Tribal America (Our sudden political obsession with Hispanics)

To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election-night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. On Fox News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73% Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72% and he did. Beckel’s assertion — that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate you also knew the result — turned out to be correct.

his is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: For example, in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona — and, as there were more Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won. That same year America held an election, and Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory. Nobody talked about tribal-vote shares back then, but had the percentage of what Beckel calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as it was in 1980 (88 percent), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger landslide than Reagan. The “white vote” will be even lower in 2016, and so, on the Beckel model, Republicans are set to lose all over again.

Hence the urge to get on the right side of America’s fastest-growing demographic. Only 27 percent of Hispanics voted for Romney. But all that could change if the GOP were to sign on to support some means of legalizing the presence of the 12–20 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community who are allegedly “social conservatives”

“Hispanic” is a misnomer anyway.

Most of them are INDIAN.

As in American Indian.

The ancient Aztecs, Incas, Olmecs, whatever split into tribes. The conquistadors brought them the Spanish language and Christianity (among other things*). But genetically they are native American, some mixed with white or slave blood (as many from the Caribbean).

Oh, but that’s racist to mention that, of course.

*Notice Columbus gets all the approbium, how come Pizarro gets a free pass?

The never ending fiction is that the ‘Hispanic’ community is somehow obsessed with the legalizing of illegal aliens continues each and every day. There are some areas that may need to be addressed, sure, but for day to day life, here's how the issue breaks down for the community:

Illegals continually drive down income, drive up crime, bring drugs, rape and molestations, and finally, drive down local schools. Worst, they create this atmosphere of a supposedly ‘Mexican only’ problem, where the majority of ‘brown skinned people’ only speak Spanish.

Pick a person randomly in the community - say the typical third or fourth generation American of ‘hispanic’ descent. They'll explain to you the embarrassment of not understanding when addressed in Spanish, the frustration of being assumed to be applying for a low level job, the assumption that if they are in college that they got there only because of the color of their skin. Of mail that arrives in all Spanish, of going to an ATM and having it default to Spanish.

Of their kids being beaten in the streets for not being cholo enough, of teachers not challenging their kids. Of going to register their kids for school, and having to verbally refuse multiple times free meals as they don't qualify.

It is a community which is only addressed in passing by the GOP, and only in the format of pandering. Never do you hear a GOP candidate talking about how they want to help clean up the streets by deporting these criminals, of restoring pride to the community by restoring English as the default language, of ending the endless racism in schools that paints every ‘Hispanic’ child as being at the very least a child of an illegal immigrant.

The only party in the history of the country which has created wholesale amnesties was the Republican party. If this was the only issue for ‘Hispanic’ voters, then obviously conservatives would have a free ride. Instead, you have a limited number of liberal activists who try to paint the sole issue being illegal immigration and they want to set that as the only tone in debates, lest conservatives address one of the most conservative communities in America as conservatives, who want to be tough on crime, who want to make English the only official language, who want to end the constant discrimination they suffer from liberals who assume everyone with brown skin is an illegal.

But instead, we play the tune the liberals want, and divide up the country into little tiny pieces. This is why the continued push to bring forward liberal lites fails time and time again on the national stage: When we fail to offer the voters a choice, when we fail to set a national agenda that stretches far beyond one race, we default back to only the liberals having a national agenda and become just the party of no.

And in the end, we create in the minds of all voters the idea that there is no difference between the two parties, that it doesn't matter who wins - we all lose.

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