Is There Hope for America? A British View

Even by their own adolescent standards, white liberals have been dangerously overexcited by Mr. Obama’s re-election. They are reveling in the belief that the United States is locked into an inescapable demographic trap that will soon end the white majority and the dominant culture that shaped the country. This, the white liberal fondly and ludicrously imagines, will mean a wondrously multicultural and multiracial America standing as the very model of social and historical development.

This is truly an epic fantasy. Even if mass immigration does continue and makes whites a minority, it does not mean that the multiculturalist dream of groups living in harmony will come true. Indeed, we can be sure it will not, because never in history has a territory occupied by racially or ethnically differentiated groups produced harmony. The best that is ever achieved is an uneasy armistice enforced by an (often formally imperial) overlord. Ever-larger racial or ethnic minorities will create greater competition among themselves, not a rainbow alliance against the white population.

White liberal enthusiasm for a future in which they are reduced to just another ethnic minority extends to their claim that the Republican Party is in inescapable decline — unless it panders to blacks, Latinos, gays, feminists, and immigrants, while dropping any pretense of trying to stem immigration. In short, Republicans must become the ideological Tweedledum to the Democratic Party’s Tweedledee.

The chief fly in the ointment for the white liberal’s vision of the USA and the GOP is that the demographic future for the USA does not have to be as they imagine it. Mass immigration can be stopped if there is the political will.

[Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from an essay that originally appeared here.]

But even under the most aggressive demographic projections put forward by liberals there is no compelling reason to believe that in the next 15 years Republicans will be excluded from controlling Congress. There is still time for the GOP to do what is necessary to defeat the supposedly predetermined demographic and political future, by adopting a program that appeals to whites and ending mass immigration.

The voting patterns

How was Mr. Obama elected?

The ethnic vote went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama: blacks 93 percent, Hispanics 71 percent, and Asians 73 percent. Obama also won 55 percent of female voters and took 60 percent of the 18-29 group and 52 percent of the 30-44 age group. Mr. Romney won 59 percent of the white vote to Mr. Obama’s 39 percent.

We can draw several conclusions. The overwhelming black support for Mr. Obama is almost certainly available only to a black candidate. The Hispanic vote is racially disparate and white Hispanics may eventually see themselves as white. The Asian constituency is still small and disparate, and Asians probably voted for Obama to a significant degree because many are recent immigrants, but the tendency to support the most immigrant-friendly candidate may decline as succeeding generations become distanced from their ancestral culture. A majority formed of several ethnic minority groups is certain to be neither stable nor harmonious.

The youth vote for Obama dropped significantly compared with 2008, and women helped give Obama a healthy but not overwhelming advantage. This last point is important because women are the largest group that is supposedly set to consign the Republicans to the dustbin of history unless they change their supposedly outmoded ways. A 5 percent shift in women to the Republicans — something perfectly plausible under different circumstances — would solve the Republican woman problem.

If the Democrats run a white man as their candidate, they could lose the votes of many non-white women. At the same time, a white Hispanic Republican could capture a large part of the Hispanic vote while perhaps not alienating too many white voters.

As for the under-30 white vote, 51 percent went to Mr. Romney versus 44 percent to Mr. Obama. This was a reverse of the 2008 election, when Mr. Obama won 54 percent of the under-30 white vote to Mr. McCain’s 44 percent. This is a significant shift, with young whites at least drifting towards a racial realignment. It is also true that younger voters often change their politics as they grow older, normally moving left to right.

In 2008, Mr. Obama was a novelty. Now, he is increasingly seen as just another tired, failed politician. Any black candidate in the future will be just another candidate, and will not get quite as much mainstream-media deference as Mr. Obama has enjoyed.

Support for immigration by recent immigrants is often strongly driven by the desire to bring in extended family members and friends. It is possible that the descendants of recent immigrants will have weaker attachments to their ancestral lands, and this could weaken their support for immigration. More dramatically, there are examples of the descendants of immigrants wanting to pull up the drawbridge to prevent further immigration of their own people. In the 19th century, for example, Anglicised Jews from families long settled in Britain opposed immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe.

