Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
People walk past posters encouraging participation in the 2020 census in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, April 1, 2020.
At some point, at least in most functioning democracies, demography does become destiny. The immigration of so many Catholics to what had been an overwhelmingly Protestant United States—initially from Ireland and Southern Germany in the mid-19th century—mobilized an anti-Catholic politics that stretched from the Know Nothings of the 1850s through the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and beyond. Eventually, however, the Democratic and then the Republican Parties both became sufficiently Catholic that the immigration restrictions that had been placed on non-Protestant nations were lifted, though incredibly, not until 1965. In other words, “at some point” may be a long time coming.
That’s a useful perspective through which to evaluate the political fallout from the decennial census data released last Thursday. To no one’s surprise, it revealed an America clearly on track to lose its white majority at some point in the 2040s. Between 2010 and 2020, the “white only” share of Americans declined markedly from 64 percent to 58 percent, a reduction that was about two points more than demographers expected. The reduction wasn’t confined to percentages. For the first time in census data ever, the actual number of white Americans declined over the past decade—by 5.1 million people.
This rather stunning numerical and percentage decline was of a piece with the nation’s overall slow population growth during the 2010s. During the decade, the American population grew by just 7.4 percent, just a shade over the growth rate of the 1930s, holder of the slowest recorded rate for the U.S., at just 7.3 percent. What the two decades have in common is a prolonged recession, particularly severe among young people who might otherwise have been forming families and having children. Which means that the most culpable party in producing slow growth over the long span of American history is Wall Street, whose 1929 and 2008 self-induced crashes brought the nation to a halt in more ways than is commonly understood.
The specifically white decline has other authors as well: deindustrialization, the offshoring of industry, the failure of successive administrations to prioritize domestic production and good jobs. All of this fed into “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, shortening white working-class lifespans throughout the decade. The hollowing out of entire industrial and rural communities and regions acted as a multiplier effect for that despair.
One further factor has to be adduced in explaining the declining share and number of whites: the rapidly rising number of Americans who checked off the “Two or More Races” box when listing their racial identity. In 2010, nine million Americans checked off that box; last year, 34 million Americans did, a tidy 276 percent increase. That reflects the rise of cross-racial coupling and resultant childbirths, of course, but it probably also reflects more Americans’ willingness to acknowledge racially mixed parentage or ancestry. In a nation that’s always practiced identity politics (which until relatively recently chiefly meant white identity politics, and for Republicans, still does), the rise of mixed-race identity, which will surely continue, is a wild card whose political consequences are as yet unpredictable, though they’re sure to become substantial within the next few decades.
As the white population has shrunk, the Latino and Asian populations have continued to grow. The share of Latinos in the states that anchor the national Democratic Party (California) and the national Republican Party (Texas) are virtually identical (39.4 percent and 39.3 percent, respectively), but the share of white Texans (44 percent) exceeds the share of white Californians (34 percent). Asian Americans constitute 15 percent of California’s population and just 5 percent of Texas’s, while Texas is 12 percent Black, and California just 6 percent.
Demographics, then, may provide a starting point, but clearly aren’t sufficient to explain how the nation’s two mega-states have polar opposite political identities. Whites in Texas and California are different breeds, but that only begins the story. The cultural conservatism of the Latino population that abuts the Rio Grande creates different voting patterns, as the 2020 elections made clear. Meanwhile, Latinos in Texas’s ballooning big cities vote more in line with the liberal Latinos of Los Angeles and San Diego. Latino voter mobilization and socialization matter, too: In California, the labor movement has been investing heavily for the past quarter-century in the politicization of the state’s Latinos; in Texas, the labor movement has been too small to play an equivalent role.
That said, as all of Texas’s growth in the past decade has come in the state’s more liberal big-city metro areas, and most of its growth within nonwhite communities while white rural Texas continues to shrink, the Republicans who control state government will have to do some very fancy gerrymandering to maintain their hold on the state’s politics. Abetted by the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which has declared that political gerrymandering is none of the Court’s (or the Constitution’s) business, Texas Republicans will likely be up to that challenge.
Demographics, then, may provide a starting point, but clearly aren’t sufficient to explain how the nation’s two mega-states have polar opposite political identities.
That challenge epitomizes what is really the existential challenge for the national Republican Party: how an increasingly white nationalist party can take or hold power in a nation that is increasingly less white. The party faces a crisis of race that is also a crisis of age. Last week’s census revealed that whites no longer constitute a majority of Americans under the age of 18. And it’s also a crisis of geography, with population growth limited to urban and metropolitan areas, while the rural areas the GOP has dominated of late continue to hollow out. With these waves threatening to wash over the GOP, its long-term task can be likened to that of King Canute, that beachcombing monarch who sought to stop the tides.
One state where the Canute strategy completely failed was California. Beginning with the state GOP’s rabid embrace of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino policies in 1994, the party has been reduced to a bare quarter of the electorate, having lost 37 of the last 37 elections for statewide offices. (Their only hope to win such offices is through low-turnout special elections, which is why they’re so invested in the Gavin Newsom recall.) As unions and the Democrats invested in Latino voter registration and mobilization, Republicans persisted in anti-immigrant and regressive economic policies, abetting their own marginalization.
Nationally, Republicans have two ways to delay, if not totally counter, a California-like extinction. One is to win a greater share of Latino and Black votes through campaigns of cultural traditionalism, appealing to some voters in those communities by affirming such causes as patriarchy. Such appeals do tend to fall flat among younger voters of all races, however. The other way, of course, is to suppress the minority vote, which has become nothing less than the Republicans’ existential strategy. If more and more Americans vote, they’re toast, and they know it.
The flip side of suppressing minority voting is to panic anxious and bigoted whites to turn out as never before. The new numbers coming out of the census will doubtless be invoked by such panic-mongers as Tucker Carlson as foretelling the end of civilization. Here’s what Carlson said about that earlier this year: “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate—the voters now casting ballots—with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World … that’s what’s happening, actually.”
Never mind that those “new people” will be the ones funding the Fox audience’s Social Security and Medicare.
Carlson’s rant echoes what the Know Nothings and the Klan said about Catholics; it’s in the grand tradition of American nativism. Ironically, what that tradition denies is the most authentic element of American exceptionalism. The United States—unlike Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Japan, or any other major country on the face of the Earth—is the only major power almost entirely comprised of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who arrived during the last four centuries. What Carlson and his ilk, which includes today’s Republican Party, seek to subvert, then, is not only the fundamentals of democracy, but also America’s distinct national identity as a nation of immigrants, a polyglot, multiracial mishmash, as the new census makes abundantly clear.
