This week's featured article is "Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP?" by Stephanie Slade.
This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.
Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses
The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Holy Miami-Dade, Batman," tweeted then–Politico reporter Tim Alberta on election night in 2020. Early returns had started rolling in, and the numbers from South Florida were not what people were expecting. President Donald Trump was dramatically exceeding his 2016 totals in the county's majority-Hispanic precincts.
Hillary Clinton had carried Miami-Dade by almost 30 percentage points four years earlier; Joe Biden took it by a mere seven percentage points en route to losing the state. "It was a bloodbath," one former Democratic Party official would tell The Washington Post.
Trump's strong showing in Miami-Dade was an indication that something strange was happening with partisan affiliations. Like most ethnic minorities, Hispanic Americans have long been viewed as a loyal Democratic constituency. But in recent years, that trend has begun to abate.
Back in 2002, journalist John B. Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that "forecast the dawn of a new progressive era" powered by the organic growth of left-leaning demographic groups, including college-educated professionals and immigrants.
Now the pair have a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt and Co.), that sounds the alarm about "the cultural insularity and arrogance" driving blue-collar voters away from their party.
"We didn't anticipate the extent to which cultural liberalism might segue into cultural radicalism," Teixeira told The Wall Street Journal in 2022, "and the extent to which that view, particularly as driven by younger cohorts, would wind up imprinting itself on the entire infrastructure in and around the Democratic Party."
Among close political observers, the sense that the major parties are undergoing a major realignment has become pervasive. Whereas the GOP once was popularly associated with country club members and other relatively wealthy, highly educated constituents, the party is increasingly being referred to as the natural home of America's "multiethnic working class." The distinction is less about income, at least for now, and more about education: In 2020, Biden won handily among voters with a college degree, while Trump edged him out among those without one.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party—once associated with labor unions and the relatively less well-off—is struggling with parts of its former base. A staggering two-thirds of white voters who didn't graduate from college went for Manhattanite Trump over Scranton-born Biden. The former vice president did earn the support of seven in 10 nonwhite voters, a respectable showing, but also an underperformance compared to Clinton's numbers in 2016 and Barack Obama's before that. Miami-Dade was not the only place where people of color swung toward Trump on the margins.
These shifts have caught the attention of political commentators and operatives of all stripes. Some, like Judis and Teixeira on the left, hope Democrats can stem their losses by moving to the middle on social issues. Others, including members of the "New Right," believe Republicans can expand their gains by moving leftward on economics. Hardly anyone seems to think there's a place for a principled defense of free markets and free trade.
If the parties are truly realigning, what does it mean for the future of American politics—and where does that leave libertarians?
In terms of pure electoral math, "nonwhites and working-class whites combine for a more than two-to-one advantage over whites with a college degree," Patrick Ruffini writes in Party of the People (Simon & Schuster). "In recent years, all the energy and growth in the Republican Party has come from this multiracial populist coalition."
Ruffini, a GOP pollster, is lauding the same phenomenon in his book that Judis and Teixeira are lamenting in theirs: Working-class whites have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, while ethnic minorities are increasingly up for grabs. True, highly educated whites have swung toward the Democrats during the same period—and in 2020, that was enough to offset Biden's losses with nonwhite voters and deliver him to the White House. But because the share of Americans with a college degree is not likely to increase much more than it already has, this is questionable as a long-term strategy.
Given these changes, it has become fashionable on the right to demand that the Republican Party shed what is disparagingly referred to as its "free market fundamentalism"—the deregulation and international trade that the GOP championed for decades, in words if not in deeds. A whole ecosystem of nationalist-populist institutions, from think tanks to media platforms, has sprung up to push Republicans to embrace left-wing economics, which can include support for everything from tariffs to pro-labor regulations to industrial policy to targeted antitrust enforcement against disfavored companies.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) offered an example of this perspective in The American Conservative in June 2023. "We are living through a historic inflection point—the passing of a decades-long economic obsession with maximized efficiency and unqualified free trade," he wrote. "It's time to revive the American System," that is, "the use of public policy to support domestic manufacturing and develop emerging industries."
Some members of the New Right go even further, calling, in the most extreme cases, for an "American Caesar" strong enough to purge the land of its libertarian elements and forcibly reorient society to the common good. But even the more temperate voices generally see the idea of limited government as passé.
Advocates of such a turn often point to a widely circulated graph produced by the political scientist Lee Drutman after the 2016 election. It maps the electorate along two axes: economic left vs. right (along the horizontal) and social left vs. right (along the vertical). The upper right quadrant depicts consistent conservatives—those whose survey results are both socially and economically conservative, the vast majority of whom supported Donald Trump. The lower left quadrant depicts the inverse constituency, consistent progressives, the vast majority of whom supported Hillary Clinton. The lower right quadrant is allegedly for libertarians: economically conservative and socially liberal.
Whether that quadrant does a good job of actually capturing libertarians is a different question. Some of the social issues it uses to separate left from right are items that might indeed help distinguish between conservatives and libertarians, such as support for gay marriage and opposition to a Muslim ban. But others are items on which libertarians are not all in agreement with each other, such as whether abortion should be legal or whether illegal immigrants are good for the country. And on several—such as whether black Americans should receive special favors—you would expect libertarians, who tend to believe strongly in equality before the law, to come down on the "socially conservative" side. Taken together, this raises the possibility that quite a few self-identifying libertarians were coded as conservatives.
The economic issues index also is not perfect: Thanks to corporate welfare, a free marketeer might well agree with the supposedly progressive statement that our economic system is biased to favor the wealthy, for instance.
But the chattering classes have focused their attention on the upper left quadrant: people labeled socially conservative and economically progressive, sometimes referred to as the "populist" cohort. When Rubio et al. call on the GOP to move left economically, it is these voters they want to reach. Indeed, among those who flipped from supporting Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016, populists were overrepresented. It's natural to infer that Trump's willingness to stray from free market orthodoxy—his trade protectionism, for example—was the reason.
But does support for government intervention in the economy really deserve credit for landing our 45th president in the White House? Perhaps not. Look again at the four quadrants: The graph depicts a clear positive correlation between social and economic conservatism, and most people who voted for Trump also said they support free markets and free trade.
Both Party of the People and Where Have All the Democrats Gone? suggest it's social issues that are driving the realignment. In other words, working-class voters didn't rush into the arms of Trump because they saw him as an economic populist; they fled the Democratic Party because they saw it as a bunch of cultural radicals. It's the obsession with stating your pronouns and the perception that Democrats are soft on crime, not the economy, stupid.
"You're going to tell all white people in this country they have white privilege and we're a white-supremacist society?" Teixeira told the Journal. "And that we're all guilty of microaggressions every day in every way? Not only is this substantively wrong in my opinion, but as politics it's batshit crazy. You can't win if people think that's where you're coming from."
Ruffini concurs. Swing voters "are hardly New Right ideologues, espousing a combination of hard-left economic views and hard-right cultural views," he writes. "The key point about these voters is that they are only slightly off-center in their views on either dimension, hardly good recruits for a new ideological vanguard." Nonetheless, of the two, he believes "cultural questions are more and more central to how people vote these days."
This is reflected in a poll of Trump supporters commissioned by the Ethics and Public Policy Center just after the 2020 election. That survey did not find respondents consistently taking the New Right position. On some economic questions, such as whether trade with other countries helps or hurts America, they were split. On others, they expressed traditional free market views, such as that "government doesn't create wealth; people and businesses do." They strongly favored securing the southern border but were somewhat less sure how to handle those illegal immigrants who are already here. More than half believed that "climate change is real but science and technology developed by the private sector and government can help make its effects less severe," a refreshingly middle-of-the-road stance.
When it came to cultural grievances, however, the poll found overwhelming agreement: 89 percent of respondents believed that "Christianity is under attack in America today," 90 percent fretted that "Americans are losing faith in the ideas that make our country great," 92 percent thought that "the mainstream media today is just a part of the Democratic Party," and 87 percent worried that "discrimination against whites will increase a lot in the next few years."
Note that the moral questions of yesteryear, such as abortion and school prayer, are no longer central. Instead, GOP voters appear to be united around issues of culture and identity.
When people on the left discuss how on Earth Donald Trump managed to get elected president, they tend to assume that racial resentment was at work. When people on the right tackle the same question, they usually insist it was an uprising by blue-collar voters who felt "left behind" by our modern, globalized economy.
In The Overlooked Americans (Basic Books), Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, casts doubt on both those explanations. Her conclusion is that rural Americans who gave their votes to Trump "supported him for a wide range of reasons that had nothing to do with economic grievance or racism."
Currid-Halkett's research shows that on metrics from median income to homeownership to unemployment, rural America is actually doing quite well—especially compared to the prevailing narrative. By one measure, income inequality was higher in urban counties than in rural ones in 2019.
"For the most part, the people I interviewed also didn't feel particularly left behind," she writes. "As a man from Missouri who asked to remain anonymous remarked, 'The truth is, Elizabeth, we don't feel left behind. We want to be left alone.' He meant by the government and the media, which he felt encroached on his way of life." Later in the book, she summarizes the position of rural Americans as follows: "They don't want to feel looked down upon because of their lack of education or their belief in God….They don't want to be canceled for inadvertently saying something 'unwoke.'"
These voters were clearly turned off by the behavior of Democratic elites rather than turned on by Trump's economic agenda. Similarly, a distaste for white Christian identity politics, not a strange new predilection for left-wing economics, may be what's pushing highly educated voters away from the GOP.
"It used to be fashionable for country-club Republicans in [wealthy suburban communities] to say that they were 'fiscally conservative and socially moderate,'" Ruffini writes. "Now most of the rank-and-file voters who describe themselves this way have another name: Democrats."
Those who saw nonwhite voters as a permanent Democratic constituency miscalculated on a number of points. For one thing, they failed to appreciate that black and Hispanic Democrats were always more conservative on social issues than their white peers within the party. "Many Black voters hold socially conservative positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues consistent with their higher levels of religiosity," Ruffini writes. They have historically voted blue despite, not because of, the party's cultural stances.
For another thing, America is extremely good at assimilating immigrants into the larger culture. Research from the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh finds that second- and third-generation Americans are hardly distinguishable, politically and ideologically, from those whose families have been here longer. This is one of the reasons the so-called great replacement theory advanced by right-wingers such as Tucker Carlson was always so suspect: Even if the Democratic Party were trying to "import" left-leaning voters from developing countries, it would have no way of keeping them on the left.
"When a group moves from the margins and into the mainstream of American life," Ruffini writes, "history provides ample proof that their politics change to match their newfound social station. After World War II, the children of nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States moved to the suburbs, married across ethnic lines, went to college, and saw their economic fortunes rise. In doing so, they joined a Republican Party many of them had formerly shunned."
The same thing is happening today. Ruffini estimates that, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanics shifted 19 points, African Americans shifted 11 points, and Asian Americans shifted 5 points toward the GOP.
It's not clear Republicans need to embrace leftist economics to win over these groups. Immigrants are highly entrepreneurial, starting their own businesses at a significantly higher rate than does the native-born population. And Hispanics have seen particularly fast-paced income growth in recent years. "They are making it in America," Ruffini writes.
This has the potential to make such constituencies more receptive to free market messages. Party of the People includes an interview with Oscar Rosa, a Texas politico from one of the heavily Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande that swung toward Trump in 2020. "Today, Rosa sees a new wave of Republicans," Ruffini explains. "They are younger and hungrier, able to see a way out of the poverty of their parents' and grandparents' generations."
"The son who's working away at the oil rigs," Rosa said, "who's making $150,000 but only keeping $100,000 after taxes, is like, I'm a freaking Republican. I am a Republican. I don't want to pay taxes."
One poll of Texas Hispanics found that their No. 1 problem with the Democratic Party was that it "supports government welfare handouts for people who don't work." Another poll found that majorities of both Hispanic Americans and working-class Americans believe that "most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard." (In contrast, 88 percent of strong progressives thought that "hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people.")
The country as a whole is economically conservative in some important ways. A 2023 survey from the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University found that a majority of registered voters think the U.S. government is spending too much money, and an even larger majority thinks it has taken on too much debt. Six in 10 say they would support a budget freeze.
