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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I wouldn't say that the GOP is so much the "white" party as the "settler" party. This is to say that if your ancestors were around to fight the Civil War on either side, you're a lot more likely to vote GOP. One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference (and I believe that liberals mean "settlers" when they think of "white", and that settlers are most strongly conflated with Southerners because they most strongly embraced that identity/were late to urbanize) given that the settlers were white and that Yankee descendants of settlers are well represented in the liberal camp, but roughly speaking I suspect that this is A. true, and B. most of the culture war in American today, aka. a contest between two blocs of whites with highly divergent views as to what the founding was and what the country should aspire to in the present. White liberals are a minority of white Americans, but white settlers struggle to gain support of non-whites. Hispanic Americans can be either one (given that most are descended from both natives and white settlers), and the black American experience can likewise be viewed from either lens. The latter is especially true given that in the liberal north/west, black Americans arguably were immigrants, with mostly black Southerners having served as a substitute for immigrants from the 1920s-1960s (The white Southern Great Migrants were more likely to move west, as settlers.).

Conveniently, this is something agreed upon by both the woke left and paleoconservative right, the only bone of contention being whether the settlers were good or bad/whether they have a unique claim of ownership upon America and what it means to be an American, and perhaps a secondary front concerning which groups of Ellis Islanders have more room to claim credit for civil rights or dodge guilt concerning the white supremacy question. Broadly speaking, "but my ancestors were Irish or Italian, not those damned Southerners" doesn't count for much these days, and being Jewish comes with more flexibility in that regard.

White descendants of settlers (This is something of a choice of identity, most strongly espoused by those white Americans who put their ethnicity as "American" on the census.) would be the ones who don't share negative in-group bias with white liberals. Much of their gnashing of teeth as of late has come from the belated realization on their part that they themselves are a minority among the American populace (albeit the largest plurality), and while the white settler ethos has historically had high capacity to assimilate non-English settlers (see the Germans of Cullman, Alabama ) this ability has declined along with rural America's cultural power. While not all descendants of settlers are rural/exurban/suburban, the more rural in America one goes the more likely it is that the entire population consists of settlers (some of them of Mexican descent in places like rural Texas). Given their limited ability to court outsiders into their coalition, their future consists of being the largest but continually shrinking plurality with limited elite patronage and ever-growing political irrelevance.

They (and Republican Party officials, stuck with being the settler party in most of the country whether they like it or not) may cope about Hispanics turning right, or even more fantastically toward the prospect of flipping the black vote, but I have my doubts. The GOP may convert enough settler-adjacent Hispanics in places like Texas along with Cubans in Florida to hang on in those states, but results elsewhere (the west coast and southwest in particular) have been discouraging. It's very hard to assimilate new voters into your party when it doesn't even win with the local whites, and the GOP's high water mark with the Hispanic vote, W '04, was still a 9 point loss. Other relatively pro-immigration Republican tickets fared even worse, as did Bush in 2000. Reagan '84 lost Hispanics by 32 points and Bush '88 by 40. Trump 2020 was the usual over 30 point loss.

Relating to your frame of identifying as white, the number of Hispanics and Asians who identify as white (the latter likely for college admissions purposes) will be outnumbered by the number of mostly white Americans who discover some non-white heritage, and the latter will be wealthier and more important than the former.

I think the settler and immigrant distinction is still not precise enough in this instance. The descendants of New England Puritans and of Southern Cavaliers have been on opposite sides of pretty much every single political dispute in this country since its founding, which splits the settler population right down the middle. White immigrant groups are also split between those that embrace a liberal, socialist ethos (e.g. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest) and those more amenable to conservatism (e.g. the more devout Catholics among the Irish, Italian, Polish, and most recently Cubans and other white Hispanics).