“The Emerging Republican Advantage,” an essay by the journalist and historian John Judis in National Journal, has ignited a national controversy. In part this has to do with the fact that in 2002 Judis co-authored, with Ruy Teixeira, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an empirically rich and well-reasoned study that convinced many progressives that it was only a matter of time until the numerical growth of a coalition of white professionals, African-Americans and Latinos produced a permanent or at least long-term Democratic majority. In reconsidering this thesis, Judis puts a lot of emphasis on the aversion to taxes and big government of middle-income Americans, a discontent that benefits the Republican Party.
Judis and Teixeira are brilliant analysts of politics, but I never believed in their emerging Democratic majority thesis. The idea of the “coalition of the ascendant” is based chiefly on the premise that Latino voters, the most rapidly growing share of the U.S. electorate, will continue to be Democratic partisans as their share of the population increases over time. This assumes that Latinos, in their voting behavior, will be more like black voters, the most loyal Democratic constituency, than like European-American “white ethnics” such as Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, who deserted New Deal liberalism for Reagan conservatism as they assimilated into mainstream society and moved up in income and out to the suburbs. (A British saying had it: “Give an Irishman a horse and he’ll vote Tory”).
My guess is that Mexican-Americans, a major Latino group, will vote more like Irish- and Italian-Americans than African-Americans. Moreover, as in the case of European-American ethnics, the ethnicity of Mexican-Americans, outside of heavily immigrant enclaves, may become attenuated pretty quickly.
By the 1970s, a majority of American with non-English European ancestors had multiple ethnic ancestries, and most of them no longer spoke the language of this or that Old Country. They were mainstream white Americans with a mix of, say, Polish, Irish, German and Italian grandparents. They might rediscover their Irish ethnicity on St. Patrick’s Day and forget it again until next year.
Recently native-born Americans surpassed the foreign-born in the Latino community. The rates of English adoption and out-marriage—mostly to non-Hispanic whites—among Latinos are similar to those of earlier generations of European immigrants.
One result of Latino assimilation may be the collapse of the very idea of a “nonwhite majority” except as a meaningless statistical category. Already a majority of Latinos identify themselves as “white” when given the option on census forms. As I argued in a 1996 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Beige And The Black,” because of the depth of anti-black racism in the U.S., America’s informal racial caste consciousness has always been binary—not whites vs. nonwhites, but blacks vs. non-blacks. The “white” category has been an elastic one that has expanded to incorporate successive non-black immigrant groups—first European “ethnics” and in the future, perhaps, Latinos and Asian-Americans.
I wrote in 1998:
In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.
Jamelle Bouie has made a similar argument recently, in a 2014 essay for Democracy Journal titled “Demography Is Not Destiny”:
While there are limits to the comparison between the Latinos and Asian Americans of today with their Irish and Italian predecessors—Latinos and Asian Americans span a wide range of nationalities—the basic point stands. These are two upwardly mobile groups that are rapidly assimilating with the white mainstream. If the pattern of the past holds, the future won’t be majority-minority; it will be a white majority, where Spanish last names are common. And if that’s the case, there’s a chance that the GOP ends up getting a new crop of voters over the next two decades: Latinos and Asian Americans who have assimilated, become “white,” and thus more conservative in their political preferences.
What replaces Old World (or, in the case of Latino, other New World) ethnicities, as they become attenuated? All American schoolchildren are taught that America is a “nation of immigrants with a melting-pot culture.” But this is misleading. Like Canada and Australia—and Argentina and Brazil—it’s a European settler nation, in which immigrants and their descendants assimilate to the language and political culture of the first settlers, while contributing mostly minor cuisine and folk traditions. The single largest ancestry group in the U.S. is German, but the German contributions to American culture—Christmas trees, kindergartens and beer brands—are negligible, compared to those of the original British settlers.
What is more, immigrants do not assimilate to a generic American culture. They assimilate to distinct American regional cultures, which to this day are shaped by the values of the original British-American settlers—reformist Puritans in New England, the populist Scots-Irish in Appalachia, the oligarchs of the coastal South.
Even within the same denomination or religion—Protestant, Catholic or Jewish—Southerners are more conservative than Northerners. In the 19th century, American Baptists and Methodists split into regional denominations over the issue of slavery. Southern Jews have traditionally been more conservative than Northern Jews. Bobby Jindal, an Indian-American from Louisiana, is a typical right-wing Louisiana politician. Oh, and though you didn’t hear a lot about this from the progressives on MSNBC, in 2014 the first elected black senator from the South since the Civil War was Tim Scott, a conservative Republican.
Already we are seeing this pattern of regional cultural assimilation repeat itself with Latinos. In the recent gubernatorial election in Texas, 44 percent of Latino voters—and 50 percent of male Latino voters—supported the Republican candidate, Greg Abbott, against the Democratic candidate, Wendy Davis.To be sure, the Latinos who vote in Texas today tend to be more affluent and assimilated than Texan Latinos as a whole—but for that very reason they are better surrogates for future Latino voters than are recent immigrants are who not citizens or do not vote.