It is not unsurprising that immigrants should sometimes oppose further immigration, especially by people who are different in race, nationality or ethnicity. More immigrants always mean greater competition for jobs, housing, education, healthcare etc. There is a particularly strong motive for immigrants to oppose further immigration if the country they have settled in has a comprehensive welfare system.

As ethnic/racial solidarity within a country declines, taxpayers become less willing to fund welfare programs. (see, for example, Frank Salter: On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration). Mitt Romney was castigated for saying that 47 percent of the American population were on benefits and would not vote for someone who might reduce benefits. What if the 47 percent became 60 or 70 percent? As a matter of simple arithmetic, there has to be a point beyond which benefits cannot be maintained.

That would be a serious difficulty in a homogeneous society; in an increasingly fragmented one it is a recipe for racial and ethnic strife. At the same time, those within ethnic and racial groups who have done better will tend to see themselves in class terms rather than ethnic or racial terms. This could lead to large cuts in welfare payments, which would discourage immigration.

Mr. Romney as a candidate

There were many drawbacks to Mr. Romney as a candidate. He is a rich man who made his wealth in the now widely hated financial industry. He is a member of a religion with elements that trouble some mainstream Christian voters. He has a tin ear for what should be said when you are courting the general public. In an electoral race where personality counts for so much, he came across most of the time as wooden, and incapable of engaging with voters.

He also moved from being what is politely called a moderate Republican (translation: closet liberal) on subjects such as immigration and homosexual marriage to a significantly less PC position, particularly during the primary. Many liberal commentators are now arguing that this made him unelectable because it alienated Hispanics, blacks, homosexuals, the young, and women. It is also equally plausible that conservatives did not think his change of heart was sincere. His shifts probably lost him votes on both sides of the political divide.

There was also an air of diffidence about Mr. Romney, as though his heart was not wholly in the fight. According to one media report:

After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Mr Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire . . . to run,” Tagg Romney said. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside.”

Mitt Romney “is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention,” his son said.

If this is true, it would have been signaled unconsciously to voters by body language and vocal traits.

In addition to benefiting from Mr. Romney’s many weaknesses, Mr. Obama had the advantages of a sitting president. Since 1945, only Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bush Senior in 1992 have failed to win re-election. Mr. Obama also had a reduced but still significant boost from the fact that he was the first black president.

Balanced against that, Mr. Obama had presided over the most difficult economic conditions since the 1930s. However, the recession began under a Republican president and in the public mind — at least at the headline level — was created by bankers and their ilk, who generally supported Republicans.

Voters seem to have widely accepted the view that Mr. Obama did not create this mess. They may have blamed Mr. Obama for not ending the economic troubles, but they blamed the Bush administration even more for starting them. In the eyes of many voters, Mr. Romney’s past as an investment-fund manager may have made him by proxy part of the cause of the mess.

Despite the result in electoral college (332 to 206), Mr. Obama did not win a massive popular victory:

Obama : 64,428,975 votes (50.80 percent)

Romney : 60,227,548 votes (47.49 percent)

Total votes: 126,832,750

Mr. Obama won many states by narrow margins. If approximately 850,000 Obama voters spread over the closely contested states had switched to Mr. Romney he would have become President. Taking the broad picture, there are reasons to believe that a better Republican candidate under better conditions could win, especially if he did not have to face a black Democratic candidate.

The demographics

One might conclude from liberal media excitement that whites are on the brink of becoming a minority. Of course, they are still a large majority.

The 2010 US census arrived at a total figure of 308.7 million, with a non-Hispanic white population of 196.8 million. The census also counted 50.5 million Hispanics, of which it classified 26.7 million as white. If all these people really were white, it would raise the white population to 223.6 million, or 72.4 percent. As noted above, as time goes by, some Hispanics may identify as Americans rather than Hispanics, especially if they succeed economically.