Several New Right thinkers have recently become discouraged that more Republicans don't seem to be in a rush to tack left economically. In August, the Catholic journalist Sohrab Ahmari declared at Newsweek, "I Was Wrong: The GOP Will Never Be the Party of the Working Class."
"For half a decade following the rise of Donald Trump," he wrote, "I took a leading part in the effort to bring about a populist GOP." But since "the Republican Party remains, incorrigibly, a vehicle for the wealthy," he said, "I'm increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the Left—figures like Sens. Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who…are willing to tackle the corporate hegemony and Wall Street domination that make daily life all but unlivable for the asset-less many."
Last February, political scientist Gladden Pappin (who was since installed as president of the Hungarian government's foreign policy research institute) published a long article at American Affairs titled "Requiem for the Realignment." Much like Ahmari, his complaint was that "neither conservatives at the Heritage Foundation nor 'based MAGA' advocates online have articulated a positive governing agenda that would use the power of the state to bolster the national industrial economy and support the American family." Pappin attributed Republicans' mediocre showing in the 2022 midterm elections to their reflexive invocation of Reagan-era talking points.
To the extent the GOP is hewing to the old playbook, though, it's likely because its base still largely supports economic freedom. Contra Ahmari, it's not just the donor class: According to a recent Gallup survey, 78 percent of Republicans think government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, compared to just 18 percent who think government should do more to solve our country's problems. Among Democrats, those numbers are reversed—and at this supposed moment of realignment, the two parties are further apart on that question than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
Alas, it's not all good news. Americans may favor cutting government in theory, but once programs get going, they're damnably hard to eliminate in practice. Ruffini cautions that proposals to reform Social Security and Medicare are unpopular, especially among moderate swing-voter demographics. "The country may well need to reform entitlements to ensure their fiscal solvency," he writes, "but there are substantial political costs for Republicans who try to go it alone. Until and unless a bipartisan solution avails itself, Republicans would be wise to tread lightly."
Those political costs are real. A 2021 analysis by the pseudonymous blogger Xenocrypt found that many of the voters who fall into the upper-left (socially conservative, fiscally progressive) quadrant of Drutman's graph are only there because they don't want to see Social Security and Medicare benefits touched. Remove those two issues and an awful lot of supposed populists look like run-of-the-mill pro-market conservatives. No wonder so few Republican lawmakers are willing to die on the hill of entitlement reform.
Henry Olsen, a conservative Washington Post columnist who has more than earned his reputation as a shrewd observer of global politics, takes an even stronger view. Republicans "can't be the party of tax cuts to the exclusion of government spending," he says. "They don't have to be the protectionist party. But they do have to be the party that stops treating free trade as religious doctrine. And if the party doesn't want to do that, it will eventually find itself on the outs with its voters."
He doesn't think the GOP should reject markets entirely or "become indistinguishable from the Democrats," Olsen says. But he supports far more economic intervention than a libertarian would like. He thinks government has a responsibility to keep our food and drugs safe, to make sure workers aren't being exploited by employers, and to prevent "industry concentration" and the "unfair competition" that results. "A conservatism that wants to say 'no, no, no' to all of that," he concludes, "is a conservatism that wants to continually be a minority, and wants the country to move even further left than would otherwise be the case, because it forfeits the opportunity to define the center."
Recent elections do suggest a realignment is occurring, with more-educated voters increasingly identifying as Democrats and less-educated voters increasingly identifying as Republicans. Judis, Teixeira, and their allies hope the Democratic Party will adapt by moderating its cultural stances. Olsen and his allies hope the GOP will be more willing to compromise on economics. The result, as the ideological center of gravity on both sides shifts toward the middle, is that the major parties could start to look more and more alike.
This, in fact, is what the "median voter theorem" suggests should have been happening all along. That's the idea from political science and public choice economics that says, in essence, that elections will be won by whichever candidate is closer to the average member of the electorate—and that, as a result, candidates will tend to converge toward the center.
It's great if that means less mindless woke overreach by the left. But is there hope for economic freedom in such a future?
Libertarians needn't despair just yet. There may be tough times ahead for advocates of free minds and free markets, but then, what's new? We can take some solace in the knowledge that, while the median voter theorem might seem to have logic on its side, the reality has never been quite what the model would predict.
Part of the reason is that a major party that actually moves to the middle opens itself up to a third-party challenge from the outside flank. Another part is that it's hard to get people excited about milquetoast centrism. As Olsen himself put it in a recent column, "Historically, American voters have been attracted to parties and political figures with strong agendas and stronger personalities." They want "bold, unmistakable colors," to borrow President Ronald Reagan's metaphor, not "pastel shades."
A candidate with the conscience of his convictions who knows how to connect with voters can be a powerful force. At the same time, most regular Americans are not wedded to one ideological position, especially when it comes to complex economic policy questions: Their intuitions are often self-contradictory, and exposure to more information (like how much a proposed government program would actually cost!) can move the needle quite a lot.
All of which suggests that efforts at persuasion are not futile. We've already seen that Hispanic voters and other former Democratic constituencies exhibit an openness to free market ideas. The notion that left-wing positions are always better for working-class Americans is a gross oversimplification, after all. Just ask the many energy-sector employees in places like Louisiana and Texas how they feel about the Democratic Party's environmental agenda.
If we care about America's future, giving up on fiscal sanity is simply not an option. The entitlement system is going broke, whether or not it's politically popular to do something about it. Social Security and health insurance programs such as Medicare account for nearly half the federal budget, and as the ranks of retirees swell, they will consume an ever larger share. Debt service—that is, paying interest on the trillions of dollars Washington borrowed to finance its previous overspending—has exploded as interest rates have risen in the last couple of years. These problems are structural, and they will sink our economy eventually if they're not addressed.
Dismissive as he may be of libertarianism, Olsen understands this and has some ideas. "My view is that what the Republican Party needs to do is treat the budgetary crisis as a moral question as much as a political question," he says. "In large part, we have a deficit because we've been giving money, both through the tax code and through expenditures, to people who don't need it."
Olsen thinks the path forward is to eliminate tax breaks and subsidies that go to the rich. First and foremost, that means implementing a means test for entitlement programs: People bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement income neither need nor deserve the same Social Security benefits as those who are just scraping by, he says. But it would also involve reforms like doing away with the tax break enjoyed by elite university endowments and ending farm subsidies. (Hilariously, "common-good conservative" Rubio, by insisting on handouts for his pals in the sugar industry, is a major obstacle on that last item.)
"I would never use the word austerity," Olsen says. "You're talking about a question of morals. The welfare state exists in theory to help people who need it overcome obstacles they can't bear on their own. The welfare state in practice—particularly because, for the left, the welfare state is meant to socialize life—gives money willy-nilly to people who need it or don't need it." That has to change, as libertarians and blue-collar voters alike should be able to agree. And approaching the budget with that goal in mind, Olsen says, "could go a long way toward closing the deficit."
An enduring tension in politics, Ruffini writes, is that "to get to 51 percent, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense." Yet there's no reason working-class and nonwhite Americans have to be at odds with those who strongly favor economic liberty. "When people hear about Republicans as a working-class party, they might assume this means an embrace of left-wing ideas about government spending, taxation, and regulation," he writes. "But the new Republican voters are not demanding this, and the current working-class realignment is happening under the umbrella of a pro-capitalist" GOP.
The Democratic Party has driven away droves of swing voters with its radicalism. The Republican Party has a choice about how to try to keep them. It can double down on the culture war, inflaming political tensions further. Or it can appeal to their aspirations; to their support for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes; and to the widely held belief that America is, and should remain, a place where people get ahead by working hard, not by looking to the state to solve their problems.
The second option is not only healthier for our country. Done well, it might just be smart politics.
The post Can Free Markets Win Votes in the New GOP? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An investigation by the University of Washington found that "race was used as a substantial factor in the selection of the final candidate and the hiring process" of a professor by the school's psychology department, violating a university executive order that bans the consideration of race in hiring. The report found that a white applicant was ranked No. 1 among 84 applicants for the tenure-track position but faculty members chose to extend a job offer to the No. 3-ranked candidate, who is black. The No. 2-ranked candidate was Asian. As a result of the investigation, the university has barred the psychology department from "conducting searches for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions" for at least two years, "subject to review by the Provost's Office." The department must also "undergo a comprehensive review and revision of its hiring processes." The university will also require all department members to "receive training on how to conduct searches consistent with law and policy."
The post Brickbat: Thumb on the Scale appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The big news out of the 2020 census data released yesterday is that the U.S. is becoming less white. As Reason's Ron Bailey noted yesterday, "the population identifying as white alone decreased by 8.6 percent since the previous census in 2010," while the number of people identifying as multiracial rose by 276 percent. But these aren't the only big changes American demographics saw in the decade between 2010 and 2020.
While growing at its slowest rate since the Great Depression (from 308.7 million residents in 2010 to 331.4 million in 2020), the U.S. also saw a shift in where people are choosing to live. The biggest gains go to Texas, Western states more broadly, and metropolitan areas across the country. Certain areas of the South also saw some significant gains.
Big cities see big gains.
Most metropolitan areas—that is, counties containing a city with at least 50,000 people living in it—saw their populations go up.
Some 81 percent—or 312 out of 384 metro areas—experienced a population increase, compared to only 48 percent of "micropolitan" areas (a.k.a. counties containing a city of more than 10,000 but fewer than 50,000 people). Overall, "the population of U.S. metro areas grew by 9% from 2010 to 2020, resulting in 86% of the population living in U.S. metro areas in 2020, compared to 85% in 2010," according to a U.S. Census Bureau press release.
Between 2010 and 2020, the population of U.S. micropolitan areas grew 1 percent but still decreased as a percentage of the population, from 9 percent in 2010 to 8 percent in 2020.
The majority of U.S. counties—about 52 percent—saw population decreases between 2010 and 2020.
Population winners and losers:
• Only three states—West Virginia, Mississippi, and Illinois—and Puerto Rico saw population declines overall.
• States with the most population growth were Texas, Florida, California, Georgia, and Washington. ("These five states accounted for nearly half of the total numeric population increase in the United States between 2010 and 2020," the Census Bureau says.)
• The fastest-growing state over the past decade was Utah, which increased its overall population by 18.4 percent. Utah was followed by Idaho, Texas, North Dakota, and Nevada, which each increased by at least 15 percent.
• Texas saw the most supercharged city growth:
Five of the 14 cities that grew by at least 100K people in the last decade are in Texas, according to new Census numbers.
— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) August 12, 2021
• The Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas gained at least 1.2 million people apiece between 2010 and 2020, as did the New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area.
• The latest data still put Los Angeles County as the biggest county in the U.S. and New York City as the largest city.
Pretty ironic given the 629,000 "Why I'm Leaving New York" essays published since the previous Census.https://t.co/jgZLZqGHx8
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 12, 2021
• The metro area that grew the fastest: The Villages, in Florida, jumping from approximately 93,000 people to 130,000 people.
• The next biggest gainers were the Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown area in Texas; St. George, Utah; Greeley, Colorado; and the Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach metro area in South and North Carolina.
• The five U.S. metro areas with the biggest population gains were: Harris County, Texas (Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land); Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler); King County, Washington (Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue); Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise); and Tarrant County, Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington).
• Phoenix has now overtaken Philadelphia as the fifth-largest city.
• The populations of Buffalo, New York, and Cincinnati, Ohio grew for the first time in 70 years.
Race and ethnicity shifts
America's Asian and Hispanic populations are booming, 2020 census data show:
• The number of people (of any race) identifying as Hispanic or Latino was around 62.1 million, up 23 percent from 2010. (In Texas, the "Hispanic population is now nearly as large as the non-Hispanic white population, with just half a percentage point separating them. Texas gained nearly 11 Hispanic residents for every additional white resident since 2010," notes The Texas Tribune.)
• About 24 million people identified as all or partially Asian, 9.7 million as all or partially American Indian or Alaska Native, and 1.6 million as all or partially Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
New Census numbers show Hispanics now make up 18.7% of the U.S. population, up from 16% in 2010. There are 11.6 million more Hispanic/Latino Americans in the U.S. now. That accounts for more than half of the total population U.S. growth of 22.8 million in the past decade.
— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) August 12, 2021
But the biggest racial shift came in the number of people identifying as multiracial—up to 33.8 million in 2020, from 9 million in 2010.
