Posted on 11/27/2012 7:17:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you want to understand why President Obama was reelected despite a largely unsuccessful presidency and almost unprecedentedly high and continuous unemployment, just look at the Cuban-American vote.
In fact, if you want to understand America today — specifically, why it is in decline — just look at the Cuban-American vote.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “The president captured 48% of the Cuban-American vote in Florida — a record high for a Democrat.”
Democratic presidential nominees went from 25 percent of the Cuban-American vote in 2000, to 29 percent in 2004, to 35 percent in 2008, to 48 percent in 2012.
We obviously have a dramatic trend here.
Now, why would that be?
There are two reasons: No experience of evil, and American education.
The first generation of Cuban-Americans had escaped Communist evil. People who know evil are generally conservative. Leftism and liberalism — no longer distinguishable — are rooted in large measure in naïveté and wishful thinking. The beliefs that people are basically good and that evil regimes can virtually always be negotiated with are two such examples.
Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.
That is why Jews from the Soviet Union are the only non-Orthodox Jews who vote in the majority for Republicans. They, too, know evil, and they recognize the destructive appeal of the big, take-care-of-you state.
The other reason for the dramatic shift in the Cuban-American vote is American education.
Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/Left perspective. Multiculturalism has replaced E Pluribus Unum; the American past is villainous; the country is racist; morality is relative; and the left-wing cause of the day — now global warming — is taught as incontrovertible truth (ask your children how many times they have been shown Al Gore’s global warming video, An Inconvenient Truth, and whether they have been taught both sides of the man-made-global-warming-leading-to-catastrophe hypothesis).
American schools, especially universities, are left-wing seminaries. The only difference between your local college and a Christian seminary is that the latter is more honest. The Christian seminary announces its goal — to graduate committed Christians. The universities deceive when they say they have no agenda other than to open minds. They may believe this deception, but it is a deception nevertheless. Almost no university ever has a conservative speaker at its commencement exercises; nearly every professor in liberal-arts departments is a Democrat (and a left-wing Democrat at that); and on the few occasions that conservatives do receive an invitation to speak at a college, they are likely to be continuously heckled, may well need body guards, or might have their invitation rescinded, as with Fordham University and Ann Coulter last week.
Members of the second Cuban-American generation have been far more influenced by their schools and by television shows than by their parents. And the same holds true for second- and third- and fourth- and fifth-generation Americans of every background.
A long time ago, schools taught American history, not Politically Correct American history, as mandated, for example, by California law — which forbids the use of any textbooks that do not emphasize the roles of women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered.
And a long time ago, most Americans knew what America stood for and taught it to the next generation. In other words, even conservatives have largely forgotten either the distinctive American values system or how to communicate it. Meanwhile the Left has been utterly clear about what leftism stands for and has used the schools, the news media, and the entertainment industries to transmit its values.
As a result, the American Trinity of Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum has been supplanted with Egalitarianism, Secularism, and Multiculturalism — Europe’s trinity.
And that is why the children of Cuban-Americans, like the children of virtually every other group in America, including White Anglo-Saxon Protestant children, increasingly vote Left.
Either conservatives — from presidential candidates to the rest of us — learn what we stand for and learn to communicate it, or the greatest experiment in making a good society will come to its end.
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist.
Why should the Cuban-Americans miss out on the taxpayer-paid life of leisure? Taxpayer funded college tuition, EBT cards, Obamaphones, welfare, subsidized housing, Obamacare... it’s all there for the looting... er.. taking.
Praeger is completely, completely, completely wrong. Wrong with a capital R. He is making the error of thinking that so-called Cuban Americans are a static group of original exiles from the 1960s, their okay children and their corrupted grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He is thinking of the Jews of the biblical exodus, a group leaving en masse. But that is not a correct model. There have been successive waves of refugees, so you could find a teenager in Miami who barely speaks Spanish, the grandchild of refugees, and another teenager who doesn’t speak English, whose family got here last year. There are elderly who have been here since 1959, and others who have arrived last month.
Praeger is also wrong wrong wrong to say that distance from communism through generations is what turns people Democrats. But in fact, it is the more recent arrivals who are likely to vote Dem - being born and raised in communism, they have no understanding of freedom beyond the freedom to go to Walmart. They have no loyalty or interest in thr United States, they go back and forth to Cuba constantly. These newbies are of all ages - they voted for Obama because he gave them easy access to Cuba, giving them unlimited “family.visitation”. There are people who commute from Miami to Havana on a monthly basis. They voted for Obama.
The bias toward centralized power is the natural one. People do not automatically understand the notions of distributed decentralized power, and they don’t automatically understand how you achieve liberty or what its costs are in terms of limitations on government power.
“Classic liberal” notions of limited government have to be taught, and they are no longer taught. Every year we graduate another wave of new voters who have no clue and don’t know they have no clue.
It is identification as a minority race in a white dominant country (for now)
The irony is the early Cuban exiles (lol...they weren’t exiles were they...they ain’t going back...the ones who would have are dead or dying)
...the irony is that the early Cubans are as white as I am and are some of the most Caucasian of all Latin American peoples..
now most of them are here and Cuba is brown like the Dominican Republic and status from white down in the same too
I don’t agree that most later Cubans are dems...the Mariel boatlift sorts were not
I think it’s the kids..
when I lived in Miami 20 years ago Democrat Cubans..in national elections were rare as hens teeth
I do not know the specifics about the American (of Cuban descent) community, but my comments were directed towards our government educational system. In that respect I agree with Mr. Praeger. The Government Educational system is geared to dumb down it's citizens with respect to their Constitutional rights, and to what actually defines a Constitutional republic. They aren't taught why this Country was founded; why we had a revolution; and what principles our Founders valued. Instead they are taught the opposite, and after not too many generations you have a population that believes it is Government's job to take care of them from womb to tomb. Washington DC becomes the new god.
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