Posted on October 7, 2022

Are Hispanics ‘Natural Conservatives’ After All?

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, October 7, 2022

Credit Image: © Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire

The “Great Replacement” is a dangerous conspiracy theory. Just listen to Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX):

A red wave? Immigration is arguably our most important issue. Many white advocates say our rulers deliberately tolerate and/or cheer non-white immigration. Migrants are cheap labor for Woke Capital. Our rulers import a helot underclass that votes progressive.

Our view is that unrelenting Hispanic immigration will give progressives a permanent majority, and that white conservatives should stop Hispanic immigration and abandon any hope of winning the Hispanic vote. The GOP should appeal to white workers who normally sit out elections or vote Democratic. The Alt Right was born out of disgust with President George W. Bush’s pandering to Hispanics and blowing the chance after September 11, 2001 to stop mass immigration.

What if we were wrong? What if Hispanics can “become” white?

Here are some opinions:

Mr. Liu, himself part of a group with higher incomes than whites, said:

The great risk, underscored by the reactions to the new research, is that we go on unthinkingly treating whiteness as the ideal and social baseline of American life.

That’s harmful because it subordinates people whose backgrounds aren’t “white” and because it stunts the capacity of all people — not least poor and working-class whites — to name and reckon with class divides and inequality.

Whiteness is the baseline of American life. If Hispanics — or Asians — accept that and don’t “reckon with class divides and inequality,” there can be no Left that is built on victim morality, aside from blacks — who would be increasingly isolated and despised. Republicans used to win a majority of the Asian vote, but today Democrats win it overwhelmingly. The most likely explanation is that the Democrats are no longer a workers’ party, but the party of elites and blacks. It’s the party of rulers and their clients, and Asian-Americans are joining the ruler category.

Leftists may have a harder time holding onto Hispanics for three reasons.

First, our rulers can’t use Hispanics the same way they use blacks and American Indians. Hispanic poverty, welfare use, and social dysfunction far outpace that of whites, so they could be part of the victim class, but they are mostly ignored in the media’s incessant focus on blacks after George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. There’s also the reality that blacks commit well over 60 percent of the country’s murders, and Hispanics suffer like every other group. And Hispanics generally don’t make heroes of criminals out of a sense of racial solidarity.

The 1619 Project and historical orthodoxy rewrote American history. Instead of whites building a great nation, racist whites exploited Indians and blacks for centuries. Hispanics don’t fit into this story, which leads to confused claims like the one from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Hispanics are really American Indians, and thus shouldn’t be subject to immigration laws. While some journalists and academics might go along with this, ordinary Hispanics take to this about as well as they do be called “Latinx.”

Africans had different languages, tribes, and identities forcibly merged when slavers captured them. They became “black,” much as Europeans became “white” because of contact and conflict with blacks and American Indians. This didn’t happen with Hispanics. They were Mexicans, Argentines, Salvadorans, and other nationalities with fascinating and brutal histories, including wars against each other. Their histories also shaped the ways they behaved when they migrated. The famously conservative Cubans in Florida have had a major impact on American conservatism. It’s hard to fit anti-Communist refugees into a story about being oppressed by white America. A united “Hispanic” identity is far less coherent than a black or white one, especially because so many Hispanics are mixed-race.

Instead of Hispanics “becoming white,” it would be more accurate to say white Hispanics stopped being white with the invention of the new census category. When the League of United Latin American Citizens was founded in 1929, two of its goals were for Hispanics to be considered “white” and for Hispanics to learn English — what LULAC called “the official language of the country.” Activists and journalists looking for fodder for white guilt can’t decide whether the great white crime was forbidding Hispanics to speak English or treating them differently because they spoke Spanish. The confusion about who is Hispanic or whether they were “oppressed” makes it harder for Hispanics to be included in the Coalition of the Oppressed that progressives have built against whites.

Second, Hispanics are an artificial group. The census admits they aren’t a race. Activists invented the category to get “our just share of political influence and Federal funds,” and there’s no consensus on who is included. Are Portuguese and Brazilians Hispanic? In most cases, if you think you’re Hispanic, you’re Hispanic, and the government accepts it. There’s little reason for whites not to claim to be Hispanic on every job application and college admissions test. After all, the feds lump Hispanic criminals into the “white” category. We’re just trying to make this artificial group look better by giving them jobs and schooling beyond their qualifications.

“Ethnic” Americans — meaning whites from southern and eastern Europe — could conceivably have become a category if activists had pushed for it. Patrick Buchanan reportedly toyed with the idea. If so, we would be hearing many tales about the supposedly awful discrimination against Irish and Italians. (The American government’s campaigns against German-Americans during the world wars would probably would still be ignored).

