From The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Edward Luce, 2017) p94-7
The more technocracy loses touch, the more it reaches for the remote control. The subtext of Mrs Clinton’s campaign was that she was the harbinger of a new America in which whites were rapidly turning into a minority. Adapting to this new multicultural world would require an ongoing revision of our vocabulary an expanding lexicon of political correctness. The campus movement to create ‘safe spaces’ protected from ‘microaggressions’ and issue literary ‘trigger warnings’ found its ultimate echo in the Clinton campaign. Yet the demography-as-destiny vision rests on highly dubious assumptions. The US census projects that America will become a minority-majority country by 2044, when whites drop to below half the population. But that is only because Washington classifies Hispanics as non-whites, a revision that was made at the turn of the millennium. Until then, South Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans, for example, appeared separately on the census and could choose their race. But there is a wrinkle in the data, which belies the left’s minority triumphalism. More than half of America’s Hispanics consistently say they would prefer to call themselves white. This is not just an abstract battle over classification. It means that many of those who are defined as Hispanic are no likelier to be natural Democrats than ‘white’ people (another contestable designation). It explains why many Hispanics reacted no differently during the election than most whites to Donald Trump’s promised border wall. Mexican-Americans felt viscerally targeted by Trump. But there is little evidence to show that legal immigrants from other Spanish-speaking countries were any more outraged than any other voter. Why would the Democratic establishment bank more on their loyalty than it does on whites’? Resistance to such ethnic shoehorning might explain why a higher share of Hispanics voted for Donald Trump than had for Mitt Romney in 2012.
If we took Hispanics at their word and treated more than half of them as white, America would remain a majority white country until at least the 2050s and possibly indefinitely. Irish and Italian-Americans were only accepted into the mainstream after the Second World War. It took just a few decades for them to shift from being reliably ethnic Democrats to forming the breakaway core of Reagan Democrats that realigned American politics. There is no reason to suppose ‘Hispanics’ will behave differently. The same might be said of the latest ethnic category, Middle East and North Africans (MENAs), which the Obama administration pushed through just before it left office. At the stroke of a pen, the White House had conjured up ten million new non-whites. Again, the move betrayed a technocratic itch to channel people into corrals. Lebanese Christians and secular Turks may have less in common with Sudanese Muslims than with whites. Yet overnight they could benefit from the same affirmative action to enter university as other minorities. Hillary land was inured to how badly this game of favourites came across to non-college-educated whites, who still form America’s largest voting bloc, and will continue to do so for some time. A few weeks before the election Mrs Clinton described half of them as belonging in a ‘basket of deplorables’, whose racial prejudices would consign them to history’s trashcan. In her otherwise gracious concession speech, Mrs Clinton reeled off all the Americans who had contributed to her coalition. This included ‘people of all races and religions’, ‘immigrants’, ‘LGBT people’, and ‘people with disabilities’. Her list did not extend to the guy in the pick-up truck or the blue-collar labourer. They had been forgotten.
Failure to diagnose the reasons for Mrs Clinton’s defeat will only make Trump’s re-election more likely. In a seating piece for the New York Times after the election, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, called for an end to ‘identity liberalism’. The American left had ‘slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message,’ he wrote. Moreover, if the Democratic standard-bearer insisted on name-checking different groups at her rallies she had better mention everybody, otherwise those left out would feel resentful. Lilla also took issue with the liberal post mortem on Mrs Clinton’s defeat that laid the blame on a racially charged ‘whitelash’ against multicultural America a verdict that was at odds with the revealed motivations of many Trump voters. ‘This [postmortem] is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority,’ wrote Lilla. ‘It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps.’ As a professor of humanities in Manhattan, Lilla has impeccable liberal credentials. A colleague at Columbia nevertheless wrote a riposte to Lilla’s piece that branded him a white supremacist. Yet Lilla was on firm ground. Fascism is based on group rights. Liberal democracy is founded on individual rights.
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