The Democrats were doomed by demographics -- a hypothesis

In my previous posts on the election (see here, here, here, and the last part of this), I discussed various contributing factors to the election defeat.  All those things are real and need to be addressed.  But there remains another factor to consider, perhaps the most important one.

To begin with, a couple of disclaimers.  First, this post may disturb or upset some readers, but given the topic at hand, there is no way of avoiding that.  Second, I don't have enough hard supporting evidence to claim what I say here as a firm conclusion.  I believe it is true based on a few poll results (though not many, since if I'm right, most people would not tell the truth about this issue even to anonymous pollsters), voting patterns, analogy with parallel developments in Europe, and certain universal features of human nature.  This post should be taken as a hypothesis.  But if I'm right, it will be a growing issue in federal elections going forward.  Finally, I'm dealing with it purely from the pragmatic standpoint of winning and losing elections.  Whether it's right or wrong for voters to feel the way I believe they do is irrelevant to this specific discussion, so I'm not going to get into that question.

Many have noted the oddity that, in keeping with the post-Dobbs pattern, abortion rights won in almost every state where they were on the ballot -- yet many of those same states also voted for Trump and for other Republican politicians who oppose abortion.  One might also add that several red states passed worker-friendly measures such as a higher minimum wage, while still voting for Trump.  On one level we shouldn't be surprised at such outcomes.  When voting for an initiative on issue X, you vote solely based on how you feel about that one issue.  But when voting for an officeholder, you may also vote for a candidate who opposes your views on issue X if that candidate shares your views on issue Z, if you believe Z to be more important than X.  Almost always, both candidates will share your views on some issues and not others, so you vote based on which issues are more important to you.  Most Americans favor abortion rights and liberal economic policies, and liberal policies on many other things as well.  But many who feel that way also voted for Trump because they like what he says about something else which is more important to them.

The question is what that "something else" is.  As blogger Annie said in a comment exchange just after the election, "abortion was more than just an issue: it was one issue in the degradation and devaluation of women -- a core concern.  Something is totally out of whack."  This is especially striking since so many women, though not quite a majority, voted for Trump.  And given that the reason for Trump's win wasn't growth in his support but a drop in Democratic turnout compared to 2020, even voters who didn't want to vote for him, even women, were not as motivated to rise up and defeat him as the mass support for that core concern led many (including me) to expect.

The issue that trumped abortion rights, labor rights, and pretty much everything else, must be an absolutely primal, existential concern, for women as much as for men.  I believe that that issue was related to immigration, partly because this would explain why this election didn't follow the same pattern of huge swings to Democrats that we saw in elections since Dobbs -- immigration is a federal responsibility, so it impacts only national elections, not state or local ones.  But the real issue wasn't immigration as such, but a closely-linked problem for which immigration serves as a proxy.

One of the most toxic effects of political correctness (an antecedent of today's woke-ism) has been to make certain topics undiscussable and certain views unspeakable.  To voice such views, or even to raise such a topic, is to place oneself outside the pale of acceptable discourse -- to be name-called, shouted down, ostracized, possibly unemployable.  It has become established that certain things simply cannot be talked about.  This means that, like an iceberg moving mostly below the waterline, a profound popular concern can remain undetected by public discourse, polls, etc, yet have a massive impact when the time comes to vote.

So here it is:

For some time now it has been common on the left to assert that in some number of years, white people in the US will become a minority, due to non-white immigration and population growth (right-wingers call this "the Great Replacement") -- and that this is something to be celebrated.  And there's no denying that over the last few decades, there have been substantial and very visible changes in the demographic character of the country.  The Spanish language has become pervasive, while other foreign languages are heard more than ever before in the major urban centers.  Islam, once almost unknown here, is a growing presence in some areas, and is beginning to show some of the same arrogance, menace, and violence as it displays in Europe.  And the population is clearly far more racially diverse than it was in, say, 1970.

The American people have never been consulted about whether they wanted these changes to happen.  They were simply allowed to happen, under both parties, and the financial and political elites assumed that opposition would be minimal, or could at least be bullied into silence.  But silencing people does not change their minds.  Very often, it makes them angry and more determined to push back.  Certainly it precludes honest debate.

Anxiety or objections about such demographic change should not be regarded as "racist".  There is probably no country on this planet where the existing ethnic or cultural majority would tolerate being reduced to a minority, especially by immigration of other populations who do not even have roots in the country.  Some countries, such as Japan and South Korea, have never accepted immigration beyond absolutely trivial numbers, despite the standard arguments for doing so -- labor shortages, an aging population -- applying even more strongly there than in the US.  Preserving the ethnic and cultural character of the country outweighs all other considerations.

We have been seeing the issue develop in western Europe for decades now.  Nations with very distinct historic cultures, with no history of high immigration from outside Europe, have in the last half-century or so been subject to such immigration, on a substantial scale, mostly from the Islamic world and Africa.  Large areas of major cities, which used to be ethnically and culturally homogenous, now feel almost alien to their indigenous inhabitants, with a strong presence of languages and religious practices previously unknown there.  Islamist hatred of gays and Jews is a growing problem in what are otherwise very liberal societies.  And there has been a political reaction.  European voters are increasingly favoring so-called "far-right" parties (most of which are actually to the left of US Democrats on most issues other than culture and immigration), because those parties are the only ones promising to oppose the unwanted changes in the character and culture of those countries.  The British want Britain to stop becoming less British, the Italians want Italy to stop becoming less Italian, and so on.  It's an existential, almost primordial feeling, perhaps never fully explicitly articulated even in the privacy of a voter's own mind.  But it's there.  And ultimately it trumps other concerns, even economic ones.