Race realists know race is biological. The census says Hispanics can be of any race. Some Hispanics are white. Some are mixed, some are black, and some are from indigenous tribes. A person’s race tells us more about him than whether he’s from Argentina, Mexico, or Chile. The rate of white-Hispanic intermarriage is relatively high compared to intermarriage with other groups. That may be because in many cases, it’s not miscegenation. Some “Hispanic” celebrities who bank on their ethnic heritage for careerist purposes are mostly white; Jessica Alba is 87 percent European, and alba means “white” in Latin.

Jessica Alba (Credit Image: © Dave Longendyke/ZUMA Wire)

Finally, many Hispanics face the same problems as working-class whites. Hispanic solidarity is weak compared to that of blacks, so Hispanics fit uneasily into the Democrat high-low coalition against middle-class whites. More broadly, like working-class whites, they aren’t partisan voters. They worry about the economy and the cost of living. They are ordinary citizens, not activists.

In June, the aforementioned Republican Mayra Flores won a special election in a South Texas border district. Her Democrat opponent in the upcoming mid-terms, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, who moved into her district from one that had become more Republican, said the national party was “taking Latinos in South Texas for granted.” In Mrs. Flores’ special-election race, Republicans emphasized border security, not amnesty. It worked. The district is 84 percent Hispanic.

Politico wrote:

“The border’s a big deal, and they’re not doing anything about it,” the National Republican Congressional Committee chief said. “We are actually more in touch with the voters than our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.”

Republican polling of the district, conducted in mid-May by Meeting Street Insights, found that the most important issue for voters was border security and immigration (35 percent), followed by inflation (28 percent).

Flores and GOP outside groups slammed Democrats as having a weak border security policy that has led to more crime in the region.

In July 2022, a NYT/Siena College poll found Democrats winning Hispanics by just three points in the mid-terms. This poll was taken when President Biden’s approval ratings were lower than they are now, and gas prices were higher. Still, even during this Democratic nadir, college-educated whites — who have no white identity and want no part in conservatism — chose Democrats by more than 20 points. In contrast, a New York Times article found:

No racial or ethnic group was likelier than Hispanic voters to cite the economy or inflation as the most important issue facing the country, with 42 percent citing an economic problem compared with 35 percent of non-Hispanic voters.

Ruy Teixeira is a writer who became famous among white advocates because of his book The Emerging Democratic Majority. It argued the opposite of Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority by showing that demographic changes could push the GOP permanently out of power.

However, in July, he bluntly told NPR:

Look, I mean, voters of color don’t talk about voters of color. Who the hell lives in communities of color? The people I know live in neighborhoods, right? So there’s this whole, you know, sort of rhetorical lexicon that the left of the Democratic Party has become obsessed with and insists on using, which basically just alienates normie voters, including normie nonwhite voters. I mean, we have people in and around the Democratic Party talking about how all white people have white privilege and how this is a white supremacist society and so on. And I just don’t think this is the way people think about the world, including, you know, normie nonwhite voters.

He argued that Hispanics were hit hard by inflation and were moving closer to white working-class voters, especially on the economy and crime. In Bloomberg, he also argued that Hispanics were “very alienated by this seemingly lax approach to crime and law enforcement” (emphasis his). The COVID-19 lockdowns also hurt Hispanics economically. President Trump won more minority support in 2020 than he did in 2016. In May, Reuters reported inflation was costing Democrats support among Hispanics, further evidence that the drift is driven by economics.

The New Republic had its own explanation. It said Hispanic churches were driving voters to the GOP. “That LEXIT [Latino Exit from the Democratic Party] coexists in spaces with people promoting the Great Replacement and other racist conspiracy theories, endorsed and promoted by other attendees at ReAwaken America, is an interesting feature of the Trump era,” it wrote. The article, called “The Democratic Party Is Shedding Latino Voters. Here’s Why,” began with, “It wasn’t that long ago that some political pundits believed that America’s growing ethnic and racial diversity would put the conservative movement on the path to extinction.”

So much for the “racist conspiracy theory.”

Rep. Flores can score easy wins by hitting Democrats on social issues.

However, Republicans should be careful. Gas prices have come down since the summer, though they may increase now that OPEC+ cut production. Rep. Flores faces a fellow Hispanic in November who is not taking this race for granted and who will probably win in what has been a deep-blue district. Also, while President Biden is not wildly popular among Hispanics, his approval rating among them was better than his overall rating in two separate polls last month.

Republicans may be falling back on the “Hispanics are natural conservatives” line that Jeb Bush and other Republicans used when they argued for amnesty. One Hispanic Republican whom Rep. Flores touted said that “Hispanic conservatism is all about the natural values that our abuelas (grandmothers) inscribed in us from an early age — God, family, and country.” These may or may not be “Hispanic” values — there are clearly plenty of Hispanics for whom they are not — but standard conservatives love this kind of talk. It’s insulting to suggest whites don’t care about these things.

