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.
