Atlantic: Trump Can't Reverse the Decline of White Christian America

[pbrower2a]

It looks as if the Establishment will have to become more inclusive if it is to have any relevance except as a bogey for those that it excludes.

[pbrower2a]

There are two ways that a "whites only" strategy can work

1.) have enough Hispanics assimilate enough to regard themselves as white

2.) have the democratic become so extreme on cultural issues that it drives away all of the moderate whites and a large chunk of the liberal whites out of the party.

The chances of either of these two things happening over the next decade (and probably the following one) in enough numbers to allow the current republican party to win on a consistent basis, is quite low to put it mildly.

1. If anything, it will be Hispanics who assimilate white people (their spouses) into the Hispanic  communities. Even if the kids look nearly white they may still identify with a Hispanic, and not an Anglo culture. Such is so with Asians... and is generally so to the extreme with blacks.

White identity is a hollow appeal, and when something else (like apocalyptic war or a looming reprise of the Great Depression) becomes more pressing, then white identity becomes empty in the extreme and ineffective as a political appeal.

2. Democrats have decisively won on homosexual rights. That used to be a radical stance, but even I was largely making conservative arguments for gay and lesbian rights, the basis Law and Order. Having been threatened with gay-bashing I came to the conclusion that homophobia is inconsistent with my safety.  Gay-bashing is a violent crime; had it killed or crippled me it would have been a pointless tragedy to my mostly-conservative relatives, and as such it is contrary to any Christian conception of family values. Mainstream gays and lesbians ostracized the creeps who see homosexuality as an excuse for pedophilia while showing that they wanted marriage so that they could adopt and raise children.

If liberals want to start any cultural war, then they had better choose one that they can win.

To win after 2018 Republicans will need to either change successfully or cheat and get away with it.

[pbrower2a]

Actually, Asian Americans are more likely to become Republicans first, under any realignment. They voted 48-50% (50-50?) for the GOP in 2014 and their economic situation is strong enough that if social issues were taken off the table, they would be part of any GOP coalition in the future. I think Asians are just ticked off at the GOP's social issues (since a ton of Asians are highly educated and there's an education divide).

It's not remembered but Bush won 44% among Asians too. Coincidentally, the 44% in both Latinos and Asians matched his CA performance in 2004.

Don't forget another reason why we Asians vote Dem these days - because the GOP likes to perpetuate the "Perpetual Foreigner" idea. (Exhibit A: The "Watters World" Chinatown Segment. Exhibit B: Steve Bannon's "Too many Asians in Silicon Valley" comment." Exhibit C...you get the point.) Of course the GOP does this for the same reason they demonize other minorities - to attract more and more of the White vote...

Which ultimately supports your point - for the GOP to adapt, they have to drop the otherization of immigrants and embrace them, which is incompatible with Trumpist ethnic nationalism.

For many Asians, their intellect and learning comprise the core of their identity. The anti-intellectualism of Donald Trump and many other Republicans is a severe and unforgivable insult. Anti-intellectualism is the red meat of the Republican Party, and poor white people can't get enough of it.

[pbrower2a]

Even if that's true, helping the left is the only practical effect your efforts are having. You were in the driver's seat of the conservative movement in America for years, and this country has only gotten more and more left-wing as far as culture is concerned.

I mean, did you really think the left would never come back? Times change, and conservatives were not really adapting to the world that was changing around them. America has always undergone swings back and forth between competing ideologies and policies. You guys don't get to control everything forever, and neither do we.

I don't think America becoming socially liberal was an inevitability that couldn't have been stopped. The youth in Poland are fine with voting for right-wing parties that oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, mass immigration, etc. I know Poland and the US are different countries with different cultures, but I think that shows that we could have done a much better job of trying to keep America socially conservative.

Poland has always been a lot more socially conservative than the United States and Western Europe. Part of it is cultural, but their society is also a lot less open than ours.

A few realities about Polish history. in the early modern era Poland was in fact a great power between the union of Poland and Lithuania (Lithuania then containing much of what is now Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine) and the three partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. Austria, Prussia, and Russia chose to wipe Poland completely off the map, and in three acts of dismemberment they obliterated the whole of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After defeating Prussia and Austria in 1807, Napoleon established the Duchy of Warsaw, a partially-independent country  mostly in what is now all but the extreme west, north, and south of Poland.  At the end of the Napoleonic era, Prussia got a big chunk of what had been the Duchy, and as a reward for helping defeat France the Tsar of Russia got to establish himself as King of Poland. The Kingdom of Poland was steadily stripped of any Polish character in economic life and political reality.  The Poles had two failed rebellions against a Tsar that they did not want as a ruler, and the Tsar clamped down. Russia tried to make Orthodox Russians out of Catholic Poles -- which is just the thing for solidifying nationalism and religious faith.  Austria wasn't too bad for fellow Catholics who happened to speak Polish... but Prussia and Germany sought to turn 'its' part of Poland into more space for Germans. Imperial Germany funded a program to buy farmland from Poles so that Germans could settle in what had been Polish territory.

(Where I live, many Poles are descendants of people who sold their farms and took the proceeds of wartime pay of the Franco-Prussian War and settled in America, many as farmers).

After the dissolution of the Tsarist monstrosity in the Bolshevik Revolution and the defeats of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Poland sprung back into existence, only to have to fight for its life against the Bolsheviks. It's hardly surprising that nationalism and resolute Catholicism would be big parts of Polish identity.

But that Poland would last roughly twenty years before two of the most demonic regimes to ever exist would decide to split Poland between them -- and so they did.

For six years, Poland was one of the most infernal places to have ever existed. Not to trivialize the Holocaust, as the Hitler consigned every Jew that he could get his hands on in western, central, and southeastern Europe -- the Nazis did everything possible to degrade Poles into slave labor under conditions that would make the chattel slavery of the American South look humane by contrast. To make such possible the Nazis murdered the educated elite among Poles immediately after conquering Poland at the start of World War II.

America, Britain and the Soviet Union could agree to restore Poland, but Stalin's vision of a puppet state with a Commie government and a socialized economy  would prevail because nobody could do anything about it except to flee or to offer some futile, doomed resistance. The godless state of Stalinist puppets would face one force capable of withstanding Stalinist terror -- the Roman Catholic Church. One could not identify oneself as a Pole, no matter what one's economic lot or level of education, except as a fervent Catholic.  In the 1980s the working-class and intellectual elites resisting  a weakened and discredited Commie state connected to a Roman Catholic Church that still held ultra-conservative ideas.

It has been nearly three decades since Poland cast off  Commie rule. Because "Left" in Poland now largely means either Commies or those people who made genteel, self-serving compromises with the Commies, there is practically no Left in Poland.  Polish intellectuals are as fervently Catholic as intellectuals almost everywhere else in the West are irreligious.