The Wall Street Journal has published an unsigned editorial, praising President Bush for finding solutions where there are not apparent problems. [The Pre-Emption Presidency, Jan. 20]. They also stopped to give the finger (implicitly) to VDARE.com, and Steve Sailer:
"There's another reality Mr. Bush is facing up to and it's called the Hispanic vote. Paleocons and nativists may think the key GOP demographic is uneducated whites. But it's hard to imagine a majority Republican future without at least being competitive among Hispanics. In this sense, the guest-worker proposal isn't just an exercise in economic sanity but also in long-term party building on a par with FDR's capture of the black vote."
"Uneducated whites." Thanks a lot, guys. I suppose they mean uneducated by comparison with the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. But really, what kind of a thing is that to say?
There's a simple arithmetical point here: the WSJ-level "educated" are, let us say, the top 2% of the population. They're outnumbered when it comes to voting, by the other 98%. If the Republican Party doesn't appeal to the "uneducated" it will be about as big as the Green Party.
Perhaps the uneducated stereotype they're talking about is the one that Sam Francis wrote about in 2000: "Revolt of the 300-Pound Beefy Guys"
'Buchanan crowds don't look like Republican crowds,' [David] Brooks sneered. 'There are none of those Chamber of Commerce officers in golf shirts and tasselled loafers. Instead, Buchanan draws the beefy, 300-pound guys with tattoos up their arms and sleeveless T-shirts. He draws the guys with shaggy biker beards and the Teamsters who park their rigs in the lot and get hoarse shouting, "Go, Pat, go!" It may be hard to classify exactly which political category these people belong to, but they are certainly not Republicans. ["Buchanan Feeds Class War in the Information Age" David Brooks, LA Times, Oct 31, 1999]
Actually, it's not so hard to classify which political category such people belong to. They're called 'Democrats,' and the contempt for them that our Mr. Brooks exudes helps explain why they never show up in the crowds around other Republican candidates.
Jeremy Lott has an article about Jayson Blair in the American Spectator Online:
JAYSON BLAIR GREW UP IN FAIRFAX COUNTY, Virginia, in a much more upscale neighborhood than this Fairfax-based reviewer can afford. His father was a bigshot at the Smithsonian and his mother a local schoolteacher. The family was heavily involved in a local church.
This is something I hadn't noticed, although it was mentioned during the scandal; when Blair was given this job, he had two factors going for him, his privileged background, and his race.
Of course, somewhere, as I pointed out, there's some would-be Jimmy Olson somewhere, who didn't have either of these advantages.
"A Tale of Two States: America's future is either Texas or California"—another of my explorations of the red-blue divide—is now available to electronic subscribers to The American Conservative in the upcoming February 14, 2005 issue. An excerpt:
Now that
California is a bastion of liberalism, having given the
Democratic Presidential candidates victory margins of 10
to 13 points in each of the last four elections, it's
easy to forget that Republican hopefuls carried the
state nine times out of ten from 1952 up through 1988...
In contrast, Texas ... voted Democratic in four out of
five elections as recently as 1960 through 1976. Yet, it
has gone Republican the last seven times...
In reality, the Electoral College divide grows out of
discordances over the fundamentals of social life:
marriage and
children. In 2004, Bush carried the 19 states with
the highest expected lifetime fertility among
non-Hispanic white women (with Texas at 1.93 babies to
California's 1.65). Even more strikingly, he won the 25
states where white women are married the most number of
years on average between 18 and 44 (15.2 years in Texas
to 12.5 years in California),
Why the correlations? Consider how differently one
well-known issue can seem depending on your family
structure: Should the government let the Boy Scouts ban
gay men from becoming scoutmasters? To voters who are
single, or married but childless, or have only
daughters, this often appears as a purely abstract
question of justice: of course, everybody should be
guaranteed equal opportunity to be a scoutmaster. Yet,
to citizens with sons, a ban may seem like a common
sense precaution against temptation: of course,
homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to lead their boys into
the woods overnight.
Both the marriage and fertility factors are likely tied
to another statistic that correlates remarkably well
with the 2004 voting: Bush won the 26 states with the
least inflation in housing prices between 1980 and
2004... In Texas, where Republicans have grown in
strength over the decades, housing prices are up only 89
percent since 1980, the second lowest growth rate in the
country...
While the arrow
of causality no doubt points in multiple directions,
it's plausible that the price of a house with a yard can
sometimes make the difference between how far down the
path young adults go toward marriage, children, and
voting Republican.
In turn, the sizable gap between home prices in
expensive blue and expansive red America appears rooted
in their dissimilar landscapes, as vividly illustrated
by coastal California and sprawling Texas...
Want to read the rest? Become a subscriber. [VDARE note: even though Amcon's website doesn't link to VDARE.COM!]