An important political imponderable is the approximately 100 million whites who were eligible to vote but did not. As the US becomes more polarized  turnout is likely to increase, but an increase need not be uniform across all races. While whites are the majority, a candidate offering pro-white policies can win an election simply by appealing to enough white voters. The same is not true for minorities. They will all be competing for political attention, and will have different demands, so no single party or candidate will satisfy them. Already, there is friction between blacks and Hispanics, and this will intensify as the Hispanic population continues to grow.

The other thing in the favor of the white population is that even according to the most aggressive demographic predictions, there will be at least another generation before non-Hispanic whites become a minority. If some white Hispanics identify as white, that would delay white minority status even further. All of this means that there is time for both the Republican Party and whites in general to change the demographic future by voting for candidates and parties that would control immigration and cease to pander to minorities.

But even if the white population becomes a minority it would remain by far the largest minority for some time. That could result in a coalition of whites and one or two smaller partners to create a white-dominated group that would leave the white population in a position of considerable power.

A program to maintain the white majority

Any party, whether existing or new, could adopt a program of preserving the white majority, but it is unrealistic to expect a new party to challenge the Democrat/Republican duopoly. Since the Democrats are wedded to politically correct ideology, the only real option for such change lies with the Republicans.

The logical and natural thing for the Republican Party is what neither they nor any other mainstream party in the developed world has done: play the racial/ethnic political game by appealing unambiguously to whites. To be effective, such a political platform would have to be adopted by Republican candidates across the board, not merely by presidential candidates. That would go against the US party tradition, in which discipline is much looser than in many European countries. Perhaps the most likely way such policy uniformity could arise would be for it to be adopted first at the state level and grow nationally after it had proven itself locally. What the Tea Party achieved on taxation and spending could perhaps be achieved on race and immigration.

At the core of this appeal to the white majority must be a promise to end mass immigration by those who cannot be assimilated. This would require a truly effective barrier along the Mexican border, stronger coastal surveillance, and proper policing of small airfields. It may also be possible, without amending the Constitution, to stop granting birth-right citizenship.

There is also the question of the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States. Many claim there are too many to remove forcibly, but this may not be true. During Operation Wetback in 1954, more than 1 million Latin Americans (mainly Mexicans) were either deported or chose to leave for fear of being deported. Their removal was accomplished by a border force of little more than 1,000. It is manifestly not impossible to expel large numbers of people, especially when they are being expelled just across the border to a neighboring country.

A large-scale expulsion of illegal immigrants would be the strongest possible signal to whites that the Federal Government was willing to act on their behalf. Other inducements for whites would be a pledge to abolish racial preferences, and to end all public assistance of any kind to illegal immigrants.

A recast GOP would explicitly recognize the tribal nature of human beings. Above all, it would make it clear that the values and culture of the founding and ancestral white population are precious things, which whites have both the right and the duty to defend. It could declare English the official language and make real fluency a requirement for naturalization. It could also invite ethnic and racial minorities to become Americans and not hyphenated Americans. It is debatable whether minorities would embrace European values and culture, but such an offer would assuage white doubts about the program and would be seen as an attempt at inclusion.

This program would have great appeal to whites. They may pay lip service to the multicultural creed or stay silent for fear of losing jobs or social standing. However, once mainstream politicians have the courage to denounce political correctness regularly and unashamedly, at least some of the mainstream media would come on board. Ordinary white Americans would lose their fear, and their pent-up resentment at what has been done to their country would be released like water from a breaking dam.

If the GOP adopted such a program it would put the Democratic Party in a very difficult position. It would have to make a hard decision: Would it unashamedly go after the non-white vote by promising ever more privileges to them to counter the GOP’s appeal to whites? If so, the Democrats would lose most of their remaining white support. Even if its policies remained unchanged, it would still lose white voters because the party would have nothing to offer them to compete with the white-enticing program of the Republicans.

If the Democrats lost substantial ground among whites they would almost certainly start to shift away from political correctness and towards the new program of the Republicans. That would help to move the entire political debate in a sensible direction.

