Demographic Death of the GOP

June 14th, 2013

Peter Nolan

by
Patrick
J. Buchanan

Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: Outside
Agitators

Next year
should be a banner year for the GOP, and may yet be.

Obamacare,
a “train wreck” about to happen, says Democratic Sen. Max Baucus,
goes into full effect Jan. 1, with the popular IRS as enforcer.

The Obama media
feel betrayed by the secret intrusions on First Amendment rights.
Libertarians see the National Security Agency’s data mining as a
massive violation of Fourth Amendment rights.

The White House
is bedeviled by scandals, the second-term curse has caught up with
the Obama presidency, and prospects for the U.S. economy seem dicier
than a few months ago.

History is
also on the GOP’s side. In the second midterm elections, Presidents
Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK-LBJ, Nixon-Ford, Reagan and Bush II
all suffered big losses. It has become a tradition.

But if the
GOP is favored to hold the House and make gains in the Senate, the
long-term prognosis for the party remains grim.

First, libertarianism
is breaking up that old gang of mine.

Sens. John
McCain and Lindsey Graham call for air strikes on Syria. But no
echo is heard, as the Republican Party becomes anti-interventionist.

Yet the acid
test comes after Friday’s Iranian election, as the neocon war drums
begin to beat.

Libertarian
Republicans believe the National Security Agency is Big Brother
and the Brave New World at hand. National security Republicans back
the agency’s right to access private data banks to protect us from
terrorism.

On how to deal
with 12 million illegal aliens – send them home or grant them amnesty
and a “path to citizenship” – the party’s rancorous division will
be starkly visible when the bill reaches the House.

But the existential
crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since
George H.W. Bush, is demography.

Yet the matter
cannot be avoided now, for it is on page one.

“White Numbers
Shrink,” was the headline on the lead story in USA Today.
“More Whites Dying Than Being Born,” blared The Wall Street Journal.
What does this mean?

In demographic
terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before
– not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza
epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and
birth dearth of the 1930s – has this happened.

In ethnic terms,
it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain,
Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe – the European
tribes of North America – have begun to die.

The demographic
winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for
the native-born of old Europe.

In political
terms, this is depressing news for the Republican Party. For nearly
90 percent of all Republican votes in presidential elections are
provided by Americans of European descent.

In 1960 white
folks were close to 90 percent of the entire U.S. population and
95 percent of the electorate. Nixon’s New Majority was created by
pulling Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern conservative Protestants,
white folks all, out of the Roosevelt coalition and bringing them
into a new alliance that would give Nixon a 49-state landslide in
1972, which Reagan would replicate in 1984.

But since that
New Majority gave the Republicans five victories in six presidential
elections, four of them 40-state landslides, the political world
has turned upside down, and demography is the cause.

Mitt Romney
won 59 percent of the white vote, a 3-to-2 victory over Obama among
America’s majority. In any year before 1980, that would have meant
victory. But in 2012 whites were only 74 percent of those who went
to the polls.

Thus, Obama’s
sweep of 80 percent of the African-American, Asian and Hispanic
vote, one-fourth of the electorate and rising, enabled him to coast
to a second term.

Between 2008
and 2012, the Hispanic vote rose 1.4 million, the black vote by
1.7 million, and the white vote fell by 2 million.

Where is America
going? What does the GOP future look like?

America’s white
majority, 64 percent of the population and 74 percent of the electorate,
still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real
terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white
babies were outnumbered by babies of color.

If Republicans
are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically,
ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used
to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”

Those
answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses
that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so
wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting
as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920
by 1972.

So what are
the Republicans doing?

Going back
on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal
supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to
a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of
his total votes.

Whom the gods
would destroy they first make mad.

June
14, 2013

Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.