Regional culture also tends to be adopted by native-born American migrants from other parts of the country. Partly this is self-selection. According to the General Social Survey, transplants on the West Coast are more liberal than natives, and the same is true for transplanted Southerners and Southwesterners. As Harry Enten and Nate Silver, interpreting the GSS data, note at FiveThirtyEight:
An 18-year-old from South Carolina might go to college in Boston if she has liberal political leanings or stay in South Carolina if she’s more conservative. The patterns can be self-reinforcing. If liberal residents are more likely to leave South Carolina, that means a higher percentage of the ones who remain are conservatives.
More bad news for Emerging Democratic Majoritarians: the political journalist Sean Trende has estimated the impact of regional population shifts on House seats (and thus on the presidential electoral vote) in 2020 and 2040. In both periods, the Northeast and Midwest lose congressional representation, while all of the states to pick up House seats are in the South or the West. Texas is the big winner, gaining two seats after 2020 and seven seats after 2040, for a total of nine gained. New York loses one seat after 2020 and two seats after 2020, for a total of three lost. According to Trende, California does not lose seats but picks up only one between now and the 2040s.
Different variables will yield different predictions. But it seems likely that the political clout of more conservative regions like the South and Southwest will continue to grow as a result of population shifts. And because powerful, enduring regional cultures tend to replace dwindling and attenuating immigrant cultures, a growing number of conservative Southern and Southwestern Latinos in the electorate may doom the hope that Latino immigration and fertility will propel a Democratic coalition of Latinos, African-Americans and white progressives to permanent power in American government.
The Republicans, to be sure, have their own problem with non-Hispanic white nativists. Both parties need to start thinking about how to appeal to the suburban, middle-income American voter of 2050 who may be Mexican on Cinco De Mayo, Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, German during Oktoberfest, and Anglo-American on Thanksgiving Day.
Just when you think you're ready for 21st-century America, it changes on you yet again. A few years ago, predictions that whites would eventually become a minority group in the United States galvanized the multicultural left -- and horrified the nativist right. More recently, news of the growing number of mixed-race Americans has inspired the political center with a vision of a true racial melting pot, one in which white and black alike will blend into a universal brown. But a closer look at demographic trends suggests that neither of these futures -- a nonwhite majority, a uniformly beige society -- will very likely come to pass. Instead, shifting patterns of racial intermarriage suggest that the next century may see the replacement of the historic white-black dichotomy in America with a troubling new division, one between beige and black.
Racial intermarriage has long been a source of anxiety in America. After World War II, Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi defended white supremacy in a book titled ''Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.'' Like other racists of his era, Bilbo believed that an inevitable result of dismantling segregation would be the amalgamation of the races through intermarriage. He was right: since the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), struck down the last antimiscegenation laws of the states, marriage across racial lines has grown at a remarkable rate.
Between 1960 and 1990, interracial marriages in this country skyrocketed by more than 800 percent. Roughly 1 in 25 American married couples today are interracial. In fact, there are at least three million children of mixed-race parentage in the United States -- and this figure doesn't even include the millions of Hispanic mestizos and black Americans who have European and Indian ancestors. Perhaps the best-known multiracial American is Tiger Woods, who has described himself as Cablinasian: a mix of Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian.
Oddly, the U.S. Census Bureau has yet to account properly for the presence of mixed-race Americans. As a result, many of its projections are off target. For example, the bureau has famously predicted that in 2050, whites will make up 52.7 percent of the U.S. population. (In 1990, it was 75.7 percent.) Hispanics will account for 21.1 percent of the population; blacks, 15 percent, and Asians, 10.1 percent. Presumably, 2050 will be white America's last stand. But this projection is dubious, because it assumes that for the next half-century there will be absolutely no intermarriage among the four major conventionally defined racial groups in the United States: whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Each group is supposed to somehow expand -- or decline -- in hermetic isolation.
But according to an analysis of the 1990 U.S. Census data for persons ages 25-34 by Reynolds Farley, a demographer with the Russell Sage Foundation, 31.6 percent of native-born Hispanic husbands and 31.4 percent of native-born Hispanic wives had white spouses. The figures were even higher for Asians: 36 percent for native-born Asian husbands and 45.2 percent for native-born Asian wives. (In fact, Asian wives were as likely to marry white Americans as they were to marry Asian-Americans.) The highest intermarriage rates are those of American Indians. Majorities of American Indian men (52.9 percent) and American Indian women (53.9 percent) married whites rather than American Indians (40.3 percent and 37.2 percent, respectively). And these figures, which themselves document the creolization of America, undoubtedly understate the extent of racial intermarriage that the 2000 Census will reveal.