It would be foolish to believe that this would not eventually happen in the US as well.  Unlike Europe, we've had high immigration for most of our history, but it mostly came from Europe -- and even there, large influxes of groups who were perceived as "too different" at the time often provoked opposition and even violence, though the descendants of those groups are now fully assimilated and part of the majority (note that the same is happening with those Hispanic voters whose families have been in the US the longest, which is why they increasingly vote the same way as the general white population, which they are now part of).  In the last few decades immigration has become more global in origin, more racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse, and larger in scale.

This is why arguments based on the demonstrable economic benefits of immigration, the relatively low crime rates among legal immigrants, and so forth, don't move the needle at all.  They don't touch on the real, most fundamental reason why people feel so uneasy about the level of immigration we have -- the fact that it's visibly changing the character of the country.  Even most voters who are hostile to immigration won't say that part out loud.  It's a "forbidden" attitude.  But it's there.

(As an aside, we need to stop calling the US a "nation of immigrants".  It isn't.  The status of being an immigrant is not inherited.  I was born here; I am not an immigrant, even though my parents were.)

It may be objected that most people seem to get along with neighbors and co-workers they know personally who are ethnically different.  This is true, but irrelevant.  People can get along fine with individuals of different origins and culture than themselves, yet still be profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of equally different people outnumbering them nationwide and eventually superseding them in cultural and political dominance.

On the left, the standard reaction to everything I've said here will be to stick one's fingers in one's ears and chant "racism racism racism" over and over -- the most counter-productive response possible.  Slapping a label on an argument does not refute it.  Slapping a label on a feeling does not make people stop feeling it.  And as I said above, name-calling people into silence does not change their minds.  It makes them angry and prevents honest discussion.

And silencing discussion is especially dangerous in this case, because the feeling of being faced with an existential threat to something as viscerally important as the very ethnic and cultural character of one's country operates on a sub-logical and perhaps not even fully conscious level -- as do the voting decisions that stem from it.  Yet even so, it overwhelms all the arguments the left thinks of as trump cards.  "If we lose abortion rights, that will be terrible, but we can probably get them back later.  If we lose economic prosperity, that will be terrible, but we can probably get it back later.  If we lose Social Security and Medicare, that will be terrible, but we can probably get them back later.  Even if we lose some aspects of freedom and democracy, that will be terrible, but we can probably get them back later.  But if we actually lose the demographic majority in this country, we will never get that back."  I don't believe most voters are consciously thinking those things.  But I believe they are feeling them, even if most of them won't quite admit it to themselves.

To put it bluntly, it is ludicrous to imagine that this kind of massive shift in the ethnic composition of the population, in any country with a strong existing sense of identity, would fail to provoke a devastating nativist backlash.  The backlash is under way in plain sight in Europe.  And it's getting started here.  Given the highly visible changes in the US cultural environment, and open talk of whites becoming a minority nationally in less than a generation, it's astonishing that this didn't become the explicit number-one issue in US politics years ago.

Trump became a messianic figure for whom tens of millions vote, and whom other tens of millions will not vote against even if they can't stomach voting for him, because he tapped into those primordial feelings in a way no other major politician, right or left, has done.  It's debatable how many people would actually want mass deportation of illegals once the full implications became clear, or how much they would want legal immigration reduced once they understood the likely economic effects.  But they know what they don't want.  The bottom line is that the status quo -- millions of illegals living permanently in the US while everybody just puts up with it regardless of the law, legal immigration at a rate higher than the country can easily assimilate, and the growing intrusion of alien languages and cultures and the Islamic religion upon mainstream American life -- is intolerable and cannot continue.  They know Trump won't keep all his promises -- he didn't last time.  But he might do something to turn that status quo around.  None of the other options put before them, from Jeb Bush to Kamala Harris, would have.

The majority of Americans want this country to stay culturally pretty much the way it is -- overwhelmingly English-speaking, with basically the existing standards of interpersonal behavior, and with a kind of neutered, unobtrusive Christianity as the only significant religion.  And, yes, I believe most white Americans -- even most liberal, abortion-supporting, union-friendly white Americans, who voted for Obama and would be fine with their son or daughter marrying somebody of a different race -- would prefer, in their heart of hearts, that the country remain majority-white.  You can call them all the names you like for feeling that way.  It won't stop them from feeling that way, and it won't stop them from voting on the basis of it, when push comes to shove.

Trump is far from being an ideal agent to embody those feelings.  He is a stupid, corrupt, selfish, incompetent, childish, cruel, disgusting man.  His appeal is so crudely bigoted that he repels many who are disturbed about the country's changing ethnic picture but don't want to admit to themselves the true nature of their own concerns.  After he had held power for four years, enough people simply couldn't stomach any more of him that he was voted out.  By this year, those memories had faded enough for the primal anxieties about the changing character of the country to bring him back into office.  He is 78 now; in a few years, he will pass from the scene.  But he has shown that it's possible to tap into those primal anxieties and win.  In 2028 or soon thereafter, some other candidate will do the same -- one more polished than Trump, more intelligent, more articulate, less repulsive, not muddying the waters with attacks on abortion rights or the social safety net or democratic norms.  He or she may even be a Democrat.

If I'm right, this issue will not go away.  If the demographic changes continue as they have, it will keep growing in importance and urgency.  How the left should deal with this, I don't know.  But I believe it was a big -- perhaps the biggest -- factor in the election defeat.  And we need, at the least, to be able to talk about it honestly.