John Derbyshire’s latest racist, right-wing extremist extremism is up at VDARE. I’m a big fan of John’s work, even though I think the people at VDare are a bit weird. Not the bad sort of weird, more like the eccentric sort of weird. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s an oddness about some of them. Perhaps it is the effects of working with taboo material for so long, like radiation sickness. But, it takes all kinds and my tastes are not conventional. Anyway, his column has some interesting facts like this one.
The 1911 census in the newly-founded British dominion of South Africa showed whites as 22 percent in a population of 6 million. By 1980, although their actual numbers had more than tripled, they had dwindled to 16 percent in a population of 28 million, with a birthrate half that of blacks. The demographic writing was on the wall. (Whites are now nine percent in a population of 53 million, just twice the proportion of whites in 1970s Rhodesia, and of course still falling.)
I had that on my mind as I was reading something on National Review. The comment by Scott Wilson is the important bit:
Had the electorate in 2012 looked like the electorate in 1988, Romney likely carries all but a handful of states. Romney carried white voters in every age demographic. The GOP doesn’t have a policy problem, and frankly it really doesn’t have a candidate problem, although I understand the comfort in thinking those things might be true; if they were true, our problems would be fixable, or at least more easily fixable.
No,our problems are demographic in nature, and for that, there really isn’t any short-term cure. Sadly.
That, of course, brings to mind this Steve Sailer post from after the last election. A little math confirms something about modern American politics. Blacks vote democrat 100% of the time. Thinking there’s any chance of changing that is crazy. Right away that gives the democrats 13% of the vote. Hispanics are not as big, but they consistently go 70% for democrats. That’s another 6% of the vote bringing the floor for Democrats to 20% of a national election. In some states, that floor is higher, because of a smaller white vote.
When you look at the white vote, 20% have been calling themselves liberal for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. That’s another 15% going democrat bringing their floor total to 35%. Now, polling consistently puts the percentage of whites calling themselves conservative at 40%. Even though many in that group are libertarian, anarchists and just angry misfits, let’s assume they vote for the GOP. That puts their floor at 30%. That sounds pretty close, but the 35% is much more reliable and dedicated.
It is not hard to see what happens when you increase the Hispanic vote. If we amnesty 20 million Mexicans, that doubles the vote share, bringing the Democrats over the 40% threshold. That means they need just one in three whites to carry an election. Even now, they need just 40% of that group. Scott Wilson is largely correct. The GOP has a demographic problem more than anything. The share of the vote off-limits is forever off-limits. The share that makes up their base is increasingly unreliable. The crackup we are seeing with Boehner is simply a reflection of slow tearing apart of the GOP.