Things to Come 8 - Harmful Diversity

Thus far in this series, we've recorded the bitterly depressing litany of horrors in store for America - horrors which, mostly, were freely and fairly chosen by an electorate that was tolerably well informed of them.

Everybody knows that Mr. Obama loves Obamacare - it's named after him, for goodness' sake! - and everybody knows that means government control of healthcare one way or another.  Everybody knows that Mr. Obama wants to dump billions of your dollars down failed "green" energy technologies while kneecapping good old fashioned coal and oil, and Mr. Obama himself proudly proclaimed that his policies would make everything cost more.

Everybody knows that the economy has been totally frozen for four years.  What possible reason could there be to think four more years of the same failed policies will bring anything any different?

Yet that's what Americans voted for, in commanding numbers.

Or did they?

The Real America

Way back in 2008, the ever-ridiculed Sarah Palin frequently used an interesting phrase, "The Real America," when campaigning through what we'd more usually describe as Middle American towns - the Midwest, farming communities, dying manufacturing centers.  In other words, anywhere except university towns and major cities.

Of course, our race-obsessed media couldn't help but notice that these places were lighter in in hue than their preferred leftist metropolitan haunts, so they immediately claimed that Ms. Palin was implying that "Real Americans" are white and everybody who isn't white, isn't a Real American.

This was an evil slander.  Yet there's a germ of truth hiding behind the bigoted lies of the left: Historically, until Ted Kennedy's Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America was an overwhelmingly white country.  In 1960, for instance, 88.6% of Americans considered themselves white, with most of the rest being black plus a relative handful of Hispanics.  While America was built by immigrants, those immigrants themselves were overwhelmingly white, aside from the notable exception of black slaves who had no choice in the matter.

The 1965 Act changed all this, opening our doors to the entire world.  But by the 60s, most places where white people live were already tolerably decent; there's no huge incentive to move to America if you're German, Australian, or even French.  Russians or East Germans might have wanted to move but their Communist governments built walls to make sure they didn't.

The poor countries of the world, though, were and are predominantly nonwhite.  The difference between life in (say) Somalia vs life in even the poorest slum in Harlem is as different as night and day, likewise the difference between a Mexican peasant village and a Los Angeles barrio.  Is it any wonder that the world's tired, poor, huddled masses poured across the borders and oceans?  It so happened that most of them weren't white, which in a very rough way makes it possible to tell them apart from Americans who've been here longer.

Today whites are still a much-diminished majority of 72.4%.  As the media has trumpeted proudly, this simple number camouflages a stunning change: as of this year, the majority of babies born in America are nonwhite.  In an amazingly short period of time, America will totally change its makeup and appearance; by the 2040s, we are told, America as a whole will be majority nonwhite.

The Rainbow America?

Does this matter?  In principle, no.  Unique among all the countries of the world, America is not founded upon a particular race or people.  Japan contains Korean families who have lived there for generations and yet are still identified as not being Japanese.  Germans have no trouble identifying third-generation German Turks as not really being German; French know their North African-origin citizens are most definitely something other than French.

From Day One, America was not about your race, it was about your philosophy: specifically, your desire for personal liberty.  The settlers at Jamestown sought economic liberty, the freedom to get rich.  The Pilgrims sought religious liberty, the freedom to worship God in their own way.  The settlers of Maryland sought freedom to be Catholic which was denied them in England.  Roger Williams founded Rhode Island to exercise his own religious freedom, a key tenet of which was the urgent need to spread the gospel to the Indians.  He made his point in poetic form:

Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood;
Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.
Of one blood God made Him, and Thee and All,
As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.

Were Indians and blacks always treated as equals in America?  No, they weren't, but American ideals allowed for the concept that they ought to be, which is more than can be said of anywhere else in the world at that time.  At all times in America, there have been individual blacks, Indians, and everything else who were treated as equals, thus providing a living illustration of the possibility.

What's more, contrary to what we're taught in school, bigotry wasn't really color-based.  Are not Italians and Irish pretty self-evidently white?  Yet a century or more ago, their legal immigration was decried as harshly as that of Mexican illegals today.  In fact - and Jesse Jackson, prepare to be shocked - Louisiana Gov. John Parker wrote of Italians in 1911 that they were:

...just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.

No, blacks weren't the bottom of American society - Italians were!  Gov. John Parker was eager to put actions to his words: his entry into politics came when he led rioters in the largest mass lynching in American history.  This murderous crime was perpetrated, not against blacks, but against Italian immigrants!

Yet today, Italians and Irish are the equal of anyone else and aside from their names are basically indistinguishable.  Why?  Because over several generations, they assimilated.  Sure there are some residual cultural elements like St. Patrick's Day and a taste for cannoli, but the rest of the time they're as American as the rest.  They are "Real Americans" and have been for a long while.

The Great Divide

How do we know that Italians and Irish are "Real Americans"?  Simple: they say that they are.  On St. Patrick's Day, the Irish are Irish; the rest of the year, they're American, full stop.

This is reflected in voting patterns.  A century ago, Irish immigrants generally voted for fellow Irishmen, which is how the tremendous corruption of Tammany Hall came into being.  The Irish would rather vote for a corrupt individual who shared their national heritage than an honest man of any other background.

That's long gone; a liberal New Yorker of Italian descent didn't vote for Rudy Guiliani because he's Italian, any more than a conservative New Yorker of the same ethnic heritage would vote for Mario Cuomo for that reason.

Since 1965, America has had an even more massive influx of immigration than during the heyday of Ellis Island.  Unlike in the old days, we have suffered from the insidious philosophy of multiculturalism, which holds that people can come here and still keep their old ways, their old loyalties, their old views, and even their old languages.  Some groups even dream of re-annexing the American southwest to Mexico.  This un-American attitude was anathema to the America of pre-1965; the "melting pot" was promoted, demanded, and required, with the reward being that once an immigrant was fully melted in, he was just as much a part of America as those who'd been here much longer.  Not now.

Politically, this matters.  We don't have access to demographic voting data based on recency of immigration; most probably this information doesn't exist because it's not in the political interests of anyone to collect it.

Instead, we must use race as an extremely rough proxy.  This analogy is weak for blacks, most of whose families have been here for centuries though not participating as equals in American society and governance, but as we've seen, it's mostly correct for everyone else.

So, on the admittedly heavily limited assumption that "whites" mostly represent voters steeped in the culture of America over generations, and everything else other than blacks mostly represents voters whose families came to the United States in an era where every major cultural force encouraged them not to assimilate themselves into America but rather to celebrate the attributes of the country they were driven to leave, what do we see in the voting patterns?

We'll find out in the next article in this series.