"The 'in combination' multiracial populations for all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category," the Census Bureau notes. "All of the race alone or in combination groups experienced increases. The Some Other Race alone or in combination group (49.9 million) increased 129%, surpassing the Black or African American population (46.9 million) as the second-largest race alone or in combination group."
White people still make up the bulk of the U.S. population, with 204.3 million Americans identifying solely as white. An additional 31.1 million identifying as a combination of white and another race.
As NPR points out, "what the new census data shows about race depends on how you look at it."
The Census Bureau warns that "data comparisons between the 2020 Census and 2010 Census race data should be made with caution, taking into account the improvements we have made to the Hispanic origin and race questions and the ways we code what people tell us."
An aging population:
"The share of children in the U.S. declined because of falling birth rates, while the share of adults grew, driven by aging baby boomers," notes the Associated Press. "Adults over 18 made up more than three-quarters of the population in 2020, or 258.3 million people, an increase of more than 10% from 2010. However, the population of children under age 18 dropped from 74.2 million in 2010 to 73.1 million in 2020."
Shift in Oregon education standards. Gov. Kate Brown signed a law in July that ends certain proficiency requirements for high school students. Is this simply a knock at bureaucratic testing standards, or "the soft bigotry of low progressive expectations"? The Wall Street Journal says it's the latter:
The new law extends until 2024 a temporary suspension of the state requirements that kids demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to graduate from high school. Previously, in addition to demonstrating proficiency via Oregon's Assessments of Knowledge and Skills test, students had the option of taking other standardized tests or submitting a work project to teachers. The new legislation gives the state's Department of Education until 2022 to write new standards.
The purpose of public education is to provide students with the skills they need to succeed in the world. It is a terrible disservice to issue a diploma that fools them into believing they've mastered basic skills they haven't. It is particularly cruel for the minority students who will pay the highest price when the real world confirms that their high schools have defrauded them of a real education.
San Francisco to require proof of vaccination for many activities. Of course the Bay Area is among the first to up the vaccination status ante. "San Francisco will become the first major city in the country to require proof of full vaccination against the coronavirus for a variety of indoor activities, including visiting bars, restaurants, gyms and entertainment venues that serve food or beverages," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The new rules take effect August 20.
Somewhat surprisingly, New Orleans is also joining in:
New Orleans announced Thursday that people will have to show either proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test result within the last 72 hours to go to bars, eat indoors at restaurants, work out in a gym, or do other activities in public.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the new rules will go into effect on Monday and enforcement will start on Aug. 23.
NEW: Officials have found no evidence of a superspreader event stemming from the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, city health commissioner says. https://t.co/agbwENPfvi pic.twitter.com/2Sg8kJfy1k
— ABC News (@ABC) August 12, 2021
• The federal cop who devised a bogus sex trafficking ring and falsely imprisoned a teen for two years can't be sued, a federal court says.
• "The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked part of an eviction moratorium in New York State that had been imposed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a move the law's supporters said might expose thousands to eviction," The New York Times reports.
• Lenore Skenazy looks at the cruel treatment of inmates at a Texan prison for sex offenders.
The post Texas Wins the Census appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Laney College, a public community college in California, has placed mathematics professor Matthew Hubbard on leave and is investigating him for sending racist messages to a student of Vietnamese descent, Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen, suggesting she change her name. "Your name in English sounds like F—k Boy," Hubbard wrote. "If I lived in Vietnam and my name in your language sounded like Eat a D—k, I would change it to avoid embarrassment both on my part and on the part of the people who had to say it. I understand you're offended, but you need to understand your name is an offensive sound in my language. I repeat my request"
The post Brickbat: What's in a Name? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>U.S. population could increase from 323 million in 2016 to as high as 447 million by 2060—or fall as low as 320 million. It depends on how many immigrants are admitted over the next four decades, according to new report from the Census Bureau.
The report sketches out four scenarios for 2060. If current levels of immigration are maintained, the U.S. population will grow to 404 million by 2060. If immigration is cut in half, the population will rise to 376 million. If immigration increases by 50 percent, the population expands to 447 million. And if all immigration were to be halted now, the U.S. population would peak at around 332 million in 2035 and drop to 320 million in 2060.
In the high-immigration scenario, the proportion of foreign-born residents would rise by 2060 to 21.6 percent of the population. If immigration is halted, the forecast shows only 4.6 percent of the population in 2060 being foreign-born.
In all of the scenarios, the median age of the U.S. population rises from 37.9 to more than 40.
The report projects that the number of people identifying as "white alone"—that is, respondents who check only the white ethnicity box on census forms—will continue to rise in the main, high, and low immigration scenarios. This increase results from the Census Bureau's expectation that the children of Hispanic immigrants will probably, like the children of Italian, Polish, Greek, and other earlier immigrant groups, choose to identify increasingly as white. But the share of the population in the white alone category will decline in each scenario, due to faster increases in the numbers of Americans in the other racial and ethnic groups.
It remains my hope and belief that Americans of whatever ancestry living in 2060 will look back and wonder why anyone ever cared about the ethnic makeup of the American population. America is an ideal, not a tribe.
The post What Happens to the U.S. Population If Immigration Rises Substantially or Halts Entirely? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I'd become an ex-black man…not because I'd ceased loving what I've been taught to call "black," or because I…wished my daughter to blend in to what I'd been taught to call "white," but simply because these categories cannot adequately capture either of us—or anyone else, for that matter. I had no guilt about it anymore because blackness, like whiteness, isn't real.
That's a passage from the new memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, by Thomas Chatterton Williams. In a world that is increasingly embracing identity politics that sort people along racial and ethnic lines, Chatterton Williams is moving in a radically different direction. His book is an explicit call to "unlearn race" and embrace individual diversity.
The 38-year-old Chatterton Williams is the author of a previous memoir, Losing My Cool. He is biracial himself and grew up in New Jersey identifying as black. He is married to a white French woman, lives in Paris, and describes how the birth of his first child—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl—forced him to interrogate and ultimately discard ideas about identity that he and the rest of us have long taken for granted.
In a wide-ranging discussion, Chatterton Williams and Nick Gillespie talk about race relations in 21st century America; how class and gender intersect with ethnicity; and whether it's really possible to "unlearn race" in a country that has spent so much time and energy defining national character along racial lines.
Audio production by Regan Taylor and Ian Keyser.
The post The Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man: Thomas Chatterton Williams appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is schoolenfreude a word? If so, a Wall Street Journal article from Saturday produced buckets of the stuff.
Seems an area man who helped design the devilishly complicated algorithm that determines the middle school designations for New York City public school kids, and who also supported the trailblazing (and controversial) diversity plan in Brooklyn's mediagenic District 15, found himself on the losing end this spring when his incoming middle school daughter was assigned to just her 10th-ranked choice of government-run school. So what did Neil Dorosin and family do?
They chose a charter school closer to home. And I do not blame them, not one little bit.
The school his daughter was assigned to, Sunset Park Prep, features comparatively poorer students (a majority of them, unlike Dorosin, are nonwhite) achieving comparatively decent test results, so that was attractive enough to include on her school rankings (as it was for my daughter, who is in the same school district and age group). But: "He worried about the travel distance. He said his daughter cared that none of her friends were going to Sunset Park Prep, some were going to the charter, and she found the charter's building more appealing."
As Matthew Ladner wrote in an unrelated piece about New York charter schools yesterday, "We should celebrate anytime any family finds a good fit school for their children. They paid their taxes after all; if they are happy, then so am I." Indeed. And there is no ammunition for a charge of hypocrisy here, either, as Dorosin does not to my knowledge share Mayor Bill de Blasio's unreasonable hostility to charters.
But the initial experiences of parents on the vanguard of District 15's experiment with "controlled choice"—as in, families choose their ranked preferences, then the school system chooses their assignment based on a mixture of lottery and demographic leveling—suggest that more people than before are choosing exit rather than compliance.
Dorosin's Brooklyn Urban Garden School (BUGS), one of five privately-run charters in a district that has 11 Department of Education-operated middle schools, "had a surge of interest in the past year," the Journal reported:
Its officials said 502 children living in District 15 entered the charter's lottery for sixth-grade for this fall, up from 315 the previous year, before the district's new admissions method. Now 77 of its sixth-graders come from the district, up from 37 before.
That's an eye-popping increase. We don't yet know the full enrollment picture for this fall, but a previous Journal article from the summer reported that the number of incoming sixth graders appealing their designations jumped from 350 to 450 (or from around 13 percent of the incoming class of middle schoolers to 17 percent), while the number of appeals granted plummeted from 59 to 14. As I noted in this Twitter thread at the time:
That's a meaningful increase. The number of objectively disgruntled families in District 15 has jumped from around 290 to 435, or from about 11% of incoming 6th graders to 16%. Where will those 145 additional unhappys go? We don't know yet.
— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) July 10, 2019
At just one middle school, the long-maligned Charles O. Dewey (I.S. 136) in the same Sunset Park neighborhood as Dorosin's assigned school, appeals went up from 22 to 50. A disproportionate number of my daughter's classmates at her comparatively affluent and successful elementary school were assigned faraway I.S. 136 despite not even including it in their rankings. (You can select up to 12 publicly run schools; charters are handled separately.) I have yet to hear of a single one of those families accepting their assignment.
Meanwhile, we know of at least three parents of District 15 elementary public schoolers who have either moved or are in the process of moving away from this area altogether as a direct result of their middle school placements. Have I mentioned that my elementary school subdistrict may soon be changing to controlled choice?
As it happens, just today—the same day as a crucial public meeting about the fate of my youngest daughter's elementary school—the Cato Institute has published a new policy paper about controlled choice, by George Mason University education professor emeritus David J. Armor. Keep in mind that this particular policy approach toward integrating schools, which is the successor of the racial-integration busing policies of the 1970s, is preferred not just by my district, but by New York City's whole Department of Education, and pretty much the whole school-diversification establishment.
So what does Armor conclude?
In larger school districts, controlled-choice plans can generate controversy and middle-class flight among parents who prefer neighborhood schools, similar to the "white flight" observed in earlier decades when mandatory busing was used to attain racially balanced schools.
A review of controlled-choice plans in six large districts in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Florida shows considerable and ongoing higher-income and white losses in these districts. While other demographic forces cannot be ruled out (e.g., urban to suburban movement for reasons unrelated to schools), neither can the unpopularity of controlled choice. More important, none of these districts has demonstrated significant closing of achievement gaps between higher- and lower-income students, one of the main justifications for these plans.
For larger school districts…it is clear from the cases reviewed here that controlled choice for economic integration is not working as intended. It is still controversial, and it may be contributing to growing racial and economic isolation among some larger school districts. Most importantly, this policy has not been successful at achieving one of its major goals: closing achievement gaps.
Ouch.
As I have said whenever asked, I don't know if my school district's new system will be good or bad, and I'm happy that some populations that previously did not even think to apply to some of the highest-reputation middle schools got admitted this year. Choice is a wonderful thing, and poorer families especially should have more of it.
But the lure of control is ever-present. Two weeks after a Democratic presidential debate spat between Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) and former Vice President Joe Biden made school busing national news again, New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a deeply knowledgeable and interpretatively questionable cover story with the provocative headline, "It Was Never About Busing: Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept."
I can testify that Hannah-Jones' conclusion resonates with many of the people driving diversity-conscious admissions changes to schools in New York and elsewhere: "Busing did not fail. We did."
Parents who balk at accepting the results of the new busing will be branded as racist, one of the gravest accusations one can level at another human being in modern society. As one woman just emailed me while I was finishing this post:
For schools to become integrated and, more importantly, equalized, it means that some kids will suffer. Those kids are likely to be those who already have an enormous amount of social capital, if not downright wealth. They will survive. If their parents choose to send them to private school instead, let it be on their conscience about how they are supporting a racist and classist system and how they are, indeed, racists.
All parents, Neil Dorosin included, are going to do what they think is best for their kids. If the school they are assigned to is objectionable on grounds of distance, or test scores, or curriculum, or cleanliness, or safety, or leadership, they will look for ways to opt out. And if in the process they are treated like privilege-hoarding accomplices to a system of white supremacy, then that noise you will hear is the slamming of doors behind them.