The rest of the West

What applies to the United States holds true for the rest of the white world. The program I suggest applies to any country with a largely homogeneous white population that has been fractured by mass immigration. In many such countries the task will be easier than in the US. European countries are not dominated by two parties and therefore give their voters more options. Their parties are more coherent and ideologically unified than American parties. Finally, they are much smaller countries, which makes it easier to create a party with the unified program that is required.

In principle, Britain would be well placed among larger First-World countries to create such a party and have its program followed through. This is because Britain has no superior constitutional law (any law passed by Parliament can be repealed by Parliament); no executive head of state; a first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons, and an executive drawn, with one or two exceptions, from that House of Commons. It is true that Britain is presently enmeshed in the European Union and various other treaties and conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees, but these could all be abrogated and repudiated by a simple act of Parliament.

The main barrier to political change that would protect the interests of the white native majorities in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere is a matter of political ideology and custom. If the political will exists, there will be change.

Just another “End of History”

Where do the dramatic predictions made by white liberals about the America’s political future come from? Such ideas have a long history. The last time something similar hit the headlines was Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article, “The End of History?” Published at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, it argued that liberal internationalism was the conclusion of human social development and that the long march of human social evolution had come to a halt.

Wittingly or not, the present outpouring of liberal triumphalist glee is an offshoot of the Fukuyama world view, which itself was in the line of historicist claims that history was not simply a series of random events but a process that had some ultimate end, either willed by God or the consequence of ineluctable cause and effect.

For Mr. Fukuyama, the victory of liberalism was inevitable:

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism . . . .

. . . at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.

The legionaries of this ideal want a world with no nations, no states, no borders, and no distinctions between people. That idea has a religious intensity for true one-worlders. It is a goal that promises a world which, for the one-worlder, will be perfect — or at least greatly superior to what now exists. That has the intensely exciting and liberating effect of absolving true believers from responsibility for the here and now. It also fosters the idea that anything done now is legitimate regardless of its moral consequences, in much the same way that Marxism permitted any atrocity provided it was part of the historical motor that drove society to its final and perfect end.

Moreover, even if the one-worlders believe their goal is inevitable, they may also believe, as Marxists did, that the speed at which it arrives may be hastened by conscious action. The similarities between Marxists and the one-worlders are worth noting because the latter are the type of people who, 30 years ago, would have been Marxists.

However, the claims made by liberals about the Republican Party and the United States are different in one important respect from earlier historicist theories. Both Marx and Mr. Fukuyama described what was supposed to be an inexorable process that could not be halted. The modern liberal claim is different because there is a mechanism — mass immigration — created by human agency, that helps achieve their goals. Immigration can be stopped, but if there is no party that takes action against immigration, the native population could be quickly reduced even to a small majority. This is a very real danger in a small country such as Norway.

The liberal voices calling for the Republicans to “wake up and smell the ethnic coffee” are asking whites to commit political suicide by allowing ethnic and racial victimhood to become the driving force of their party as well as that of the Democrats. That would remove any chance of an effective stand against immigration. The logic of ethnic and racial change should tell the Republicans to do one thing only: use the still-white majority to safeguard their position by stopping mass immigration. Racial politics may be distasteful, but if that is what everyone else is playing, then you have to play the same game as a matter of self-preservation.

Will Republicans embrace their only rational way forward and become the standard bearer for white America? It would be a tremendous psychological hill for them to climb. Left to their own devices, Republican will accept the fate bestowed upon them by white liberals and their minority auxiliaries. But they may not be left to their own devices; hard economic times are making white Americans angrier and angrier at the way they have been betrayed.

Since Mr. Obama’s re-election there have been petitions gathering substantial numbers of signatures in many American states arguing for secession. For now, these are just expressions of exasperation, but they are signs of a growing sense among whites that there is no way to change things within the Union. If mainstream American politicians remain divorced from the wishes of the still-white majority, secession may become more than an expression of exasperation.

It is not inconceivable that the USA could fracture if mass immigration continues. If that happens, territory is what counts. A large majority of the physical territory of the United States voted Republican. In the end, control of physical territory, whether through the overt exercise of power or the passive fact of being the dominant population, is the most important political fact. That could make all the difference.

[Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from an essay that originally appeared here.]