August 5, 2022: Tom Homan, Mayra Flores, and Kari Lake speak on the CPAC panel, “Biden’s Border Crisis.” (Credit Image: © Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press)

According to a recent report from Pew Research, Hispanics overwhelmingly see Democrats as the party that works harder to earn their voters and cares more about what they think. There has been practically no change in party affiliation from 2019 to 2022, with almost twice as many Hispanics calling themselves Democrat as Republican. While 80 percent of those polled say the economy is a very important issue in the midterms, 57 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This is slightly lower than for the overall population, but hardly a pro-life tidal wave.

A plurality of Hispanics think same-sex marriage and acceptance of transgenderism are good things. The number who oppose them are outnumbered by those who don’t care. Neo-Francoism and National Catholicism may be online memes, but they don’t reflect reality. Besides, the data show that Hispanics who are most enthusiastically matching with the GOP left the Catholic Church to join evangelicals.

Over 70 percent of Hispanics and even 45 percent of Hispanic Republicans think controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting the right to own guns. No fewer than 73 percent do not want President Trump to remain a national political figure. This is not a far-right voting bloc, aside from some “white nationalist Hispanics” who worry Axios.

Hispanics do not strongly support border security. Just 34 percent think it’s very important to increase security to stop illegals, and a miniscule 17 percent think it’s very important to increase deportations. In contrast, a majority think it’s very important to let illegals who came as children apply for legal status. Rep. Flores herself has already voted to increase visas.

Almost 60 percent also think immigrants should be able to “hold on to the customs and way of life of their home country.” This is a key issue for white advocates. What difference does it make if Hispanics vote Republican at the cost of changing the country? Vermont may vote Democratic but we’d rather live there than in Honduras.

Still, white advocates must ask themselves a terrible question. Given that white progressives have explicitly anti-white attitudes, can we stand to live with them for much longer? White liberal enclaves such as Portland and San Francisco appear to be disintegrating, and Hispanics opposed to crime and degeneracy might be better allies. We may need to talk about whites in America as comprising two different peoples, if not quite two different races.

The Heritage Foundation overstates the case when it says a “demographic and political tsunami” could be coming for Democrats because Hispanics will switch parties. The Coming Democratic Majority is still on its way, but is delayed because of the bad economy, President Trump’s fleeting successes, and Democrat extremism on issues such as transgenderism.

However, elite attitudes ultimately triumph; even having to talk about drag shows for schoolchildren shows how powerful they are. With enough time, even “Latinx” could catch on. (My own slippery-slope prediction is that it will be politically incorrect to say “Americans” within the decade because “America is a continent, not a country.”) On current trends, highly-motivated, highly-educated white activists will ultimately get their way over a large but lazy majority.

Yet Republicans have an opportunity buried in the poll data. While the Hispanic “natural conservative” is a myth, there are real differences between those who consider their Hispanic identity to be very important to them and those who do not. Even with President Biden’s low Hispanic approval rating in the Pew poll (54 percent disapprove, 45 percent approve), most of those for whom a Hispanic identity is very important approve of the Administration. Just 37 percent of those for whom Hispanic identity is less important feel the same way.

That means that if the GOP really wants to win over Hispanics, it paradoxically needs to end Hispanics as a demographic category. The current system encourages Hispanics to hold on to an artificial identity set up to win federal patronage, discourage assimilation, and claim to be victims. Abolishing affirmative action and breaking up patronage networks could delay, if not completely derail, “the coming Democratic majority.” The Left would be stuck with annoying managerial elites, hapless black clients, and increasingly disenchanted Asians.

If the GOP does not end affirmative action, Hispanic support will depend on the economy. Worries about crime and inflation may tip a race or two this election cycle. However, the overall trends still favor a permanent progressive majority. Unless Republicans are content with delaying the inevitable, they need to take serious action.

One of the few things America has over our kinsmen in Europe is that we have overcome so many of the internal racial battles that cost our people so dearly in the 20th century. We couldn’t have done this if the federal government had encouraged non-WASP consciousness, but that’s what the federal government is doing now with Hispanics. If the GOP wants to win, it has to abolish this artificial, cynical category. Republicans should treat them as Americans, not Hispanics. The party could even borrow from the original LULAC platform and establish English as the official language.

Of course, our goal is not to save the GOP, but the white race. GOP success might be welcome, but it doesn’t solve the race problem. However, all this at least prepares us to ask the right questions.

It’s not whether “Hispanics are white” or whether “Hispanics can become white.” Hispanics aren’t any more real than “ethnic Americans.” Some Hispanics are white, some are mostly white, and some are not at all. The different races within the “Hispanic” group share few common interests aside from the artificial ones given to them by the government. We want Hispanics to identify with the conquistadors, not the conquered, but America subsidizes subversion. We are already plagued with one permanent underclass. We shouldn’t fund another. Hispanics are drifting right, but it’s temporary. The GOP must act now, or it will lose forever its chance of survival.