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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/
Pull quotes:
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
I think we're not far away from explicitly race-based campaigns by Republicans in some blue districts. Imagine a Hispanic candidate, running as a Republican, campaigning for the following:
Jobs, not welfare
Traditional families
End of anti-Latino racism
Debate catch phrase: "I dare you to say Latinx one more time, Senator."
Hispanics and Republicans seem like natural allies on the culture war at least. All the woke stuff is Anglo imperialism. Successfully tarring Democrats as imperialists would also have the effect of demoralizing progressive white voters.
This has been a Republican pipe dream for a long time, not just for Hispanics but for other minorities as well. The problem is that these kinds of politicians are too beholden to a national party apparatus that is opposed to the kinds of things that would make such a candidate successful. Most voters are savvy enough to realize that "Jobs not welfare" is just code for cutting social services without any plan to replace them with anything. If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare. Add to that the fact that actual welfare is already restrictive enough that further cuts aren't really on the table and you're left with a host of ancillary programs like food stamps, CHIP, subsidized housing, etc., and a good number of these beneficiaries already have jobs anyway, just not ones that pay enough to obviate the need for some forms of public assistance. "Jobs not welfare" is a good applause line for people who already have good enough jobs that public assistance isn't really part of the calculus (Except as a drain on their tax dollars), but it doesn't exactly inspire hope among poor people that electing you will improve their position.
Something similar goes for "End of anti-Latino racism". Well, okay, I have no doubt that the Republican establishment isn't opposed to ending anti-Latino racism in theory. But in practice... it's hard for me to think of a single new policy that the GOP would get behind to serve this end. First you have the rank and file Republicans who will tell you that anti-Latino discrimination isn't a problem and that they all benefit from affirmative action anyway. The most obvious way in which Latinos experience distinct challenges on account of their ethnicity is that many of them don't speak English, and bilingual support is absent in a lot of places. I don't know how one begins to address this through legislation but the GOP has been the party of "if you're in America you should speak English" for some time now, and I don't see that general sentiment going away any time soon.
And as for Latinx, that ship already sailed. A lot of Democrats jumped on that bandwagon in 2020 but the term has been in steady decline ever since. It was kind of big news when polls started being released that showed only a few percent of actual Latinos preferred the term, but contrary to conservative belief, this resulted in most Democrats curtailing their use of it. These days the only people who use it are dyed in the wool wokesters like AOC, who got into a spat with fellow Bronx Democrat Richard Torres this past summer after the latter lambasted the Yankees for using the term. Torres's comments were indicative of a growing trend among Democratic politicians to use "Latino" or "Hispanic" for the simple reason that most members of the community prefer it. In any event, just because a group may not prefer a term doesn't necessarily mean they actively oppose the use of it, much less that such a term would actually affect a voting decision. The fact that most black people prefer "black" over "African American" doesn't seem to have made too much of a political impact, even if the latter is just as much a piece of contrived political correctness as "Latinx". It's just not that big a deal.
Why? If one can get $X for merely being alive, one would have to be offered stricly more than $X to work, certainly not less than $X.
But what happens in reality is that due to a phemenon called "welfare trap" sometimes abstaining from work, brings in more bucks than working, as in the latter case one would no longer be eligible for some means-tested programme.
Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear but I'm well aware of the welfare trap, hence the language "good enough pay that people would get off benefits", which would be the amount where it wouldn't make sense to turn it down to preserve benefits.
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