The minority vote

A lot of pundits are talking about the role of the minority vote in this election. BTW, whites are now a minority in the US, so I can speak as one minority to my fellow minorities.

First of all, everyone has vested interests, but everyone doesn’t have the same vested interests. And this can operate at an aggregate level as well as an individual level.

Vested interests aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Acting in your individual or collective self-interest isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

How we deal with our vested interests is a good test of our Christian commitment. For instance, antebellum white Southerners had a vested interest in maintaining the institution of slavery. The Southern economy was largely agrarian. That’s labor-intensive. Slave labor supplied cheap mass labor.

Of course, most of us think that’s a paradigm-case of allowing a vested interest to betray Christian priorities.

I’m no expert on minority communities in the US. I speak as an outsider. But it’s my impression that these groups generally vote Democratic for very different reasons.

To begin we, we need to guard against hasty generalizations. As Marco Rubio points out, Latino-Americans don’t comprise a monolithic voting block. There are significant regional variations. Still, the Latino vote is disproportionately Democrat. (That may change over time.)

I think the reason many Latinos vote Democrat is because many of them are here, or came here, for the economic opportunities and social programs, as well as to escape the violence and corruption of the countries they left behind. 

However, there’s a danger of destroying the very thing you came for. If Democrat policies bankrupt the host country, then America ceases to be the land of opportunity.

Of course, there are exceptions. Not all Latinos came here to escape poverty. Eduardo Saverin’s dad moved his family to the US, not because he was poor, but because he was rich–which made his family a target for kidnappers (or so I’ve read).

Likewise, not all Latinos are here because they came here. There’s always been some Latino presence here. Like many borders, the Southern border is a line on a map. A legal and political boundary rather than a natural barrier. It wasn’t always there.

Now, a vested-interest can either have short-term or long-term goals. Conservative Latinos like Marco Rubio and Miguel Estrada are Republican because they think that in the long-run, Latinos are best served by GOP policies.

It’s understandable if Latinos to feel defensive about Republican rhetoric on illegal immigration. Due to a sense of ethnic identity and solidarity, it’s natural to feel picked on.

Rudi Giuliani once said he cracked down on the mob because he felt Italian-Americans needed to police their own.

By contrast, I don’t think Asians vote Democratic for the same reason. Rather, I suspect Asians naturally align with the Democrat party in large part because Asians come from traditionally non-Christian countries and cultures. (There are recent exceptions like S. Korea or the Chinese underground church movement.)

As such, they don’t feel any in-built affinity for the religious right. They don’t naturally identify with Christian social conservatism. That’s somewhat alien to their national or ethnic experience.

This, in turn, is reinforced by other factors. Many Asian-Americans are college educated. College tends to secularize students.

In addition, many Asians have located on the West Coast, which is already left-of-center. And immigrants are apt to assimilate with the dominant, preexisting culture.

The black vote is paradoxical. For one thing, it was Southern Democrats who enacted and defended Jim Crow. Likewise, some Democrat policies like sodomite marriage or desegregation busing are unpopular among many blacks.

However, blacks generally vote Democrat for two reasons: in terms of historical memory, they associate the civil rights movement with Democrat politicians like Bobby Kennedy and LBJ.

That’s a generational thing. You’re not going to have a major partisan shift until that generation dies out.

The other factor is the way the Democrat party panders to black voters through social programs. There are, of course, black conservatives  (e.g. Tim Scott, Allen West, Ken Blackwell, Roger Innis, Michael Steele, Larry Elder, Ward Connerly, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Stephen Carter, Clarence Thomas) who think Democratic policies are detrimental to the long-term interests of blacks, but it’s an uphill climb.

I think Jews usually vote Democrat in large part because Marxism is a Jewish ideology. And I think that, in turn, reflects a reaction to centuries of clerical anti-Semitism. There’s some pushback from conservative Jews like Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and David Horowitz, but in the US the Jewish right is far smaller than the Jewish left.

You also have so-called “neocons.” These are hawkish, but they may be socially liberal.