirty work of executing their intellectual will. The jihadis at least bother to justify within their doctrine why the apostate must be killed. There is nothing in the leftist philosophies that mandate gulags, much less executions.
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