"The whole process [has] left us so traumatized and frankly angry that I can't see myself going through it again for our younger daughter," one District 15 parent of a sixth grader emailed me last week. "And, we look forward with terror at the high school admissions and the real possibility that the same forces will be at play by the time we're up. It's become [such] a toxic subject of our lives that I really can't live with anymore. So, [the] end result is that we have decided to leave Brooklyn altogether."
The post Even Social Engineers Don't Want Their Kids Used as Demographic Pawns appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To the surprise and chagrin of multicultural Canada, it turns out that Quebec separatism, long thought a dead movement, was actually in hibernation. The Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) won a majority government, ousting the immigrant-friendly centrists and trouncing the establishment separatists. The victory marks the first time since 1966 that the province won't be governed by either the left-leaning Liberals or the social democratic separatist Parti Québécois.
The CAQ is only seven years old but its agenda should have a familiar ring to Americans. The party combines populism and center-right economic policy prescriptions with a brand of hardline ethnic nationalism that would make Stephen Miller blush. Premiere-designate Francois Legault aims to cut immigration by 20 percent, strengthen the province's existing ban on face covering, and expel newcomers who fail a test of French literacy and "Quebecois values."
Why is this happening in Canada? Wasn't Canada supposed to be a gentle haven of multiculturalism with a bilingual, bhangra-dancing prime minister, that opened its borders to 55,000 Syrian war refugees and a steady stream of American exiles self-deporting from Trump's America?
The temptation to see Trump as a bellwether for La belle province should be resisted. Nor can we blame Canada for Quebec's nationalistic turn. Though it's known as the Great White North, Canadians overall have maintained positive attitudes towards immigrants of every hue and shade for the last 20 years, even as the numbers of foreign born have swelled to over 20 percent of the population.
No, the forces bringing the caquistes to power in Quebec City are home grown and they've been a long time in the making. Hostility toward immigrants is deeply embedded in Quebec's separatist political culture, predating Trump's candidacy by decades, traceable to the failed 1995 referendum on Quebec independence.
The separatists lost that contest, which would've redrawn the map of North America, by the agonizingly close vote of 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent. When the final results were tallied, and it became clear to all that Canada would not break apart, Quebec's separatist Premier (and Captain Kangaroo lookalike) Jacques Parizeau infamously pointed the finger at immigrants for shattering the dream of an independent, French-speaking nation.
"It's true, it's true we were beaten, basically, by what? By money and ethnic votes, essentially," ("C'est vrai qu'on a été battus, au fond, par quoi? Par l'argent puis des votes ethniques, essentiellement") said a belligerent Parizeau, going off script, to an audience of his howling supporters at the Palais des Congress in Montreal.
Many understood "money" as a rhetorical jab at Montreal's Jewish community. As a culturally distinct minority of English-speaking Canadians, Jewish Quebeckers overwhelmingly opposed nationhood. The premiere's raw remark so succinctly summed up the post-referendum resentment that it's still periodically revived, 23 years later, whenever Canadian pundits wish to remind readers how ugly nationalist politics can be.
Ugly though it was, Monsieur Parizeau had a point. Immigrants who've chosen Canada as their home have never been persuaded to abandon it. And while most of Quebec's immigrants are native French speakers, few take interest in the acrimonious language wars that animate the separatist cause. With the 1995 referendum decided by a single percentage point, immigrants are arguably the reason why Quebec remains a Canadian province today.
Separatists didn't always see immigrants as an obstacle to nationhood. Gérard Godin, a poet-politician, and the first immigration minister of the Parti Québécois, argued in the early 1980s that foreign-born citizens were essential to the project of francophone sovereignty. Immigrants, he hoped, would be welcomed on their arrival in the province; in time, they would come to self-identify as Québécois and then they would vote for independence.
Godin's 1983 ode to immigrants, "Tango de Montréal," is written in brick outside of Montreal's Mont Royal metro station.
Seven thirty in the morning in the Montreal metro
it's full of immigrants
they get up early
in that worldso if the old heart of the city
is still beating
it's thanks to them.
The post Ethnic Nationalists Won the Quebec Election. What Fueled Their Rise? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A longstanding concern about "voting with your feet" is the fear that it will increase racial and ethnic segregation. Given the opportunity, most people might choose to "stick to their own kind" or at least avoid historically unpopular minority groups. Recent data, however, paints a very different picture. Far from exacerbating segregation, residential mobility actually seems to reduce it. Bloomberg economics columnist Noah Smith summarizes some of the data here:
Surprisingly, evidence seems to show that Americans are increasingly open to living in diverse neighborhoods. A 2016 paper by the National University of Singapore's Kwan Ok Lee finds that since 1990, white flight and white avoidance of black neighborhoods has decreased dramatically. In fact, white Americans in recent decades have tended to move toward diversity rather than away from it.
Urban economist Joe Cortright, blogging at City Observatory, summarizes the results. Lee looks at U.S. Census tracts, neighborhoods that on average have about 4,000 residents. In addition to the racial makeup of neighborhoods, she was able to track where individuals moved to and from.
Lee's first finding is that American neighborhoods are becoming more diverse. Majority-white neighborhoods were about two-thirds of the total from 1970 to 1990, but during the next two decades that number was only 57 percent. The probability of single-race neighborhoods becoming mixed increased substantially. Meanwhile, a small but growing number of neighborhoods have a substantial numbers of whites, blacks and Hispanics or Asians….
Lee's final finding is the most striking. She found that once Americans move to a mixed-race neighborhood, they tend to either stay there, or move to another mixed neighborhood. This is true for both white and black Americans. In other words, neighborhood diversity isn't just a result of changing demographics, but of Americans choosing to live near people of other races.
These findings are not as surprising as they might seem. Even if people do not care about ethnic diversity for its own sake, diverse areas have important advantages that many potential foot voters value, including greater economic growth and job opportunities. The evidence of foot voting decisions is also consistent with other data indicating increasing racial and ethnic tolerance, such as increasing rates of interracial marriage.
Evidence indicating that Americans are becoming more tolerant may seem difficult to square with the alarming growth of poisonous identity politics on both left and right, exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump, among other things. One possible way to reconcile the seeming contradiction is that Trumpism represents a revolt of the old order, not the wave of the future. This is consistent with the fact that his support is overwhelmingly drawn from older, lesser-educated whites. It is also likely that people's foot-voting decisions are based on greater knowledge and more careful consideration than their choices at the ballot-box. Those who vote for dangerously divisive politicians may behave very differently in other aspects of their lives.
The available evidence also undercuts a closely related concern about foot voting: the claim that it leads to a "big sort" under which people cluster with those who have similar political views.
This is not to suggest that all is entirely well in the realm of foot voting. Many people who would like to move to diverse and economically dynamic areas are prevented from doing so by zoning restrictions that artificially inflate the price of housing. This, along with restrictive licensing, creates barriers to mobility that severely impede the ability of both minorities and poor whites to improve their lives by voting with their feet. If we want to expand opportunity for the poor, increase economic growth, and further diminish residential segregation, breaking down obstacles to mobility would be a great place to start.
The post Voting with Your Feet Does Not Lead to Segregation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Flemming Rose isn't going to watch the decline of free speech without a fight. In 2005, while an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Rose commissioned twelve cartoons about Muhammad to encourage artists to overcome self-censorship. Extremists responded to the cartoons with attacks on western embassies and riots, resulting in the deaths of over 200 people.
Now Rose has written The Tyranny of Silence, a defense of his decision to publish the cartoons and a guide to unfettered expression in the 21st century. "I'm not willing to sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of cultural diversity," he says.
As politicians across the world respond to the challenge of multiculturalism with censorship, campus speech codes, and the persecution of journalists, Rose explains why openness is the proper political response to a globalized world.
Rose is no rogue provocateur. He is one of the planet's most committed defenders of free speech, the open society, and enlightenment values of tolerance and human rights.
Edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Josh Swain and Mark McDaniel.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Nick Gillespie: Today we're interviewing Flemming Rose at the Cato Institute and the author most recently of The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate Over the Future of Free Speech. In 2005, while an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Rose commissioned a series of cartoons about the prophet Mohammed as an exercise to stop self-censorship. Eventually, terrorists and extremists responded to the cartoons with violence, attacks on western embassies and riots creating a death toll that reached at least 200 according to the New York Times. Rose is no rogue provocateur. He is one of the planet's most committed and articulate defenders of free speech, the open society and enlightenment values of tolerance and universal rights and that is why I'm particularly happy to have the opportunity to talk with him today. Flemming Rose, welcome.
Flemming Rose: Thank you for those nice words, Nick. It's wonderful to be here.
Nick Gillespie: Let's take the pulse of free speech in the decade since the Mohammed cartoons came out. Since then, we've seen any number of violent reprisals against free speech, probably most catastrophically the gunning down of a good part of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France, but we've also seen the continuing rise of hate speech laws in Europe and a stultifying climate rise on U.S. campuses and other college campuses. Are things good for free speech generally right now or not?
Flemming Rose: If we take the long-term historical view, yes, free speech is in better shape than in the 17th century or the 18th century or even the beginning of the 20th century. No doubt about that, but if we look in a shorter-term perspective, let's say the past 20, 30 years, I think free speech is in worse shape. Free speech is in bad standing. You can see it when you check out statistics. Freedom House puts out a report every year; Reporters Without Borders in Europe do the same thing in other institutions and the trend is the same all over. For the past approximately 10 years, freedom of the press and freedom of speech is in decline and I think that is the new thing. We know China. We know Cuba. We know North Korea, Russia, where things usually are in bad shape, but the new trend is the freedom of expression is in decline even in western Europe.
Nick Gillespie: What forms does it take, say, in Western Europe? Are reporters being, if not put in jail, are there legal actions against them or is it a chilled atmosphere where people just don't talk about certain things?
Flemming Rose: It's both. I mean, just to give you an indication, in the first half of 2015, France, of all countries in the world, was the most dangerous place to live for a journalist.
Nick Gillespie: Meaning that he would get arrested or you would get beaten up?
Flemming Rose: You would get beaten up or being gunned down. That's, of course, not the case anymore, but a couple of years ago, I interviewed the most famous French cartoonist Plantu, who works for Le Monde and I asked him, when was the last time a cartoonist was killed in Europe and he couldn't recall. The only name he came up with was a Palestinian cartoonist who was killed in London in 1987, either by the Mossad or the PLO, but even Honoré Daumier, the most famous French cartoonist who worked in the 19th century, he was sent to jail several times but he came out and he continued mocking the king. He was not killed. He was not physically threatened.
Nick Gillespie: Where are the threats coming from? Are they exclusively coming out of religious intolerance? Is it Islamic Jihadists? It is broader than that?
Flemming Rose: It's far broader than that and I think fundamentally it has all to do with our ability to manage diversity in a world that is getting increasingly globalized and I think the debate of free speech is going on in a qualitatively new situation driven by migration, the fact that people move across borders in numbers at a speed never seen before in the history of mankind. The consequence being that almost every society in the world right now is getting more and more diverse in terms of culture and religion. That's one factor.
The second factor is the digital technology. The fact that what is being published somewhere is being published everywhere and people can react to speech across cultures, but in a situation where speech loses context and can be manipulated and exploited and political and so that's what happened to me.
Nick Gillespie: Because it was a series of Danish imams who took the cartoons, added cartoons that never appeared or were never commissioned by you and toward the Middle East and stoked anger.
Flemming Rose: And deleted the context. I mean, even in some western countries, the context got lost in the translation.
Nick Gillespie: And I guess what you're saying with the French cartoonist in the 19th century, it was at least a Frenchman mocking the French king. It wasn't somebody from Syria. It wasn't somebody from Africa or America.
Flemming Rose: Yes, yes. And I would say that this has a put a huge pressure on everybody to manage diversity and it turns out that we in the west are not very equipped to deal with that. I think you are a little bit better at it in the United States but in Europe, we have in the 20th century tried to build a sustainable peace through the creation of homogeneous nation states after World War I and after World War II. After World War I, we created a lot of new states.
Nick Gillespie: Like Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—
Flemming Rose: The Baltic States, a dissolution of four empires, the creation of new states.
Nick Gillespie: And those were all kind of predicated, not accurately always, but with the idea that they were creating, well, Czechoslovakians, they're all the same, they will get along with each other.
