Can Democrats Stop Hating White People Long Enough to Win Hispanics?
Can Democrats Stop Hating White People Long Enough to Win Hispanics?
Democrats have forgotten how to talk to minorities about anything except racism.
By Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Hispanics, once the favored demographic for the minority-majority formula of the Democrats, are drifting away.
Every few weeks another poll depresses Dem politicians, activists, and organizers even more. Hispanics now support a generic Republican for Congress by 9 points. Texas primary election results suggest that Hispanic voters are choosing Republican primaries over Dem ones.
That’s a catastrophically bad metric that goes beyond an election to political commitment.
Democrats wonder where their beautiful dream of a permanent majority-minority went wrong. The answer, as usual, is that it went wrong with them. The contemporary party has tangled together different strands of leftist radicalism, socialism, identity politics, culture war and environmentalism with little thought as to how the whole messy package fits together.
Hispanics have been left out by the coalition between white lefties and black nationalists that defines not only the politics, but the culture of the party. In the victimhood olympics, where men in dresses, drug dealers, and terrorists appear to be in the lead, the only Hispanics the party is interested in are illegal aliens. And, Hispanics are no more united in support of open borders than they universally enjoy hearing themselves referred to as Latinx.
While some economic elements of the Democrat program appeal to Hispanics, socialism has alienated a significant portion of those voters who escaped socialist countries. The more the Democrats embrace the socialism label, the more those voters become resistant to them.
Environmentalism hits Hispanic workers hard in places like Texas and offers nothing in return.
But the biggest problem is that Democrats, under the influence of critical race theory, of Kendi and Coates, of an obsessive purge of whiteness and the 1619 Project, have forgotten how to speak to minorities in any other terms than the racial marxism of hating white people. And Hispanics are, proportionately, less likely to build an identity around hating white people.
Critical race theory insists on a binary division between whites and non-whites that can feel true to some black people, but to diminishing numbers of non-black minorities. Likewise whiteness as a concept appears compelling to the white lefties and black nationalists who now dominate the political culture, but has far less resonance to Hispanics who are already racially mixed.
Hispanic resentment, when it exists, has tended to be nationalistic rather than racial, but historical grudges over past wars do not fit comfortably into the racism of race theory.
White evil, like any other racist concept, requires gut hatred or educational indoctrination.
The grand conviction that whiteness is the root cause of all evil requires an obsessional level of racialism that few people who are not rabid bigots or thoroughly indoctrinated are capable of.
Among non-college Hispanic voters who lack the indoctrination, the obsessional racism falls flat.
That is another of the reasons why the educational establishment is pushing critical race theory into schools at every level. But it still takes a certain mindset, usually found in either street corner racists or academics, to make it work. While racism can be taught, it works best in fertile ground. And what Democrat strategists are really discovering is that their politics of racial resentment don’t perform nearly as well among Hispanics as they do with black voters.
Hispanics are starting to function as a swing vote because they care more about economics, kitchen table issues, than they do about systemic racial resentments. It’s not that racism doesn’t work among Hispanics: human nature makes it obvious that it works with every group. The difference is that Hispanics don’t put group resentments ahead of their economic interests.
Or at least not so far ahead that they’re willing to suffer and vote for the party that caused it.
Democrats have successfully built minority coalitions, but the problem with their majority-minority model is that some elements of the coalition are deeply committed to the cause while others are only as invested in it as far as their immediate self-interest goes.
This basic common sense reality of urban politics was abandoned as a radicalized party became increasingly convinced that all of the portions of its base were invested in its grand vision of a transformed nation and world, when a significant portion just wanted to get ahead.
Losing working class white voters taught the Democrats nothing. Instead of reckoning with losing the South and seeing a former base demographic start to vote lockstep Republican, they denounced them as racist and began explaining everything in terms of systemic racism, whiteness, and the other racist nonsense of their renewed embrace of black nationalism.
Now, faced with losing Hispanic voters, they’re mulling over the internalized whiteness of Hispanics instead of addressing the way their culture war is driving away their own voters.
The racist conspiracy theories of critical race theory makes it easy enough to swallow up everyone who disagrees in the vastness of whiteness. But like any conspiracy theory, it creates a shrinking echo chamber of loyalists and treats everyone else as enemies even as it paradoxically claims to offer redemption to all of mankind. At this rate, the Democrats stand to alienate sizable portions of their minority coalition only to then slur them as white people.
Comforting intellectual rationalizations don’t win elections, they just make the losers feel better.
To rebound, the Democrats would have to return to a program of offering racial advancement rather than just racial resentment. Identity politics is built on the edifice of Marxism. Underneath the racial warfare is class warfare. But the new ruling lefty class isn’t especially interested in economics: it is much more enraptured with trendy academic theories of racialism.
And that’s why it’s losing Hispanic voters.
The central idea of systemic racism is that minority economic advancement is impossible without completely overthrowing the system. Any minority member who succeeds under the current system is clearly employing privilege and internalizing whiteness to get ahead.
That’s an uninspiring message to anyone who isn’t a leftist revolutionary or a violent racist.
Growing numbers of Hispanics have responded to it by voting and registering Republican because given a choice between postponing economic advancement to the era of some future revolution (a dogma that many of them had already seen lead to misery in their own home countries) or getting ahead now, the smart money is on getting ahead now.
And, best of all, the message was brought to them and paid for by the Democrats.
Democrats have a hard choice to make. They can take a step back from hating white people to win over Hispanics, or they can double down on their current coalition and hope for high turnout.
Socialism is seductively easy, but racism is even more so, and there’s no sign that the party of racism is anywhere close to kicking the habit. And, with the corporate culture so thoroughly invested in critical race theory, they may no longer be able to. The Democrats made a racial dystopia and now they’re discovering that they may have to live and die by the world they made.