Tag Archives: Demographics

Why the Republican Party Is Abnormal and Dysfunctional

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It’s good to keep in mind that the Republican Party isn’t normal or functional and why that’s the case. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times explains:

The extent to which the Democratic Party operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.

A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.

If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.

Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.

Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. In 1994, around 33 percent of Republicans called themselves “moderate” and 58 percent said they were “conservative.” There were even, at 8 percent, a few Republican liberals. Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. Outside a handful of environments, found in largely Democratic states like Maryland and Massachusetts, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.

But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition geared toward a set of policies — aimed at either regulating or tempering the capitalist economy or promoting the inclusion of various groups in national life. The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment.

There have always been ideological movements within American political parties. The Republican Party was formed, in part, by adherents to one of the most important ideological movements of the 19th century — antislavery. But, as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”

It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the past decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters for Republican politicians is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment. And if conservatism means aggrieving your enemies, then the obvious choice for the nation’s highest office is the man who hates the most, regardless of what he believes.

The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade — nothing to temper the instincts of politicians who would rather shut down the government than accept that a majority of Congress passed a law over their objections, or who would threaten the global economy to get spending cuts they could never win at the ballot box.

Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite: There is a whole infrastructure of ideologically motivated money and media that works to push Republican voters and politicians farther to the right.

It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.

It’s hard to imagine what that might be. It can’t come soon enough.

Being Real in America

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The real Eiffel Tower is in Paris. There’s a fake one in Las Vegas. If there is a “Real America”, is there a fake one somewhere? Maybe in Belgium or Thailand? Max Boot of The Washington Post has some thoughts on what’s real about America:

I’ve been feeling very blue this summer. Oh, I don’t mean I’m depressed — I’ve been having a ball. But I’ve been spending time in some of the most liberal enclaves in America: first Martha’s Vineyard, then Provincetown, Mass., an LGBTQ mecca where pride flags are ubiquitous…..

I have to admit that even this reformed ex-Republican did a slight eyeroll at the car next door to our rented beach house in P-town. It sports bumper stickers proclaiming “Biden-Harris,” “Coexist” (with Christian, Jewish, Muslim and peace symbols), “Resist” and “Bye Don” under a shock of yellow hair. Naturally, it’s a Subaru station wagon with a bike rack. How cliché can you get?

It is easy in such environs to imagine that you’re not in the “real America”….

But you know what? Provincetown is the real America [note: first settled in 1700]. So is Martha’s Vineyard. These communities are undoubtedly on the left…. But, in many ways, they might be more representative of 2022 America than the Rust Belt diners where reporters love to take the pulse of T____landia.

There is an implicit assumption, shared by many Republicans and Democrats, that “real” Americans are White, rural, conservative, Christian and poorly educated. (“I love the poorly educated,” D____ T____ said in 2016.) Ultra-MAGA Republicans assume that their policy preferences — anti-immigration, anti-gun control, anti-abortion, anti-“woke” — are the only legitimate views that can be held by “real” Americans, and that anyone who disagrees is a pointy-headed elitist or “globalist” who is out of touch with reality.

Yet it is White, Christian, rural, conservative voters who are now in the minority. Indeed, much of the reason that MAGA Republicans sound so hysterical so much of the time is that they know that the tides of economic and demographic change are leaving them behind. The White share of the population has declined from 80 percent in 1980 to just 60.1 percent in 2019. By the 2040s, America is projected to become “majority minority.”

Accompanying this demographic shift is an economic shift that puts a premium on brains over brawn: In 1970, 31.2 percent of non-farm workers were employed in blue-collar jobs. By 2016, the blue-collar share of the workforce had fallen to just 13.6 percent. There is even a religious shift: Atheists and agnostics are the fastest-growing religious group in the country, while the percentage of Christians declined by 15 points between 2007 and 2021.

Demography is not necessarily destiny, and Latinos, in particular, are not as Democratic as they used to be. But these trends are hardly favorable for a T____ified Republican Party whose base increasingly consists of White, evangelical Christians who haven’t graduated from college.

