That was followed up this week by a report in the Wall Street Journal discussing the fact that the overwhelming majority of the growth in the United States population is coming from – and will continue to come from – minorities, particularly Hispanics and blacks. At the current rate, whites will be a minority in the United States soon after 2040.
The ramifications from that change could be significant. How? Minorities have higher crime rates, higher welfare rates, higher dropout rates, higher unemployment rates, more child poverty, lower literacy rates and more unwed mothers than whites. To the degree that those elevated numbers become the norm, that is problem.
One narrative from this data might suggest that the prospect of whites being a minority has great dangers in terms of the continued economic and social well being of the United States. That is not the narrative I would posit however. Rather, I would suggest that the color of the skin of the majority of the American population today or in 2040 is of no consequence.
While it is beyond dispute that whites have been behind the majority of the advances of the last two centuries, the truth of the matter is that it had nothing to do with their DNA and everything to do with America’s entrepreneurial spirit, something that was denied for 150 years to many minorities. From Elisha Otis to Charles Goodyear to Kemmons Wilson to Bill Gates, it was the free market that allowed these men and many others to transform the world. Importantly, free markets can only thrive within a political framework of individual liberty and private property, and those laws don’t care about race.
The problem with the future of America is not that minorities will eventually be the majority, but rather that anti-capitalist liberals may eventually be the majority. Put another way, the problem for America’s future is not that there are too many minorities, but rather too many minorities may end up as liberals.
The challenge for those who are concerned with the future of the United States, is not to fret over demographic shifts, but instead to attract the coming majority of blacks, Hispanics and Asians to the conservative position.
Today we have a country that is fundamentally falling apart. The government takes too much money from the citizens yet still spends even more. One third of all income comes from that government. Almost half of the population pays no income tax. Government employee unions have a death grip on state and city finances while teacher’s unions have destroyed the public education system. The policies that facilitated most of these problems (as well as many of the challenges listed above that so negatively affect many minority communities) found their genesis in the Democratic Party: Welfare, government employee unions, the 17th Amendment, etc.
Unfortunately for America, today a majority of minorities consider themselves Democrats, or at least vote that way. Biased media, a liberal judiciary, brainwashing schools and pandering politicians… the reasons behind why they do is unimportant. What is important however (to the future prosperity of the country) is that conservatives figure out how to reach out to minorities and persuade them that it is in their best interests, and indeed those of their families, their communities and the county, that they become conservatives and vote that way. To put that another way, the GOP must demonstrate to minority voters that the solutions to the problems detailed above are not to be found in more Democrat big government programs, but rather in traditional conservative governance based on free markets and individual liberty coupled with individual responsibility and family cohesion. Many in the GOP say that minorities should vote for them simply because polls suggest that they share many conservative values. While that may make some sense, it has not proven to be a successful strategy in terms of attracting votes, and everyone knows what Einstein said about doing the same thing and expecting different results.
If the GOP hopes to retain a voice in American politics it will have to do more to attract minorities. (Although I’m somewhat using the GOP interchangeably here with conservatives, it is actually conservatives who need to act, either through the GOP or through the Tea Parties if the GOP doesn’t have the stomach.) That does not mean changing or compromising conservative values, but rather finding ways of communicating to minorities that conservative ideas are the recipe for success today just as they have been for the last 200 years.
Make no mistake, this is an uphill battle. As long as unions are able to coerce hundreds of millions of dollars out of employee’s paychecks every year and spend those dollars to vilify Republicans and lie about Democrat success, this will be a struggle. Add to that the left leaning mainstream media and it’s going to be a very tough road. Nonetheless the fact remains, if conservatives do not act, all hope is lost.
The reality is that the future of the country has a darker tinge to it and the $64,000 question is, is the GOP going to do what is necessary to make sure that that future majority appreciates and supports the conservative foundations that created an Exceptional America or will it simply allow the country to implode under the weight of a bloated, smothering insolvent federal government that abandoned Constitutional principals decades ago. With ramparts manned by the likes of Herman Cain, Marco Rubio, and Thomas Sowell there just might be a chance.
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