The white vote? Democrats lost it a long time ago

It is very easy, too easy, as you can see in this Washington Post column, to frame presidential contests involving Donald J. Trump as white supremacy versus racial tolerance.

Columnist Perry Bacon, Jr., who is Black, actually wrote, “And because white people are likely to be the majority of voters for at least two more decades, America is in trouble. (Italics added)

America is in trouble because whites are the majority.

Let that sink in. 

America became the dominant force in the world with a white supermajority, and “whiteness” is now an evil? How Woke.

Can you imagine any mainstream columnist getting away with something like, “Because Blacks are a growing minority, America is in trouble.”

Substitute Hispanics for Blacks and read it aloud. Pretty amazing, huh?

That’s what passes for intelligent discourse in some quarters.

Bacon, actually, may be late in coming to the race party.

I knew that Trump had secured the white male vote. You know, pretty much the blue collar Deplorables.

What I did not realize is that the last time Democrats won the presidential white vote was in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson versus Barry Goldwater. 

In every presidential election since then Democrats have lost the white vote. 

That’s almost 60 years of losing the white vote. Why? The sliding white vote is too often dismissed, glibly and wrongly, as racism — and that gets done a lot.

Too rarely do Democrats sit down and ask themselves how they managed to lose their previous base — working-class whites. (They have owned a vast majority of Blacks voters since FDR.)

Bacon describes the alliance between Republicans and white Americans as “the most important and problematic dynamic” in American politics. He also believes it has been ignored by the public, with commentators and analysts often choosing euphemisms like “middle America,” “working class,” and “soccer moms” to describe Trump’s followers, rather than describing them as white.

I’m not surprised that a Black columnist sees everything through the prism of race. I am a little surprised that editors didn’t warn him that his opinion that a white majority means trouble is stupid. America has always had a white majority. Still does today — 57.8%, not including Hispanics, according to the U.S. Census.

That number has been dropping slowly since 1965, when the Immigration and Nationalism Act  shifted from favoring Northern and Western Europe to being more, um, inclusive of the rest of the world.

The premise was to make immigration less discriminatory.

“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” said lead supporter Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Actually, it did, a little, but not so much at first, and Way Back Then, illegal immigration wasn’t the catastrophe it is today.

It was small, and could be handled.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a sweeping immigration bill that provided amnesty for 3 million illegals in exchange for a promise of tighter security at the Mexican border, and a crackdown on employers hiring illegals. 

Democrats got their amnesty, Republicans did not get the crackdown, poisoning their trust in Democrats.

And that’s the way things remained for decades, and this is where the factual account ends.

Here our tale turns to analysis and speculation, to see how the two streams — white flight from the Democratic party, and a flow of legal and illegal immigrants into the U.S. — merged into a political river.

As recently as President Barack Obama, Democratic politicians were strongly opposed to illegal immigration.  Even as a senator, in 2005, Obama called for a crackdown on illegals and employers, a stance he would reiterate as President.

In 2009, Sen. Chuck Schumer, chair of the Senate Rules Committee, condemned illegal immigration as “wrong, plain and simple.”

Today, you can find no major Democratic elected official talking like that.

Why? I am not given to conspiracy theories, but I am given to suspicion.

As the Left quieted down, the Right grew louder.

Remember the chino-clad, torch-carrying pinheads at Charlottesville?

Their chant: “Jews will not replace us.”

They didn’t mean Jews would actually replace them.

They meant — using an old white supremacist, anti-Semitic trope — that Jews were the leaders in a conspiracy to import nonwhite “others” into America, thus “replacing” native white people.

The extension of that philosophy is that Democrats want the same thing — to diminish whites in America.

When President Joe Biden says “white supremacy” is the greatest threat America faces, he feeds that notion, even though he is as white as Santa’s beard.

There is a broad — I am not saying majority — feeling on the Democrat Left that white people, and their trauma-making Western civilization, cause most of the trouble in the world.

Sounds crazy, right?

As crazy as all of the top 50 U.S. universities dropping the once-standard  Western Civilization as a required course, and 34 not offering it at all?

American Democrats are  turning against themselves, against traditional values.

Back to the numbers. We know Democrats have lost the white vote, and, amazingly, Trump has made inroads among Black males, and Hispanics.

This confluence, which Democratic insiders have seen coming for a decade, seems to have ignited Democrats’ delirious obsession with the “browning of America.”

To the Left, it is desirable, it will make America “better,” I have heard them cackle.

To me, praising one race over another is racism — plain and simple as Schumer might say.

A long-held belief on the Right is that Democrats view illegal immigrants as “future Democrats.” They say it all the time.

Are they correct?

Some on the Right even believe that illegals can vote, thus contributing to a Democratic wave.

I can’t say no illegal has ever voted, but I can say such numbers would be infinitesimal (and probably located in overwhelmingly Democratic areas anyway, like most big cities).

I can say that providing amnesty to the 11-20 million illegals who broke our laws to get here, could upset our political system. It could cause further bifurcation of the electorate.

If that came to pass, eventually we will see two political parties representing two different races — white for Republicans, nonwhite for Democrats — and that would truly be destructive for America.