Of course intermarriage rates vary by region. White men in California in 1990 were more than six times as likely as Midwestern white men to marry outside their race. Overall, interracial marriages are more than twice as common in California (1 in 10 new couples) as in the rest of the country (1 in 25). According to the magazine Interrace, San Jose, San Diego and Oakland are among the Top 10 cities for interracial couples. America's racial complexion, then, will change more quickly on the coasts than in the heartland.
Nevertheless, the overall increase in intermarriage means that both multicultural liberals and nativist conservatives have misunderstood the major demographic trends in this country. There is not going to be a nonwhite majority in the 21st century. Rather, there is going to be a mostly white mixed-race majority. The only way to stop this is to force all Hispanic and Asian-Americans from now on to marry within their officially defined groups. And that is not going to happen.
Thus, the old duality between whites and nonwhites is finally breaking down. But don't cheer just yet. For what seems to be emerging in the United States is a new dichotomy between blacks and nonblacks. Increasingly, whites, Asians and Hispanics are creating a broad community from which black Americans may be excluded.
Disparities in interracial marriages underline this problem. Black-white marriages have risen from a reported 51,000 in 1960 (when they were still illegal in many states) to 311,000 in 1997. Marriages between white men and black women, though still uncommon, rose from 27,000 in 1980 to 122,000 in 1995. Although black out-marriage rates have risen, they remain much lower than out-marriage rates for Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. For the 25-34 age group, only 8 percent of black men marry outside their race. Less than 4 percent of black women do so.
While many blacks frown upon marriage by blacks to members of other groups -- such relationships are viewed by some as disloyal -- it seems very unlikely that such conservative attitudes are more pronounced among black Americans than among whites or Hispanic or Asian immigrants. The major cause of low black out-marriage rates may well be anti-black prejudice -- the most enduring feature of the eroding American caste system. Furthermore, antiblack prejudice is often picked up by immigrants, when it is not brought with them from their countries of origin.
In the past, the existence of an untouchable caste of blacks may have made it easier for Anglo-Americans to fuse with more recent European immigrants in an all-encompassing white community. Without blacks as a common other, the differences between Anglo-Americans, German-Americans, Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans might have seemed much more important. Could this be occurring again? A Knight-Ridder poll taken in May 1997 showed that while respondents were generally comfortable with intermarriage, a full 3 in 10 respondents opposed marriage between blacks and whites.
In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority -- a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans -- offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.
The political implications of this new racial landscape have not yet been considered. On the positive side, the melting away of racial barriers between Asians, Latinos and whites will prevent a complete Balkanization of American society into tiny ethnic groups. On the negative side, the division between an enormous, mixed-race majority and a black minority might be equally unhealthy. The new mixed-race majority, even if it were predominantly European in ancestry, probably would not be moved by appeals to white guilt. Some of the new multiracial Americans might disingenuously invoke an Asian or Hispanic grandparent to include themselves among the victims rather than the victimizers. Nor would black Americans find many partners for a rainbow coalition politics, except perhaps among recent immigrants.
One political response to a beige-and-black America might be a movement to institutionalize binationalism. In Canada, Anglophones and Francophones have been declared the country's two founding nations. Blacks, as a quasi-permanent minority, might insist upon a status different from that of voluntary immigrants who merge with the majority in a few generations. Such compromises, however, are difficult to maintain. If most immigrants blend into one of the two founding nations -- the Anglophone majority in Canada, the mixed-race majority in the U.S. -- then working out a stable modus vivendi between the expanding community and the shrinking community becomes almost impossible.
The other possibility is that black Americans will, in time, participate in the melting pot at rates comparable with other groups. Such a result cannot and should not be the aim of public policy -- how can you legislate romance? -- but it may be an incidental result of greater social mobility and economic equality. The evidence suggests that the association of people as equals erodes even the oldest and deepest prejudice in American life.
According to the 1990 census, white men 25-34 in the U.S. military were 2.3 times as likely to marry nonwhite women as civilians. And white women in the same age group who served in the military in the 1980's were seven times as likely as their civilian counterparts to have black husbands. Indeed, for all groups except for Asian men, military service makes out-marriage much more likely. The reason for this is clear: the U.S. military is the most integrated institution in American society because it is the most egalitarian and meritocratic. It is also -- not coincidentally -- the least libertarian and least tolerant of subcultural diversity. It may be that in the nation as a whole, as in the military, the integration of individuals can be achieved only at the price of the sacrifice of lesser differences to a powerful common identity.
In the end, racial intermarriage is a result, not a cause, of racial integration. Racial integration, in turn, is a result of social equality. The civil rights revolution abolished racial segregation by law, but not racial segregation by class. Ending racial segregation by class might -- just might -- bring about an end to race itself in America. It is certainly worth a try.
