Is the rising minority population actually bad for the Left?

[Luke Skywalker]

I'm making racial generalizations here, so bear with me.

A recent study has shown that combined minority births now outnumber white births, and white people will end up a minority in 2050. Most democrats would leap for joy, but could this actually hurt them in the long run?

Think about it: Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Latinos are very fiscally liberal because centuries of oppression have given them the short end of the socioeconomic stick. Ergo, they vote democratic. But the racial achievement gap has been narrowing by a non-trivial rate, and by extension the gap's political power will wane. Blacks and latinos won't have as much of a reason to be fiscally liberal anymore.

But both groups are very, very socially conservative, and vote overwhelmingly against gay marriage and (IIRC) abortion. After gaining socioeconomic parity, could they migrate to the Right?

Of course, if the gap in wealth and education decreases, they might not remain as religious, and the two may even out. I'm not sure. And I don't think any of this applies to Asians like myself. It'll still be a long time before we have much political power.

[madd0ct0r]

i think you need some data in your OP for us to be sensible with this.

[D.Turtle]

Well, since socio-economic parity will probably not be achieved in this century, I am unwilling to speculate on what could happen at that point.

In the short to medium term, Republicans have no chance with the black vote, and will have to make large changes with regards to immigration law in order to increase their latino vote. Of course, the last few years, has seen them make large strides in the wrong direction for that to happen.

[Luke Skywalker]

EDIT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/wh ... emityn.www

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

...

Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years.

Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.

The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.

[K. A. Pital]

Left. As it has been historically the case for the most part.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

To the left. Voting for the guy who wants gay marriage is better than voting for the guy who wants to deport them. They face the same 'lesser of two evils' question as we do, only on a much more visceral level and the divide between lesser and greater is much more visible. Funny, how the more extreme your socioeconomic status, the clearer you can see what you have to do. It is the middle class that suffers from short-sightedness.

[General Mung Beans]

In the future at least for the US, once the Tea Party/nativist faction starts to die off (my personal hunch is that this'll happen after 2014 which will be the last huzzah of the TP after Romney's defeat), the Republicans will embrace fully open immigration as part of neoliberal economic policy and thus divide the Hispanic vote fairly equally with the Democrats (this was already apparent in 2004 with Bush). Blacks will remain Democratic IMO though.

While not much is said about the political trends of Asians, from personal experience and the political affiliations of elected Asians they do seem to be more evenly split between the Republicans and the Democrats than Hispanics or blacks.

[Mr Bean]

While not much is said about the political trends of Asians, from personal experience and the political affiliations of elected Asians they do seem to be more evenly split between the Republicans and the Democrats than Hispanics or blacks.

Asians tend pretty strongly democratic depending on which Asians your talking about. For example the Chinese have been painted as the next great other by the Republicans but the flip side is not all Chinese see their homeland as anything other than the next great evil much like how the Cuban refugees vote based on who hates Castro more (Or at least that's how that sector votes).

But seriously Asians should not be labeled "Asians" to begin with except when talked about in the broadest terms like the term "Europeans" which includes everyone from the Armenians to the Welsh. Koreans might be split but the Japanese are not. Philippians from personal experience are strongly Democratic but I have no idea on the macro level. Not to mention Chinese, Indian and Mongolian.

Your also talking about first generation vs four or fifth generation. The instant you don't have first generation immigrant to instil values you lose a lot of that cultural perspective. I had a friend who's grand-parents were South African and forced to live at the beck and call of Afrikaners under Apartheid. They were not legally slaves but they were treated identically to how any house plantation slave in pre-civil war America. Being the youngest of seven children his grandparents had died before he had reached the age of four and you could see the effect his grandparents had on his older brothers and sisters which he missed out on due to their deaths before they could install those values and teach those lessons. Such lessons are much less effective delivered second hand.

[K. A. Pital]

I do not consider Democrats being a true left party, but it is clear that immigrants will have a lower socio-economic position in the US class and group hierarchy, be they part of the worker class, worker aristocracy or even small bourgeois. They will face more obstacles and are more likely to face discrimination.

Just as communism is widespread among the young Turks in Germany, it will become a trend for the new generation of immgrants still confronting daily "mundane" racism and other forms of pressure to shift to the left. Dr. Trainwreck is onto something - the lower you are and the lower is your income, the more radical you become. Once you've got little to lose, only the left would send you an appealing message that you do still matter. The right would write you off as a loser or a second-class citizen who hasn't been working "hard nuff".

[salm]

Just as communism is widespread among the young Turks in Germany

Not to derail this thread, but where do you get this information from?

[Alerik the Fortunate]

A lot may depend on how the Republican party transforms over the coming decades; I still feel that there will be some sort of struggle and fracture between the major blocks: corporatist, libertarian, religious conservative, neoliberal. I have no idea what the party will look like in 20 or 30 years, and as has been pointed out, economic parity for minorities is still decades away. Also, the current trend of the Republicans has been to be not the party of parity, but of supremacy, that you only matter as a supporter of the existing elite while holding up empty promises that you can join that elite. Decades of transparent contempt for the lower classes may make the Republican platform harder to sell unless they change noticeably.

As for social issues, the general trend among the young is solidly to the left, aside from reactionary trends among diehard conservatives, who are fewer in number in every generation even if they are vocal. I expect this will hold as a trend in minority groups, even if they lag behind whites in acceptance of LGBT rights and similar issues. Additionally, social and economic integration, and presumably increased education, will only accelerate that trend. I expect that to outweigh trends towards conservatism due to economic improvement.

[K. A. Pital]

Not to derail this thread, but where do you get this information from?

I guess that's the impression I got from talking to Turks. There are a few explanations which do not really mean that Turks became left-wing in Germany, though, like this story.

In the 1980s, Germany becomes a center for Turkish communists. In Turkey, prisons are overfl owing with them and their sympathizers, and more than a few of them end up on the gallows. In Germany, however, even the Evangelische Studentengemeinde [Protestant Student Association] worries about the persecuted. It is not that people are interested in Turkish communists’ way of thinking; it is enough that the Turkish state is persecuting them.

However, in a way it is peculiar that the left-wing views have persevered and are easily found even among rich and popular turks (the rapper Kool Savas and his communist rap-performing brother come to mind). I can't really make a call on whether these views are becoming more or less popular right now, though.

[Luke Skywalker]

As for social issues, the general trend among the young is solidly to the left, aside from reactionary trends among diehard conservatives, who are fewer in number in every generation even if they are vocal. I expect this will hold as a trend in minority groups, even if they lag behind whites in acceptance of LGBT rights and similar issues. Additionally, social and economic integration, and presumably increased education, will only accelerate that trend. I expect that to outweigh trends towards conservatism due to economic improvement.

The typical trend of human history is to the Left, but that's from a relative policy standpoint. So whereas your typical conservative's policy stances would be dangerously radical by the standards of someone living in the 18th century, I don't think the number of people on the Right will ever be insignificant. They'll just be liberal by today's standards.