Flemming Rose: It was Wilson's principle of the right to self-determination of a nation. There were still minorities living on different territories and after World War II, there was a huge huge population swaps, basically in eastern Europe, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians. They were moved across borders in order to create more homogeneous nations and that has been a kind of dirty secret of Europe because of fascism, because of Nazism. National identity has been a kind of suspicious thing.
Nick Gillespie: In a European context this helps explain why after World War II when Turks started moving into Germany to work. It was not even a question that they would be offered German citizenship.
Flemming Rose: Yeah. A job.
Nick Gillespie: They were migrants.
Flemming Rose: And jobs. And they came to work and to make a living.
Nick Gillespie: But they would never be German because Germany is for Germans.
Flemming Rose: Exactly. Diversity is difficult. Diversity is painful. Of ethnicity, religion, and culture and also of opinions and because of our historical legacy in western Europe, we have been told that we should celebrate diversity and I think that's great. I'm married to an immigrant myself. I've traveled around the world and I think diversity is a great thing, but it's kind of becoming not okay to admit that it's difficult because if you say that, you are racist, you are xenophobic and so on and so forth, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's just very difficult.
Nick Gillespie: You're Danish, you grew up in Denmark, you go back centuries or generations and then a new person comes and you're uncomfortable with something about them and is that not xenophobic? Is it not racist or what is a way— How can you have an open conversation that doesn't immediately get taken up to the 10th degree where everybody is ready to pull a knife?
Flemming Rose: I think the United States has for decades been a melting pot, a composition of very different people coming from different cultures and therefore what it means to be an American is a quiet narrow definition. You have to accept a few basic rules in order to get a sense that you belong when you get citizenship and even though you speak the language with an accent, people will not look strange at you and think you are an outsider.
In Denmark, it's very different. Denmark and most European nation states, they were homogenous nation states for centuries and diversity is something that you have to learn. One thing is to be proud that you provide 1% of GDP to the U.N. Development Programs and, oh, we do everything for the third world, we support and fight poverty.
Another thing is to have a neighbor next door who belongs to a different culture and has a different religion and maybe speaks a different language from the outset.
Nick Gillespie: From a U.S. perspective, it's really a 20th century phenomenon. The term the "melting pot" comes from a play that was written in the 1890s. The Statue of Liberty which is now seen as an icon of immigration and refugees coming to the U.S. was actually sent by France in 1876. It's called Liberty Enlightening the World. It was about how France and U.S. were built on Enlightenment principles that had nothing to do with immigration, and it was, of course, a very ugly period in the 1920s. We went through a period of very xenophobic immigration laws. Before that, Asians, Chinese and Japanese were kept out by law, so it hasn't been as easy in the United States.
Flemming Rose: And it also underlines my point that this is something that you have to learn. It's not natural. I would say that most people, they have a natural instinct for freedom. You want to do your own thing and you don't want other people to interfere and stop you.
Nick Gillespie: And you're Danish so you've been to Germany and you still believe that most people want to be left to do whatever they want.
Flemming Rose: Yeah. [laughs] I belong to a different generation. I didn't fight in the Second World War, but the other thing is tolerance. The ability to live with things that you don't like is something that we have to learn.
Nick Gillespie: Where are we supposed to learn these values and what has happened that we're not kind of keeping up with that?
Flemming Rose: I think the concept of tolerance has been undermined. When I was exposed to the cartoon crisis, I was quite often being criticized as being xenophobic, racist, intolerant and so on, so I sat down and I spent some time trying to understand what I was talking about and I found out in fact that the concept of tolerance in the west has been turned on its head compared to the way it was understood when it came in the world after the war of religion in the 17th century .
It grew out of the religious wars when Catholics and Protestants and were killing one another for decades. At some point, people decided, okay, this has been going on for long enough. We have to work out a way to be able to live together even though we hate one another and we believe that the other faith is blasphemous, so edicts tolerance were adopted in different parts of Europe and it meant that in the beginning that Catholics and Protestants, they were living in the same country but in different towns. Later, they could live in the same town but in different parts of the town, and finally they lived in the same quarter and today they live in the same building without paying notice, but basically, that kind of religious tolerance implied that, 'yes, I hate the Protestant religion. I believe it's a threat to my way of life, to what I believe and to the political, social and cultural order of a Catholic society, but nevertheless, I'm not trying to ban it and I'm not going to use violence, intimidation, and threats to shut them up.'
Tolerance is not something, a demand that you put on the speaker. It's not a demand that you put on somebody who publishes a cartoon or writes a novel or paints a painting. It's on the one who watches a cartoon, watches a movie, reads a novel, that they don't tear it apart or they want to ban it or use violence against a cartoonist. That is what tolerance is about. Today, it means quite the opposite, that, yeah, you may have a right to say what you say, but if you're tolerant, you shut up.
Nick Gillespie: Where does the violence and where does the banning come from, because on the one hand, people will say, well, there's been an influx. Come on, let's stop being polite here. There's been an influx of Muslims from former European colonies or from parts of the world where our foreign policy has created problems, etc., but there's a ton of Muslims and as much as Catholics and Protestants disagreed with each other, at least they worship the same God whereas Muslims are against this completely. But then also in places like Europe, David Irving, the Holocaust denier was put in Austrian jail not because he was offending Muslims, he was offending people who had perpetrated the Holocaust by saying, so where is this is all heading or where is this coming from.
Flemming Rose: I think these are different issues. If we take Islam first, I do think that Islam finds itself in a state of crisis and I think it is paramount to Muslims in Europe where I live to work out a religious doctrine that is compatible with the secular multi-religious, multi-cultural society because the Jihadists and the people who are in favor of killing blasphemers or apostates, they find quotations in the Koran and that's why the Jihadists, they are quiet strong ideologically because they do make references based on earlier interpretations of the holy text.
Nick Gillespie: And they're not going to listen to a secular Westerner explain to them why their interpretation of the holy book is wrong. It really is to going to come from within the Islamic community.
Flemming Rose: Yes, and in fact, about a year ago, I had a conversation with Steve Bannon who's now part of the White House and that was in fact one of our disagreements because Bannon believes that we are at war with Islam while I'm saying, no, we are at war with violent Islamists in a hot war and we are in cold war with non-violent Islamists that do not believe in liberal Enlightenment values, but we need the leading Muslims on our side who stands up for secular democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of religious and we cannot win this battle without having them on our side to talk to their fellow Muslims.
Nick Gillespie: Just to follow up Bannon: does he believe in western Enlightenment values because he seems to be very much of a nationalist, that he wants to define America in much more narrow terms than historically we have been.
Flemming Rose: He believes that this is all— That the crisis of the west is due to the loss of a Christian identity. That this is the Judea-Christian civilization not being able to defend itself, so he believes in re-establishing the church. I mean, Christianity is still powerful in the United States but in Europe, it's on the wane and Europe is getting more and more—
Nick Gillespie: I always find it peculiar when Christians talk about a Judea-Christian heritage, especially in a European context. Europe spent a good part of the 20th century trying to get rid of the Jews, so it's odd to claim that now.
Flemming Rose: And that speaks to the other point that you talked about with David Irving. I talk about Islam and the challenge to Islam that they had to work out a new doctrine of blasphemy that doesn't imply that you have a right to kill blasphemers and other apostates and I also think that they believe that Koran is the relation of God to Muhammad and it put brakes on the right to discuss, to criticize and challenge religious dogma compared to Christianity and the Bible, so I believe they do face big challenges and it spills into Europe.
Nick Gillespie: Just to keep on Islam, but are you there, are you mostly describing kind of an Arab Islam or Middle Eastern Islam as opposed to Indonesia and Malaysia. They have problems, but it just doesn't seem to be as constraining an entity on identity.
Flemming Rose: But it's also a problem in Turkey.
Nick Gillespie: As somebody who knows very little about Islam, I tend to think of it in its traditional origin lands of the Middle East or of the Mediterranean, but most of the world's Muslims live elsewhere.
Flemming Rose: That is true.
Nick Gillespie: In the same way that Catholics in South America and North America and Asia have very different practices and really different belief systems.
Flemming Rose: But nevertheless, the Pope is the key, of course. He is based in the Vatican in Rome and it's the same with Islam because the Koran was written in Iraq.
Nick Gillespie: It emanates from there.
Flemming Rose: Yes, so the Arab world enjoys an authority that Indonesia doesn't when it comes to interpretations and tradition and you had the holy sites in Saudi Arabia and so on, but I get your point and I think it's true that there are parts of the world where you have Muslim majority in countries that do not have the same— Do not experience the same kind of pressure as they do in the Muslim Arab world. That is true.
Nick Gillespie: What's going on with the rise of speech codes to get rid of hate speech, to ban certain types of words, certain types of expression. Clearly that's not being driven by— It's not like Islamic people are calling the shots in Vienna, right?
Flemming Rose: No, that's true. And this goes back to my point about our lacking ability to manage diversity. I believe that if you celebrate diversity of culture, ethnicity, and religion. You will also have to welcome a growing diversity of speech and more different way, diverse ways of expressing yourself if you believe in what you say, but quite to the contrary, most European politicians believe that, yes, we celebrate diversity of culture, but it means that we need less diversity of speech which to me is very logical, and I'm not willing to sacrifice freedom of expression on the altar of cultural diversity. I think it's absurd, but that drives the push for new and new laws because most politicians in Europe believe that in order to save the social peace when we are getting more and more diverse, we need more and more bans. We need to speak more and more quietly. We need to be reluctant to express what we really believe or think about people who live their lives in a different way and I really think it's absurd and I don't get the logic, but nevertheless, that is the trend and for the past 10 years, there's been a push for expanding hate speech laws. There's been a push from the European Union to impose on every member state laws criminalizing denial of the Holocaust. It has led to reaction to eastern Europe. Yes, they passed these laws, but they also passed laws criminalizing denial of the crimes of communism and you have a law in Switzerland criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocide. You have Ukraine passing laws criminalizing criticism or mocking of Ukrainian freedom fighters in the 20th century and the most far-reaching example of in Russia where they criminalized criticism of the behavior of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, but it all goes back to the European memory laws criminalizing denial of the Holocaust and this belief that you protect memory through legislation about history is a very authoritarian idea. And it's been copied in Bangladesh. It's been copied in Rwanda. Most European countries have also criminalized what they call glorification of terror which is a way of criminalizing opinion.
Just to give you one example of how absurd it is because it relates to the United States—after 9/11, a Basque newspaper published on its front page a cartoon of the plane crashing into the twin towers and it read "we all dreamt about but Hamas did it." It was a factual error because it wasn't Hamas, and it's outrageous. It's offensive to me and to you, I suppose.
Nick Gillespie: To Hamas, even.
Flemming Rose: Yeah, to Hamas, yes, and he was convicted for glorification of terror and it was in fact confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights that it was okay to convict this cartoonist, so this is spreading and the most recent thing is the push within the European Union for criminalizing fake news and leading German politicians, Italians, even Danes, are talking about equating fake news with hate speech.
Nick Gillespie: And how did they go about defining fake news, because ultimately that means kind of licensing journalists or having some kind of verification process which puts the government in control or some government agency.
Flemming Rose: Basically it leads to a ministry of truth if you want to take it to it end because it's up to the government to decide what is fake news and what is not and I think it also undermines the mainstream media, the old media, because if they can publish, if they are not prosecuted for publishing fake news, they are in a way on the side of the government and it reminds me a little bit of the times in the Soviet Union where you had Pravda and Izvestia, government-sanctioned news that in the end, nobody believed they were lying about everything and the Samizdat, the unofficial, the underground press, no matter whether they fact checked or not, they were more reliable in the eyes of the public and it means that this would have the opposite effect because they say frankly—
Well, two factors: they want to defend themselves against Russian hackers and Russian trolls and so on. I understand that, but I just think it's the wrong way to go about it.
The other thing that they fear is the rising populist parties and they don't hide that this is the enemy that they are going after when they are going after fake news.
Nick Gillespie: And then that becomes a tremendous propaganda win for the populist parties and the trolls.
Flemming Rose: You couldn't dream of—
Nick Gillespie: You've lived in the Soviet Union?
Flemming Rose: Yes.
