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In the previous article in this series, we briefly strayed from our forward- (and downward-) looking theme into a retrospective of American immigration and assimilation. We noted that past waves of immigration were virulently opposed at the time, but that those immigrants, Irish and Italian specifically, are now an indistinguishable part of the fabric of America.
In those days, immigrants were pressured to become American in every visible way, and most did. Since the dawn of multicultural liberalism and political correctness, however, the exact opposite has taken place, with immigrants encouraged to stay just the way they were when they came in.
Does this have an effect on political patterns? We have no choice but to use race as a proxy, but there's at least some basis for doing so, since America was overwhelmingly white prior to 1965, and white immigration since that date has been trivially small. Other than blacks, all modern nonwhite Americans mostly represent immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who were not forced by overwhelming social pressure to assimilate.
What do we see? The difference is shocking, as the National Journal discovered in a major study of demographic voting patters over the last half-century:
No Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has carried even a plurality of whites.
Yet, as we know, plenty of Democrats have won election, so much so that Republicans and especially conservatives are now generally considered a dying breed. What the National Journal points out is that Democrats win elections based largely on the votes of non-whites, which is to say, mostly relatively recent immigrants as Hispanics now outnumber blacks.
Think through the implications for a moment. It is an historical fact that, prior to 1965, Americans were overwhelmingly white. It is also an historical fact that, since 1965, America has been overwhelmed by a massive wave of immigration that is almost exclusively non-white, which makes it at least vaguely feasible to distinguish between the two groups at the macro level.
The leftist media would have you believe that the observable difference in voting choices between these two groups is due to the inherent racism of Republicans and conservatives. There's an equally plausible explanation: that there is a difference in culture between people whose families have lived in America for generations and been steeped in American values, American politics, the American dream and the American way of life for all that time, versus people who came here recently from a quite different culture, politics, and background, and to a modern politically-correct environment that ostentatiously and forcefully refused to steep them in Americanism.
We can almost hear the howls of fury from the left: "How dare you say that only white people can be Real Americans! The world will be a better place when you evil conservatives are dead and gone!"
That is not what we are saying at all. There is nothing whatsoever that prevents black people, Latinos, or people of any other race, from holding conservative political views or being loyal Americans; we could fill pages with lists of famous conservatives of color and have many times. God knows there's nothing preventing white people from spouting or succumbing to the lies of left-liberalism, from Paul Krugman and faux-Cherokee Elizabeth Warren to John Dewey and Margaret Sanger.
In the aggregate, on the average, overall, by the millions - those people whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers were full and equal participants in the American experiment, vote conservatively, and that means Republican. In the aggregate, on the average, overall, those people whose ancestors didn't - don't.
We've many times cited Alexander Tytler, who warned that democracies only last until voters start voting themselves taxpayer dollars. Most Americans will be familiar with Ben Franklin's observation that America's new government was "A Republic - if you can keep it!"
Much conservative punditry since the election has taken, and bemoaned, the position that the time warned of by Franklin and Tytler has come - that the voters have become addicted to voting for what Mitt Romney described as "gifts," and that the Republic is now doomed. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, "It's hard to run against Santa Claus."
What demographic analysis of voting patterns reveals is something even more shocking: You actually can run against Santa Claus, and win, when the voters are people steeped in traditional Americanism.
All through the 2012 primary season, conservatives sought for a new Ronald Reagan and grumbled in frustration that Mitt Romney was no Reagan. The voting totals show they were wrong: Mitt Romney was, indeed, Reagan's equal, among people with an American heritage:
Mitt Romney won white voters by 20 points in today’s presidential election, according to exit polls, which is the same margin that Ronald Reagan won that demographic by in his 1980 landslide over Jimmy Carter... Romney has won white voters by the same 20-point margin, 59 percent to 39 percent. But the big difference is that in 1980, whites were 88 percent of the electorate, whereas in this election, they were just 73 percent. [emphasis added]
Read that again: If America of 2012 was demographically the America of 1980, Mitt Romney would not just be president but would have won a landslide as did Reagan. If the American of 1980 had been the same demographic as we have in 2012, Jimmy Carter would have been re-elected as Barack Obama was, and Ronald Reagan would have been reduced to making sequels to "Bedtime for Bonzo." He certainly wouldn't have been governor of California either, any more than there's been a conservative governor of that state for twenty years.
What has happened to America at the hands of the demonically farsighted Ted Kennedy and his 1965 immigration bill is, in the words of German poet Bertold Brecht:
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Somehow, Ted Kennedy and his fellow liberals realized that the American people would never buy into their totalitarian, leftist dream of all-encompassing Big Government socialism. If the left was ever to have the power it craved, they needed a new and different American people.
So they got themselves one. As we've explored in the page of Scragged, it's an historical fact that America has been an exceptional, unique country, in large part because of its culture of freedom and individual liberty. Anyone could make it on their own efforts in America - but they had to put forth the effort. And the role of government was mostly limited to enforcing honest dealings.
Other parts of the world don't have this culture. In Latin America, corruption is endemic, and justice goes to whoever is able to pay the most for it. How can a small entrepreneur compete in this situation? He can't, so either he doesn't bother, or he does so only underground and hopes officialdom never notices him which prevents him from growing his business beyond the teensy.
