Doomed by the South: Why the emerging Democratic majority may never happen

*An interesting take that challenges the popular political wisdom about how the growing Latino community represents a boon for the Democratic Party. It’s about the possible political realities of assimilation and about the changing demography within the Latino community. This piece begs two questions (at least): Do you believe it? And if so, What’s the message for the political parties?  VL

By Michael Lind, Salon

“The Emerging Republican Advantage,” an essay by the journalist and historian John Judis in National Journal, has ignited a national controversy.  In part this has to do with the fact that in 2002 Judis co-authored, with Ruy Teixeira, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an empirically rich and well-reasoned study that convinced many progressives that it was only a matter of time until the numerical growth of a coalition of white professionals, African-Americans and Latinos produced a permanent or at least long-term Democratic majority.  In reconsidering this thesis, Judis puts a lot of emphasis on the aversion to taxes and big government of middle-income Americans, a discontent that benefits the Republican Party.

Judis and Teixeira are brilliant analysts of politics, but I never believed in their emerging Democratic majority thesis.  The idea of the “coalition of the ascendant”  is based chiefly on the premise that Latino voters, the most rapidly growing share of the U.S. electorate, will continue to be Democratic partisans as their share of the population increases over time.  This assumes that Latinos, in their voting behavior, will be more like black voters, the most loyal Democratic constituency, than like European-American “white ethnics” such as Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, who deserted New Deal liberalism for Reagan conservatism as they assimilated into mainstream society and moved up in income and out to the suburbs.  (A British saying had it: “Give an Irishman a horse and he’ll vote Tory”).

My guess is that Mexican-Americans, a major Latino group, will vote more like Irish- and Italian-Americans than African-Americans.  Moreover, as in the case of European-American ethnics, the ethnicity of Mexican-Americans, outside of heavily immigrant enclaves, may become attenuated pretty quickly.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo by Brian Howell/Flickr]

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