Nick Gillespie: Is it credible that Russia, that the government of Russia, is orchestrating these kind of soft power campaigns of influence that cross a line from simply kind of wanting Trump to win or wanting a particular candidate in England to win to crossing the line into something that is more like espionage or is that overblowing it?
Flemming Rose: I don't know, but I think Russia is trying to make its influence as we are trying to make— We're also hacking into Russian computers and the Chinese are hacking into computers.
Nick Gillespie: The United States has a stake in every election in the world and usually makes it known.
Flemming Rose: So it's a little bit hypocritical screaming and yelling about the Russians as if they are the only ones who are doing this. Do it yourself. So in a way—
Nick Gillespie: But we were only listening to Angela Merkel's phone calls because that was important.
Flemming Rose: But I think that the Russian digital is overblown. I think the main threat against the Enlightenment values and our liberal society comes from within and not from without, but it's very easy to point the finger at a scapegoat instead of looking at yourself.
Nick Gillespie: And, of course, you would say, well, Russian trolls so we have to control the press here. It actually speeds up our process of getting rid of Enlightenment values. Talk a little bit about the kind of a paradox that you were saying, and I think you're right, that the world is becoming more diverse. Every country is becoming basically more diverse. Europe is a more diverse place than it was a hundred years ago and yet at the same time, you would expect especially as the birthplace of the Enlightenment that people would be more comfortable with differences, with racial difference, ethical difference, religious difference, gender difference, but we're seeing this resurgence of nationalism. Is that being driven— And particularly within an open Europe now, because a hundred years ago, there was no unified concept of Europe other than that we knew we weren't Turkey, but other than that, all of the European countries were trying to kill each other. Now, we have this unanimity of Europe but within that, nationalism is on the rise. How do we get back to that kind of celebration of understanding of the Enlightenment where you can both be a citizen of the world and a citizen of your home country, your hometown, your family?
Flemming Rose: Well, I think it has to do with the fact that Enlightenment values like reason, tolerance, free and independent individuals have been undermined for a very long time. It didn't start with Trump. In fact, the whole concept of post-modernism that anything goes, Islamic values are as good as the Enlightenment values and so on has led to this relativism and I think it has a lot to do with the value we provide to emotions, that if you feel something, if you can identify some kind of emotional attachment to whatever it is, then logical arguments, arguments of reason, they don't count in the same way.
I think it's in some way it's in reaction to globalization, that people feel sometimes disenfranchised, sometimes alienated. They don't know who they are. They have lost a sense of community and that is also important to individuals, and for a very long time, a healthy sense of national belonging was suspicious.
I mean, there are different kinds of nationalism. You can love your country without being xenophobic, but for a lot of people I think in western Europe, it was kind of suspicious so you see a reaction that is spilling over to the other end of the spectrum and then at the same time, you have this mass migration into Europe that makes people feel uncomfortable and we haven't been able for a long time to have an honest conversation about that and that has been exploited by these populist forces.
I would have prefered that the mainstream parties wouldn't have shied away from talking about this in a frank and clear manner instead of trying to suppress the issue, because people were having these feelings and experiences.
Nick Gillespie: Do you think that in a European context, will the European Union be a place where a kind of a more— Where the west can get out of a kind of a defensive crouch, a feeling that it is being embattled by all of these other forces, possibly also by economic competition which was probably driving some of this as well, but into a more confident and forward-looking embrace of this original understanding of Enlightenment universal and tolerance or institutions like the EU part of the problem?
Flemming Rose: They are part of the problem and part of the solution. For many years it worked the way you explained, that the European Union was a force of sound integration and collaboration, but I think more and more people feel alienated by Brussels. A lot of decisions that didn't have to be taken down there have been taken down there and it's far away. It's not close to your own community and the European Union is also a very comfortable scapegoat for national politicians so they don't have to blame themselves if they can blame Brussels, it's a lot easier, but it's just a fact of life now that the European Union is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy and we have to pay notice and I think one of the starting challenges with the European Integration Project was that it was not in any way— The end goal is not identified in a way. It was identified as a never-ending process of integration. Usually, when you have organization you have to solve a problem or manage a situation, but this was kind of a post-modern project that goes on and on and on and we never see some final point. Another thing is that the European Union for many years didn't have real growth.
Nick Gillespie: And I suspect that's huge and people will acknowledge it in the U.S., but the difference between averaging 2% economic growth of GDP each year versus 3% is massive and we're in if not quite a contraction, a flat lining that—
Flemming Rose: Well, 2% is a problem for you, but in Europe, that would be great.
Nick Gillespie: What are the projects that you're working for the Cato Institute? You've joined them and what can we look forward to from you going forward?
Flemming Rose: I'm going to write a book for Cato about free speech in a multi-cultural society for undergraduates, young men and women, a short book 15-20,000 words, to explain the basics of this and hopefully I will do a video and audios so it can be included somewhere in—
Nick Gillespie: In the last free university.
Flemming Rose: Exactly.
Nick Gillespie: We will leave it there. I want to thank you very much for talking to us. We have been talking with Flemming Rose. He's the Danish journalist, now with the Cato Institute, the author most recently of The Tyranny of Silence and a wonderful incarnation of universal values particularly for tolerance, pluralism and free expression. Thank you again for talking to us, Flemming.
Flemming Rose: Nice to be here.
Nick Gillespie: For Reason TV, I'm Nick Gillespie.
[end of recording]
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The post Flemming Rose Against the Worldwide Suppression of Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie moderates a lively and sometimes sharp-elbowed discussion about race, immigration, multiculturalism, and libertarianism in the coming age of Donald Trump. The participants are Shikha Dalmia of Reason, Avik Roy of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, and Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review.
Anti-immigration conservatives and liberals have long argued that as the United States brings in more foreigners, our common culture and values slip further and further away from the nation's founding ideals of limited government and self-sufficiency. Trump supporters who cheered the candidate's plan to curtail immigration from Mexico and ban Muslims from entering the country also often stressed the we're just importing "Democratic" voters who will expand welfare. Is any of that true? And what about the shrinking-but-still-large numbers of native-born whites who had the clout to elect (if barely) the most restrictionist (and protectionist) president since at least World War II?
Government debt continues to grow and spending as a percentage of the GDP has stayed near post-WWII highs. Trump's spending plan hardly reins in such largess even as his tax plan threatens to reduce revenues (and thus raise deficits) by massive amounts. What is the effect of such policies on libertarian visions for smaller, cheaper, and less-intrusive government? Will Trump end the federal war on pot even if he's ramping up the war on immigrants? Will more protectionist economic policy be offset by more wide-open energy or education plans? We're just a few weeks away from the start of President Trump's first term and only this much is certain: It is going to be a hell of a ride.
Subscribe to the Reason Podcast at iTunes (rate and review us while you're there!). Or listen below via SoundCloud.
Produced by Ian Keyser and Mark McDaniel.
The post The Prospects of Liberty in a Rapidly Diversifying America. (New Reason Podcast) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The campus arm of J Street, the liberal group that describes itself as "pro-Israel, pro-peace," and that positions itself as a leftist Zionist alternative to the more conservative AIPAC, has "decisively" elected a new president, Amna Farooqi. She's a 21-year-old Pakistani-American, and a Muslim. When Farooqi addressed J Street's national convention in Washington last spring, Farooqi described herself not only as a Muslim, but also as "culturally Jewish."
While she is certainly no Rachel Dolezal, the white Spokane woman who adopted a black identity and ended up heading the local NAACP branch, Farooqi has opted publicly to cross an identity border of sorts in a time when such borders are increasingly porous, and her surprising self-description was sufficiently dramatic to catch people's attention.
A columnist for the Jerusalem Post, for example, was delighted, writing that Farooqi's election "is a fascinating bridge that has been crossed," and that it "is a good lesson for Israel" in diversity and multiculturalism. A more suspicious observer argued that Farooqi's claims are a sham, and that she has "decided to work through Jewish groups which have more 'agency' [than Farooqi believes Muslim groups have] and more power to push her anti-Israel agenda."
Her claim to being "culturally Jewish" has predictably made some headlines, though what exactly she means by the phrase remains hazy. "Cultural Jewishness" is a commonly recognized category, describing many secularized Jews who identify with the religion's community while rejecting its theological foundations. Speaking at a J Street convention in Washington last spring, Farooqi suggested rather light-heartedly that because she grew up in the D.C. suburb of Potomac, Maryland, with its large Jewish population, she could make a claim to the credential. The implication is that she gradually came to see herself, at least in part, as a member of that community, though she does not actually say so.
She did tell The Washington Post, "The American Jewish community is one I grew up part of in Potomac and I want that community to be better and take responsibility," suggesting that she not only regards herself as part of a greater Jewish community, but that she seeks the role of improving it. As for Potomac, it seems to play an outsize role in a number of her statements about Israel. "I know that I'm not Jewish, and that's very scary for a lot of people, and I do understand that in some ways," she told the JTA wire service. "But I'm coming to this work because I care deeply about the people in Potomac [Maryland] and the people in Israel and the people in Palestine."
She also noted in her J Street address that, "In high school, I fell in love with Philip Roth." It was seemingly offered as a laugh line, but Roth's novels really have become barter for American Jewish street cred. When Barack Obama—"America's first Jewish president," you'll remember—was seeking Jewish votes during the 2008 primaries, he cited his own admiration for Roth in an apparent effort to connect with Jewish voters. Anyway, in the end Farooqi said little else about the contents of her cultural Jewishness.
She said a good deal more about the Zionist side of her self-presentation, however. Essentially, she became an admirer of Zionism by channeling David Ben-Gurion, the primary founder of Israel and its first prime minister. Farooqi grew up in a "fairly religious" home that she describes as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, though the political issue was taboo at home. "I was never supposed to bring it up," she remembers. Seeking a better understanding of the issue from the other side, she enrolled in an Israeli Studies course at the University of Maryland, and was assigned to play the part of Ben-Gurion in class deliberations. She immersed herself in the role with lasting consequences, she says, for her view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The day-in, day-out of thinking like Ben-Gurion, writing papers as if I were Ben-Gurion, arguing…as if I were Ben-Gurion, completely changed the way I thought about this conflict," she told the J Street convention. "Suddenly, Zionism became about accountability. It was the Jewish people, taking control of their future after a history of being trampled on. It was a small group of Jewish people who grappled with their identity and the communal obligation that it entailed, who identified a threat to the future of their people, and did everything they could to save that future, at a time when it seemed like everything might be lost.
"I fell in love with Zionism because Zionism became about taking ownership over the story of one's people. If Zionism is about owning your future, how can I not respect that?"
Yet when The Washington Post asked her directly if she called herself a Zionist, things got more contingent. "Um, it's complicated," she replied. "I really came to love and appreciate Zionism and if I was Jewish I would be a Zionist. I'm not Jewish, I don't feel comfortable calling myself a Zionist. I support Zionism but I think there are things that can be critiqued."
Among the places where Israel has been critiqued is Farooqi's own Twitter account. Her tweets and retweets include, "Wonder how many American Jews hear of the horror inflicted on Gaza this summer?" and "Wonder what Bibi would say if Palestinians applied his Iran logic to their situation?" According to one critic, "She also implied support for Palestinian terrorism when she tweeted, 'Every movement exercises a range of acts of resistance.'" Among her more frequently cited tweets, at least among her critics, is one where Farooqi reportedly called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "douchebag."
"Weren't there any Jews running" to head J Street U? some skeptics asked when Farooqi's election was announced. J Street actually answered that question, saying that there were four candidates, that two of them were Jewish and two weren't, and that Farooqi ran away with the election. Other people have argued that a Muslim president of such an organization is not really a big deal, noting previous cases of Muslim-American students who have been vocally pro-Israel.
Farooqi, who has already spent time studying in Israel, says she hopes to attend graduate school there, too. If she does, she will have been preceded by other perhaps unexpected scholars from the United States. One such, Egyptian-American Haisam Hassanein, was the valedictorian speaker at this summer's graduation ceremony for foreign students at Tel Aviv University. Here are his remarks.
The post Can a Nice Muslim Girl from Maryland Really Identify as Jewish? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If the GOP is the party for whitebreads, then why does it have the most diverse presidential lineup in the history of the republic? Not just that, it has more minorities in high-office than Democrats whether it is U.S. senate or state gubernatorial mansions.
But does this diversity mean that the GOP does not have a minority problem? No, because minorities have a problem with the GOP, says Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.