A more diverse, better-educated country is more liberal, particularly on cultural issues. In other words, more like P-town and the Vineyard. Just look at the massive shift on same-sex marriage. Even Obama came out against marriage equality in 2008 when it had the support of only 40 percent of Americans. Now same-sex marriage is supported by 71 percent of the public — and even by 55 percent of Republicans. It has become a nonissue.

The hardcore MAGA base might thrill to the kind of cultural warfare practiced by T____ and [Florida Governor] DeSantis, but it repels most of the electorate — which is why so many Republicans who touted their opposition to abortion during the primaries are now soft-pedaling an unpopular stance.

Our political system has a sharp minoritarian bias, but there is little doubt that Democratic positions are way more popular than Republican ones. Sixty-seven million more Americans live in counties won by Joe Biden than by T____ in 2020 — and the Biden counties produce 71 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

The Biden strongholds are in major cities and suburban areas — and that is increasingly where most Americans live. Even in red states, major metropolitan areas tend to be pretty blue. The largest city T____ won in 2020 was Oklahoma City [the 22nd largest city in the US].

The whole country might not be nearly as progressive as Provincetown or Martha’s Vineyard, but those blue havens are closer to an increasingly liberal mainstream than the MAGA redoubts where pickup trucks sport “Let’s Go, Brandon!” bumper stickers. There is a good reason so many MAGA Republicans are embracing “semi-fascism”: Their views are too unpopular to command majority support anymore. They certainly don’t speak for the “real” America — to the extent that such a thing even exists.

Unquote.

In the old days, when Hollywood made a war movie, a platoon would include soldiers from all over (maybe they still do it these days with the addition of a woman or two). There would be a fast talker from Brooklyn, a cowboy from Texas, a hothead from Mississippi, a college athlete, a family man from Iowa, a skinny kid who lied about his age to enlist, an Arizona Indian, a reliable sort from anywhere USA (maybe played by Van Johnson), perhaps even a quiet black man and somebody named “Gonzales” or “Nakamura”. The message was that real Americans, the great guys who were defending democracy against the fascists, came from all over. Today, when our homegrown fascists and semi-fascists hear “we’re all in this together”, they think it’s a threat. They hate the reality of America.

As America Changes, Reactionaries Will React

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A political scientist at the University of Chicago seems to have confirmed something the January 6th insurrectionists had in common (in addition to the obvious factors, like being fans of the former president):

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.

Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties. . . .

By far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges. . . .

All 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.

The same thing can be seen in New York state, home to 27 people charged or arrested after the riot, nearly all of whom come from 14 blue counties that Biden won in and around New York City. One of these, Putnam County (south of Poughkeepsie), is home to three of those arrested, and a county that saw its White population decline by 3.5 percent since 2015.

When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.

Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.

CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March . . . to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.”

Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations. . . .

To ignore this movement and its potential would be akin to [the previous administration’s] response to Covid-19: We cannot presume it will blow over. The ingredients exist for future waves of political violence, from lone-wolf attacks to all-out assaults on democracy . . .

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post reacted to the study:

We’ve known for some time that many [Americans feel] a deep cultural anxiety, the sense that the world is changing in ways they don’t like and can’t control, and is leaving them behind. To a great degree, they’re right: Popular culture is far more diverse now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and in many ways it reflects liberal values. If you think it’s an abomination for people of the same gender to marry, TV is going to make you feel very uncomfortable (as will your own kids’ opinions, in all likelihood).

And if you’re a White person living in a town that is steadily becoming less White, just like the country as a whole? Many such people will welcome that diversity, but some will see it as a threat to their status.

Status is complicated. It comes not only from your income, the prestige of your occupation or the esteem of your neighbors. It can also come from the feeling that you and people like you are in charge. . . .

As someone who spent a lifetime chasing status, [Biden’s predecessor] understood that the feeling of status threat could be turned into a powerful political weapon. For instance: The point of insisting Mexico would pay for his border wall wasn’t that we needed the money, but that we’d regain status and potency by dominating and humiliating that country. Vote for [him] and that status and potency would be restored, he claimed.