In Southeastern Europe and Africa, your family history determines who your friends and enemies will be, and this tribal tradition keeps the people locked into violent feuds that go on for centuries if not millennia. In America until recently, you are who you are today, and who you were yesterday is suitable mainly for dinner-table stories, certainly not drive-by shootings.
In Western Europe's class structure, your family history may not lead to violence but it pretty much determined your opportunity in life. America wholly rejected this concept, expecting and enabling each individual to rise to his own level based on his own merits. No blaming your failure on "well, I wasn't born a lord so I never got a chance."
But that's how people of other countries believe, in many cases for good reason. For four hundred years, when they got to America they were forcibly impressed that things worked differently here. A few couldn't hack it, but the overwhelming majority of immigrants figured it out, became successful, and more to the point, became Americans.
Thanks to the insidious poison of political correctness, we no longer expect assimilation. Instead of being pushed to become Americans, today's immigrants are encouraged to cling to the cultures of wherever they came from that are known to be failures! How do we know this? Because the immigrants left those places!
World cultures cover a multitude of different facets and attributes, but for the main sources of modern American immigration, they come down to one key principle: you're not responsible for your own success, and someone else is responsible for your failure - most probably that Evil Rich Guy over there.
This philosophy - this wrong, corrosive, destructive philosophy - fits in perfectly to Obama's vision of an all-powerful government that uses force to, as he put it, "spread the wealth around." Never mind that it is impossible to make the poor rich by making the rich poor; that belief, false though it is, places all power right where he and the Democrats want it: in their hands.
So after hundreds of years of Americans rejecting class warfare, rejecting socialism, rejecting the idea that it's the government's job to make everyone equal - Democrats gave up on America and Americans. But they didn't give up on power; instead, they imported foreigners from foreign cultures more agreeable to Democrat beliefs and encouraged them to keep those beliefs intact and unchanged once they got here - despite the fact that it was precisely those false beliefs that made their old countries places they wanted to leave.
The 2012 election was the full flowering of this strategy, though that won't stop Democrats from piling on more: Puerto Rico has now voted that it wants to become a full state with a complete roster of (exclusively Democrat) Senators and Congressmen. Why?
For one thing, becoming a state would allow them to benefit from an extra $20 billion a year in federal funds – something Puerto Rico could use, given its 13 percent unemployment rate. As a voter in the capital San Juan, Jerome Lefebre, told the BBC:
“We’re doing okay, but we could do better. We would receive more benefits, a lot more financial help.” [emphasis added]
Just what we need - more third-worlders voting themselves funds from the public treasury!
How can we lay this charge of what amounts to treason against Obama, the Democrats, and the Left in general? It's bizarre and alien to think of national leaders as maliciously and purposefully setting out to intentionally destroy everything that makes their country what it is.
Yet it isn't unprecedented. Precisely the same thing happened in England, with precisely the same result, and there we have proof of malice aforethought.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, England was ruled by the leftist Labour Party and its "modernizing" leader Tony Blair. In many ways, Tony Blair was similar to our President Bill Clinton - he didn't want to spend the country into bankruptcy, he wasn't afraid to occasionally use military force, and he presided over a massive economic boom.
However, like the American left, Blair realized that the total dominance of leftism could not be realized with the voters he currently had; he needed to get new ones. A few years ago his speechwriter testified to what happened:
Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. [emphasis added]
In other words, just as in the United States, the British left intentionally imported people from foreign socialist cultures with confidence that they'd vote for socialism and destroy any hope of conservative power. It worked: today, England has a Prime Minister from the "Conservative" Party who holds to none of the policies of conservatism. England has two leftist parties major parties and even a smaller leftist third one; tails leftists win, heads they still win, and if somehow the coin stands up spinning on its edge - leftists win anyway!
But what works great for elite leftist politicians and their fellow travellers is awful for the country. After a recent government publication of census statistics, the Telegraph reports:
...The mass immigration that has been taking place in Britain over the past decade has dramatically changed the cultural make-up of this country. If immigration occurs gradually — as it did in Britain on and off for centuries — then immigrant communities feel the need to integrate. Over time they become essential, indeed defining, parts of the life of the country.
But immigration on the scale revealed in the new census is a recipe not for integration, but fracture. It spells the end of our unified national way of life.
With immigration continuing at this rate, the British way of life becomes simply one option in a set of lifestyle choices — something you might adopt if you care to, but only in the way you might take up yoga or swimming.
For countries to cohere and for people to feel any common bond or purpose, it is vital to have common points of cultural and historical reference. The new census proves that the possibility of such cohesion in Britain is fast receding. The differences in the figures since the last census, in 2001, speak for themselves. [emphasis added]
Does this not precisely describe what has also happened here in the United States?
The Republican establishment, as we predicted, is clamoring to follow the same path back to power as Britain's erstwhile "Conservatives": ditch everything conservative, become as liberal as necessary to appeal to the newly-enfranchised socialist Third Worlders who their own negligence and stupidity have allowed to flood across our borders, and resume power by taking positions to the left of Democrats of yesteryear. Just as with traditional Englishmen, this will leave traditional Americans without a party to represent them.
But in exploring what America has in store, we shouldn't restrict ourselves just to what happens within our borders. There's a lot going on elsewhere that's worth a look, which we'll do in the next article in this series.