And the problem is that the party has a knack for zeroing in on candidates with zero appeal in their communities.
The post Shikha Dalmia on the GOP's Diversity Dilemma appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today is Cinco de Mayo, on which Mexican Americans—and increasingly, all Americans—celebrate…something having to do with Mexico.
Anti-immigrationists routinely say the holiday is "Mexican Independence Day" and yet one more sign that Mexican Americans—just like Jews, Irish, Catholics, Italians, Germans, Outer Slobovians, et al.—are the last true "unmeltable ethnics" who simply can't or won't jump into the glorious Melting Pot of the Shining City on a Hill that is the United States of America.
But of course Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican Independence Day. As USA Today helpfully explains in an article illustrated with a picture of a margarita (pronounced mar-gerrr-REEETA, amigo!), the day commemorates a victory against the French:
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican army's unlikely victory over the French forces of Napoleon III on May 5, 1862, at the Battle of Puebla.
Mexico had troubles paying back war debts to European countries, and France had come to Mexico to collect that debt.
Not only that, the 150 or so people still living in Mexico who haven't yet migrated illegally to the United States to simultaneously outcompete us for the last few menial jobs left while mooching off welfare and getting in-state tuition at public colleges (yeah, I know, it's confusing to me too) don't even give a chihuahua's tuches about Cinco de Mayo:
Today Cinco de Mayo has become more of an American holiday than a Mexican one. But most non-Mexican Americans have "no idea" about the day's history, said Carlos Tortolero, president of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.
Whatevs, Carlos, whatevs.
This is a roundabout way of saying that, as a holiday celebrated here by people who lay claim to heritage from a foreign country, Cinco de Mayo is about as authentically American as you can get.
Indeed, did you know that the very first St. Patrick's Day parade took place not on Irish soil but in New York City, circa 1762? While the race of kings and queens celebrated the day that St. Patrick chased the snakes off of the Emerald Island for years prior, but what we know and love as St. Patrick's Day is a fully American invention, intended to put a little Hibernian swagger into the grand experiment known as the British colonies in the New World. Everybody's Irish on St. Paddy's Day. Except the Irish, who are stuck being that way all damn year.
St. Patrick's Day is best understood as a display of ethnic pride in a country that all too often shunned the Irish (the original parade was organized by Irish serving in the British army). Which is to say it perfectly anticipates the meaning and function of another well-known ethnic pride celebration, Columbus Day.
Italian Americans organized the first ethnically themed Columbus Day festival in these United States in 1866. There had been earlier celebrations, of course, but they were mostly done by bluebloods and WASPs who would have sworn up and down that the great Italian explorer who sailed for Spain had nothing to do with the garlic-eating spaghetti benders that were draining down the gene pool by flooding lower Manhattan like rats. While Columbus Day has never generated the hype or alcoholism that St. Patrick's Day has, it's the ultimate feel-good festival for Italians who have mostly never set foot back in the old country which, lest we forget, was so horrible that all our ancestors said ciao baby to it the first chance they could.
The cul de sac of identity politics was the subject of a great moment in The Sopranos, when Tony's crew react to a native American protest against Columbus Day. Ethnic pride can only get you so far before it bites you on the ass:
What goes around comes around, eh, Paulie?
If like me you are of Irish and Italian heritage, you not only have my deepest sympathies but I suspect you understand the pride that these stupid holidays provide. Not so much to those of us living in 21st-century America but to our parents and grandparents, who grew up in a very different country in which they still seemed kinda-sorta foreign. They were partly shut from being "real Americans" and would grab at almost anything that gave them a sense of identity, of pride, and possibly, some small measure of cultural power.
In a strange and beautiful way, these cartoonishly tribal celebrations were a statement not of loyalty to or longing for the old country but a way of declaring that you were fully American and that you weren't going anywhere. You just wanted a day or two a year when everyone wanted to be you, at least for a drunken moment. You not only showed that you had numbers that mattered but something to add to the Great American Casserole.
So it is with Cinco de Mayo. By celebrating the old country in the new one, Mexican Americans are participating in a centuries-long tradition of strutting their stuff and inviting everyone else to join in the fun.
And if you don't believe me, then Ask a Mexican already! As Reason did in this excellet interview with OC Weekly columnist Gustavo Arellano:
The post Why Cinco de Mayo is Every Bit as Great and Fake an AMERICAN Holiday as St. Patrick's Day and Columbus Day appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The change, to be marked today by a noon event at the state Capitol, has long been predicted by state demographers. It won't instantly make Latinos an equally powerful political force in California, or bring their incomes into parity with non-Hispanic whites, or close the school achievement gap.
But it is an important milestone – and a reminder that these other goals will become easier to achieve as the number of Latinos continues to grow, several leaders and activists said.
The post Latinos Poised to Equal White Population in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Quoting John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker's book The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Salam retorts that the conservative shift among Canada's immigrants is a function of an immigration policy that favors high-skilled immigrants — which is what he has been advocating for America all along. He says:
[T]he shift to the political right has not been universal among foreign-born Canadians. Rather, it is concentrated among relatively affluent suburban voters of Asian origin who have lived in Canada for ten years or more. Canadian immigrants who've lived in the country for a shorter period of time and who live in low-income households are far less inclined to back the CPC.
So basically we know that affluent, upwardly-mobile, tax-sensitive Canadians of Asian origin living in intact families are willing to back a center-right political party that scrupulously avoids taking a stance on contentious social issues and that is famously (some would say infamously) pragmatic on matters of macroeconomic policy and that presents itself as a defender of the country's single-payer health system. It is not obvious that this should lead us to conclude that immigrants living in households earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or indeed less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, a nontrivial number of whom have children outside of marriage, will enthusiastically support a U.S. political party that, among other things, is committed to rolling back the expansion of the Medicaid program and the new health entitlements under the Affordable Care Act as well as other redistributive measures, and that favors substantial cuts in marginal tax rates.
Fair enough. But the problem is that the GOP has managed to alienate not just Hispanics allegedly collecting welfare and living below the poverty level. With a few exceptions like Cuban and Vietnamese Americans, it has alienated every ethnic minority: high- or low-skilled; Asian or Hispanic; rich or poor; on- or off-the-dole; with intact families or without them — as I have written here, here and here. For example, more than 85 percent of Asian Indians voted for Barack Obama, and 65 percent generally vote Democratic even though they are the richest minority in the country, have strong families and low welfare use. Clearly, the problem is not with immigrants, as Salam and other conservatives suggest, but the GOP itself.
Salam notes that shift to the political right among Canada's immigrants is concentrated in "relatively affluent suburban voters of Asian origin who have lived in Canada for ten years or more." But he doesn't say if Canada's less affluent, low-skilled immigrants are rejecting the Conservative Party overwhelmingly or by small margins or perhaps even supporting it by a small margin? This matters because the GOP doesn't actually have to win the Hispanic vote to be electorally competitive if whites lose their demographic dominance and Hispanics grow to become the largest non-white group — about 30% of the population—by 2050 as projected — just not lose it in an overwhelming fashion.
After all, George Bush managed to pull over 40% of the Hispanic vote and won. By contrast, John McCain and Romney got only 35% and 29% respectively and lost. Over the 15 years that Republicans have hemorrhaged Hispanic support, Hispanics didn't get poorer or more welfare-dependent or more hostile to limited government principles—the GOP got meaner and more anti-immigrant, reaching its apex with Romney's notorious remark during a GOP primary debate that his preferred strategy to deal with unauthorized Hispanics would be to get them to "voluntarily self deport."
Such sentiments drive not just Hispanics into the Democratic camp but even the immigrants that Salam finds desirable. Why? Because as a recent survey by College Republican National Committee survey found, immigration is a "gateway issue" that signals a party's overall commitment to tolerance. Immigrant bashing of one group makes all immigrant minorities uncomfortable, even ones that are not the GOP's intended target. And the fact that the GOP continues to hold immigration reform hostage to first sealing the border only solidifies the image of the GOP as an anti-immigrant, anti-minority party — even when they might not disagree with the GOP about curbing welfare abuse or imposing reasonable border controls etc.
Salam maintains that the real lesson from Canada is that the GOP should aim for an immigration policy that favors high-skilled immigrants. But Canada's conservatives have done the opposite: moved their country away from such a policy, a point that Salam acknowledges but doesn't sufficiently grapple with. No longer does Ottawa plan the whole country's labor market based on a point-based system that gave a huge leg up to credentialed foreigners. It lets provinces and employers decide what kinds of immigrants they want and many of them have been choosing what in America would be considered low- or semi-skilled immigrants.
And there are sound policy and electoral reasons for this shift. The policy reason of course is that it does an economy no good to have a glut of PhDs who can't find jobs in their fields and end up driving cabs. And, politically, if avoiding welfare-dependency is the key to keeping immigrants in the conservative camp, then it is far from clear that an out-of-work biochemist from Russia is going to vote for conservatives any more than a fully-employed, dry-wall hanger from Mexico.
It is true that most immigrants don't come to America out of an ideological commitment to limited government — they come here to improve their lives. They have no principled objection to welfare (although they emphatically don't come here with an eye to living off it, conservative tropes about anchor babies etc. notwithstanding). Their politics, like those of a vast majority of Americans, are pragmatic.
But what Canada's conservatives have figured out that the GOP hasn't is that one can't appeal to immigrant voters (or other voters, for that matter) by bandying around abstract principles — and then blaming them if they don't immediately see the light. One has to appeal to them by developing a concrete program based on these principles that's relevant to their daily lives and concerns.
Hispanic immigrants might not turn down food stamps that liberals want to extend to them, but they might have more use for a party that pushes for a usable guest worker program out of a commitment to reducing government-created obstacles to worker mobility. (Instead, Republicans have made protecting the border a sovereignty issue.)
Sikh émigrés who left India during a persecutory chapter in that country's history might gladly accept stimulus dollars that Canada's liberals have been showering on them to build temples. But, as it turns out, they appreciate even more a party that asserts a bedrock commitment to religious freedom and toleration. (Instead, Republicans have made the threat that a multiplicity of religions poses to America's Anglo-Christian character their battle cry. Witness the fear mongering about creeping sharia in America and Bill O' Reilly's perennial crusade about how Christians are allegedly made to feel uncomfortable about expressing their faith in public.)
Chinese and Indian Tiger Moms who take the education of their children extremely seriously might not march on the streets against federal aid to local public schools, but they might well embrace a party that gives them control over their education dollars so that they can send their kids to the school of their choice. (Instead, Republican support for the school choice movement has foundered out of fears about the impact that inner-city minority kids might have on lily-white suburban school districts where their core constituency lives.)
The point is that a more (ethnically and economically) diverse electorate is not necessarily in any greater inherent tension with limited government principles than the current (white) electorate. The tension points are just different. They both present their own opportunities for principle versus populism. Trying to socially engineer an electorate suitable for these principles will do more damage to these principles than engineering a politics suitable to the new electorate.
Developing this politics will be enormously difficult of course, requiring a complete paradigm shift by the GOP. A wholesale uniform agenda that worked for a more homogeneous population will no longer do so. Retail politics is the name of the game going forward. To this end, the GOP will need to get to know each community, understand its issues and concerns and micro target its policies and messaging — just like Canada's Tories have done. That will require it to diversify its grassroots cadres and court different ethnic groups — not sanguinely point to token minorities in high places such Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal as proof of its openness.
The GOP, in short, has its work cut out for it if it wants to remain politically competitive. And folks like Salam, who are considered a voice for reform trying to move conservatives in a kinder, gentler and more moderate direction, could help enormously by counseling the GOP to stop fretting about how amnesty will hurt its political prospects or high-skilled immigrants will help and simply embrace the cause of more generous immigration, as their own principles would dictate. The GOP has missed the opportunity to own this issue, but the more it plays obstructionist, the harder its task of wooing future voters will get.
Indeed, the sooner immigration reform is taken off the table, the sooner the GOP can focus its energies on its political makeover.
The post How the GOP Can Market Limited Government to Immigrant Voters and Win appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday in Pristina, she said "the United States remains firm on Kosovo's sovereignty and territorial integrity." She was addressing the tensions that remain between the ethnic-Albanian Kosovo government and the Serbian government, which does not recognize Kosovo's 2008 independence declaration.