It is almost impossible to overstate the role that the conservative media plays in creating and sustaining the feeling that White people’s status is under threat — and that the appropriate response is resentment and fear. The encroachments of liberalism are a daily drumbeat on Fox News and conservative talk radio, as is the message that everything you cherish is on the verge of collapse. You may have thought a “Happy Holidays” sign at the department store was just a seasonal decoration, but Fox will tell you it’s actually part of a war to outlaw your religion, so you’d darn well better get mad.

After the past couple of decades, we should understand that there’s almost nothing Democrats can do to diffuse those feelings of cultural displacement. Fox is gonna Fox, and [Republican] politicians . . . are going to see culture war rabble-rousing as their key to rising within the party.

The degree to which Democrats “reach out” to guys in Midwestern diners or try to show them “respect” by paying homage to their cultural markers won’t make a difference. . . .

The degree to which Democrats “reach out” to guys in Midwestern diners or try to show them “respect” by paying homage to their cultural markers won’t make a difference. . . .

That rage still burns, because the forces of societal change that feed it continue inexorably, and some people will always try to profit from it, politically or financially. That’s true even if conservatives find it harder to loathe President Biden than they did Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Unquote.

President Biden had his first cabinet meeting last week. The fact that the cabinet “looks like America” was a mark of progress.

Many of our neighbors would have been more comfortable if Biden’s looked like the Nixon cabinet in 1972. That’s not going to change any time soon.

We Should Expect Divided Government For a Long Time

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Back in July, I wrote about the unrepresentative nature of the House of Representatives:

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes.

What I should have said is that some small states are over-represented and others are under-represented. For example, Rhode Island’s two members of Congress each represent only 525,000 people. Wyoming’s single member represents about 580,000. Yet Delaware‘s one member of Congress represents 925,000 and Montana‘s represents more than one million.

That might be a wash in political terms, because some small states lean left and some lean right. Unfortunately, of the 12 states that have no more than two representatives in Congress, eight lean right and only 4 lean left.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget the District of Columbia, which has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, definitely leans left and isn’t properly represented in Congress at all (they don’t have a senator and their representative gets to talk but not vote). This all adds up to an advantage for the Republicans.

In that post, I also said that gerrymandering resulted in more Republicans being elected to the House in 2012 than Democrats, even though Democrats got more votes. I was right about the numbers: the Republicans received only 47.6% of the total House vote, but ended up with 51.7% of the seats, which resulted in the Republicans having almost total control of the House of Representatives, since the House is run more efficiently (i.e. less democratically) than the Senate.

It might be the case, however, that gerrymandering doesn’t explain the Republicans’ success. That’s not to say the Republicans haven’t done their best to draw Congressional district boundaries to their advantage. They clearly did so the last time they got the chance and did it with more dedication than the Democrats.

Nevertheless, a recent study suggests that the Republicans have a natural advantage in House races. The reason could be that Democrats have gerrymandered themselves by tending to live in big cities, college towns and old manufacturing centers. That’s how gerrymandering works. You try to clump together people who vote for your opponents in as few districts as possible. This creates a few extremely safe seats for your opponents (ideally, they’d get 100% of the vote in a few districts), and a bunch of relatively safe seats for your side. It’s basically voter segregation or ghettoization. By living close together in places like Atlanta, Ann Arbor and Toledo, Democratic voters appear to have put themselves at a natural geographical disadvantage in House races.

The people who did the study claim to have tried out thousands of different district boundaries in 49 states (no Alaska? no Rhode Island?). The results were not encouraging for Democrats or opponents of gerrymandering:

In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting.

It might be possible to counteract this Republican advantage by creating lots of districts that radiate out from the centers of towns and cities and would include a nice mix of urban, suburban and rural voters. The authors of the study seem to discount this possibility. At any rate, their point is that by living in relatively close quarters, Democrats are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to electing members of the House of Representatives.

A reasonable conclusion to draw from all of this is that Congress is even less representative than it seems to be. The Senate was explicitly designed to favor the interests of lightly-populated states, which now tend to vote Republican, while the House exhibits some favoritism toward small states, but more importantly is gerrymandered, whether on purpose or by simple geography, to favor Republicans as well.

The good news is that Democratic presidential candidates may continue to do relatively well, since most people pay at least some attention to politics during presidential elections and most people agree with Democratic policies (progressive taxation, more social spending, less military spending). Democrats who run for President will do well, that is, until they actually have to govern. Then they’ll have to deal with too many Republicans in Congress.

Criticizing Israel and the Fundamental Problem

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Max Blumenthal is the 35-year-old son of former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. The younger Blumenthal published his second book in October. It’s called Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

In an interview at Salon, he discusses the right-ward shift in Israeli politics, the rise of some scary racism and the reaction to his book. The Amazon reviews indicate the reaction the book is getting:

5 stars…………71
4 stars…………..7
3 stars…………..3
2 stars…………..4
1 star…………..65

That’s what’s called a “distinct pattern”.

What interested me most about the interview was Blumenthal’s description of Israel as a “settler colonial ethnocracy”. That is, after all, an accurate description of colonial America’s treatment of both the native population and African slaves. It’s doubtful that the Indians or slaves would have considered the United States to be a straightforward constitutional democracy.

Blumenthal points out an important difference between America and Israel, however. He says that the Israeli government’s official policy is to maintain a Jewish population in the country of at least 70%. The United States has controlled immigration, but has never had a policy aiming at a specific percentage of the population being, for example, white Christians.

This demographic policy, Blumenthal argues, leads to oppressive policies toward Palestinians, non-Jewish Africans and, most recently, Bedouins:

The Jewish state requires [holding non-Jews] in detention centers like the Saronim, where thousands of non-Jewish Africans are staying right now in shipping containers in the Negev desert; or the Prawer Plan, which mandates the removal of 30- to 40,000 veteran [Bedouin] citizens of Israel to Indian reservation-style communities from their ancestral lands; or the fact that Palestinians face constant home demolitions — we’re talking about 26,000 home demolitions since 1967. The Jewish state mandates the creation of the separation wall, which is said to prevent “demographic spillover”; and it requires the Gaza Strip to be under siege perpetually, because 80 percent of its population is refugees who have legitimate claims to the land and property inside what is now the state of Israel.

(Note: Demonstrations against the Prawer Plan were in the news recently.)

I haven’t been able to confirm Israel’s 70% demographic target, but did find an article by Israel’s most respected demographer, Sergio DellaPergola, a professor at Hebrew University. He lays out the basic existential issue Israel faces (putting aside any threats from its neighbors):

…it has been suggested that [Israel] faces a conundrum because it has three fundamental goals, but can achieve only two of the three at the same time. The three goals are to preserve the Israeli state’s Jewish identity, democratic character, and territorial extent.

Thus, Israel can choose to apply a Jewish cultural identity to the whole territory and population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, but in that case it cannot be a democracy. Israel can opt for the same territorial extension and apply to all residents the democratic principle of “one man, one vote,” but in that case it will not be a Jewish state. Or Israel can choose to be a Jewish and democratic state, but in that case it will have to withdraw sovereignty from significant parts of the territory and population.

Professor DellaPergola points out that 1947’s U.N. resolution 181 called for the establishment of a Jewish state, an Arab state and a U.N.-administered area around Jerusalem (in the diagram below, the proposed Jewish state is yellow and the Arab state is gray). The 1948-49 war resulted in Israel expanding its borders beyond those in the U.N. resolution. DellaPerfogla believes that “the real bone of contention is what happened in 1947-1949, not the outcome of the Six Day War in June 1967”.

MFAG007y0

If the non-Jews living in Palestine and surrounding regions back in 1947 had welcomed the creation of Israel, the Middle East would be a much calmer place today. They didn’t and it isn’t.