The post Clinton Restates U.S. Support of Kosovo's Independence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The attack in Tana River district, Coast Province, took place late on Tuesday between the Orma and Pokomo groups, the region's police chief said.
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]]>Do higher IQs produce wealth, or does wealth produce higher IQs? This is the question that Ron Unz grapples with in his fascinating article, "Race, IQ, and Wealth: How Political Bias Distorts the Facts." Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, is taking on claims made in the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations that differences in national IQ account for the substantial variation in national per capita income.
The authors, emeritus University of Ulster psychologist Richard Lynn and emeritus University of Tampere political scientist Tatu Vanhanen, sought out IQ data they believe could plausibly measure the average IQs of the people of various nations and then correlated it with GDP per capita. Their conclusion is that countries populated with smarter people are the ones that become wealthier. Countries inhabited by stupid people remain mired in poverty. Lynn and Vanhanen further conclude that the connection between IQ and wealth is causal based on studies that show for individuals that "IQs measured in childhood are strong predictors of IQs in adolescence and these are strong predictors of earnings in adulthood." They then generalize, "From this it follows that groups with high IQs would have higher average incomes than groups with low IQs because groups are aggregates of individuals."
In his article, Unz uses the data collected by Lynn and Vanhanen and argues that they actually show the opposite—that rising wealth boosts intelligence. In order to avoid getting stuck in the quagmire of race, Unz looks only at the IQ data for European populations. All of the data are adjusted for the universal Flynn effect in which average IQ scores have been increasing in the modern age by 2 to 3 points per decade depending on which IQ measure is used. The data are standardized such that the average British IQ at any time is set at 100.
Let's look at Germany. Lynn and Vanhanen cited four studies that found that West German IQ scores ranged from 99 to 107, whereas East German IQs were as low as 90 back in 1967, and later studies pegged their scores at 97 to 99 points. Taking the extremes, these data imply a gap as big as 17 IQ points between West and East Germans. How to account for the rise East Germany in less than a generation of 7 to 9 points? After all, East and West Germans are not all that genetically different. Lynn's data now show an average German IQ of 102 points.
Similarly Lynn and Vanhanen report that average Greek IQs were 88 in 1961 rising to 95 in 1979. An increase of 7 IQ points in 18 years, as Unz points out, "is an absurdity from the genetic perspective." Some other data uncovered by Lynn and Vanhanen found that Croatians tested as low as 90; Bulgarians at 91; Romanians at 94; Poles at 92; and Southern Italians (Sicilians) at 89. Whereas Lynn and Vanhanen report that Northern Europeans—West Germans, British, Belgian, Dutch, Austrians, and Norwegians—tended to test at 100 points or above.
Consider the case of the Irish where Lynn and Vanhanen report a 1972 study that found the average IQ of Irish children was 87 points, the lowest figure anywhere in Europe. In fact, his realization that the Irish suffered from low intelligence appears to have been something of a eureka moment for Lynn. In a 2011 interview with the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Lynn said, "So I formulated the theory that the low IQ was likely a significant reason for the economic backwardness." He added, "The solution for this problem was obvious. What was needed was a set of eugenic policies that would raise the Irish IQ." However, Lynn forbore making his conclusions public because as he explained, "Virtually no-one supported eugenic programs any more and anyone who proposed doing so would be accused of being a Nazi." Seems likely.
As a check on the notion of genetically fixed national IQs, Unz takes a look at how well the descendants of various immigrant groups have done in the United States. The fear that Anglo-Saxon America was being overwhelmed by the wretched refuse of Europe motivated the publication of the classic 1922 anti-immigration screed by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America. As Roberts explained, "After 1880 the Nordic immigration was overwhelmed by the backward, unassimilatable, undesirable immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe." Inspired in part by Roberts' book, Congress passed the highly restrictive 1924 Immigration Act. Unz points out that in his 1978 book, American Ethnic Groups, Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell summarized 1920s data on average IQ scores for various Eastern and Southern European groups. Slovaks scored an average of 85; Greeks 83; Poles 85; Spaniards 78; and Italian scores ranged between 78 and 85. It is unlikely that these immigrants were drawn from the IQ elites of their homelands.
Accepting that higher IQs and higher incomes go together, Unz notes, "Americans of Greek and South Slav origins are considerably above most other American whites in both family income and educational level." Similarly Americans who trace their ancestry back to Italy are very close to average in income and education. The descendants of the Catholic Irish immigrants, described by 19th century nativists as "low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian and sensual" have, as Unz observes, "within less than a century had become wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of 'Old Stock' ancestry." Old Stock means earlier British, German, and Dutch immigrants.
Unz points out that as countries in Europe have become wealthier since World War II, their average IQ scores have risen. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development under its Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) administers every three years a test to 15-year olds in developed and some undeveloped countries. On the 2009 data, the Irish now outscore the British on reading and are very close on math and science. The Poles outscore the British on reading and math and are very close on science. Croatian reading scores are how higher than Austrian scores and very close on math and science.
Income trends clearly track these increases in test scores in the European countries identified as having low average IQs by Lynn and Vanhanen. For example, since 1970 Irish real per capita incomes (2005 dollars) increased from $11,000 to $43,000. Polish incomes are up from $3,000 to nearly $10,000; Croatian incomes rose from $4,000 to $11,000. The genetic compositions of European populations do not change much in a generation, but clearly incomes do.
Unz goes on to parse the implications for the current American immigration debate, particularly focusing on nativist concerns about millions of recent Mexican immigrants. Lynn and Vanhanen estimate the average Mexican IQ at 87 points. Recall this is the same score that Lynn and Vanhanen reported for Irish children back in 1972. Unz observes, "Mexicans and Irish seem to have the same intellectual ability, and since the Irish have generally done well in American society, there seems no particular reason to assume that Mexicans will not."
In fact, using data from the Wordsum test in the General Social Survey (GSS) that correlates fairly well with IQ, Unz reports the IQ scores of second generation Mexican Americans have likely risen a full 10 points in the past 20 years. In addition, he notes that in 1975 only 6 percent of Hispanic students took the SAT; now 32 percent do. However, the difference between white and Hispanic scores did not widen. "Since the white/Hispanic gap remained unchanged during this tremendous broadening of the Hispanic testing pool rather than greatly widening, the only possible explanation would seem to be a huge rise in average Hispanic academic performance," concludes Unz. Mexican Americans will assimilate as completely into American society as earlier ethnic groups have done.
So why are IQ scores going up around the world? Certainly, better childhood nutrition, more schooling, and most intriguingly, fewer childhood diseases could account for the Flynn Effect, the recent steady 3 point per decade rise in IQ test scores. Unz further speculates that urbanization dramatically boosts intelligence. Earlier waves of immigrants to the United States chiefly became farmers but in the 20th century immigrants from largely rural areas of Europe moved to cities. Unz notes that Dutch-Americans, German-Americans, and Old Stock whites who no longer identify with any European country tend to be more rural. They also perform worse on the GSS Wordsum-IQ test than do Americans whose ancestors hail more recently from Ireland, Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. A big gap in performance on the Wordsum test continues to exist today between white Americans who grew up on farms and those who grew up in suburbs and cities. In 1900 only 14 percent of the world's population lived in cities; today 50 percent do and by 2100 projections estimate that 80 percent will. So if urbanization boosts IQ, that's good news for the world.
Unz acknowledges the possibility that different European ethnic groups might have small differences in innate intelligence, but "this residual genetic element would explain merely a small fraction of the huge 10-15 IQ disparities" seen in the Lynn and Vanhanen data.
The really interesting question is what is responsible for producing both wealth and higher IQs? One clue: Wealth and IQ correlate very nicely with the index of economic freedom. History teaches that economic freedom precedes the increase of both wealth and IQ. Even the data collected by Lynn and Vanhanen clearly show that when the dead hand of communism was lifted from Eastern Europe, both wealth and IQs began rising. Before the institutions of liberty arose in the late 18th century, every people and every nation lived in humanity's natural state of poverty and ignorance. The bottom line is that liberty makes people richer and smarter.
Disclosure: With reference to the urban/rural IQ issue, I grew up on a dairy farm in Southwestern Virginia.
The post Are Smart Countries Richer or Are Rich Countries Smarter? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Murray's likely source is the much-ballyhooed 2009 U.S. Census report [PDF] that parsed certain immigration trends and fertility trends to reach that conclusion. But the claim that "whites" will be a minority in America by 2050 implies an invidious view of the importance of ethnicity and race. "Whites," by earlier definitions cherished by nativists, are already a minority in this country and have been for many decades. The successful amalgamation of previously scorned "races" is a testament to the ever-broadening inclusive tolerance of the American social project.
Let's take a brief tour through the history of race and immigration politics in this country: Shortly after the turn of the last century, many nativists feared that mass immigration was overwhelming the white "races" that had historically contributed the most to populating the nation. One of the most notable expressions of this racial anxiety was the classic 1922 anti-immigration screed by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America. "The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race," asserted Roberts. "If a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe."
In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act that established the national origins formula that limited the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to 3 percent of the number of residents from that same country living in the U.S. based on the 1910 Census. Roberts claimed that the 1921 restrictions were not enough.
"After 1880 the Nordic immigration was overwhelmed by the backward, unassimilatable, undesirable immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe," he argued. Roberts was most particularly concerned about the influx of Jews into the country.
Inspired in part by Roberts' book, Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act to change the national origins formula, limiting the annual number of immigrants to 2 percent of the number of people from any country who were already resident here based on their numbers in the 1890 Census. The national origins formula remained the basis of U.S. immigration law until 1965.
But, from the point of view of nativists like Roberts, such immigration restrictions would prove to have come too late. The "Nordic races" have already been overwhelmed and mongrelized by the progeny of the "Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic races," black Americans, and immigrants from south of our border.
Let's add up the numbers: Despite Roberts' warning about swarms emanating from Central Europeans, there are about 20 million Americans who trace their ancestry back to Slavic ethnicities, including about 10 million Polish Americans. And 6 million more identify themselves as Jewish. And surely Roberts' would despair that 26 million Americans can trace their ancestral roots back to the Mediterranean regions of Europe, mostly from Italy.
Roberts did admit that some people of Irish ancestry qualified as "Nordic," but anti-Irish sentiments among Protestant Americans ran high in the 19th century. Sociologists Jonathan Warren and France Twine in their study, "White Americans: The New Minority" [PDF], note that back in the 19th century, "The Irish were seen as a separate race." They cite other scholars who report, "Inherited features like eye and skin color, facial configuration, and physique were often mentioned. Common adjectives such as 'low-browed and savage, groveling and bestial, lazy and wild, simian and sensual' were employed 'by many native-born Americans to describe the Catholic Irish 'race.'" In any case, some 40 million Americans today claim Irish ancestry.
Of course, African Americans are the group that for centuries against which being white in this country was always contrasted. So anxious were some to maintain a clear distinction between the races that in the early 20th century 18 states adopted laws that classified citizens as black if they had "one drop of Negro blood" in them. Today, some 42 million Americans identify as African American.
Nowadays, the growing number of Hispanics is what most concerns many people. The Census Bureau uses the terms Hispanic or Latino to refer to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race. That group now comprises the largest "minority group," numbering just over 50 million.
So adding up all of the "non-white" groups, one finds that they and their descendants now total 184 million out of 313 million citizens, constituting nearly 60 percent of the country's current population. But how can that be? After all, the Census Bureau notes, "In the 2010 Census, just over one-third of the U.S. population reported their race and ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic white alone (i.e. "minority")." The answer to this conundrum is that Italians, Poles, Jews, and the Irish are now considered "white."
It is this fact that renders silly and nearly meaningless the pronouncement that "whites" will be a minority in this country by 2050. By 2050, just as the earlier waves of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants were assimilated, so too will today's Hispanic immigrants and their descendants be. For all intents and purposes, Hispanics will become as "white" as Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles.
Meanwhile Roberts' worst fear of the "mongrelization" of the races in America is being realized. The rising intermarriage rate between members of the arbitrarily defined and federally recognized ethnic groups demonstrates ever-lessening concern by Americans about this issue. It is my hope and belief that Americans of whatever ancestry living in 2050 will look back and wonder why ever did anyone care about the ethnic makeup of the American population. America is an ideal, not a tribe.
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
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