Posted on 12/12/2012 5:31:23 AM PST by Kaslin
In the scramble to make the GOP more diverse, a lot of people are looking at Asian Americans, whom many believe are a natural constituency for the party. I would love it if Asian Americans converted en masse to the Republican Party, but the challenge for Republicans is harder than many appreciate.
President Obama did spectacularly well with Asian Americans, garnering nearly three-quarters of their vote. This runs counter to a lot of conventional wisdom on both the left and the right. On average, Asian American family income is higher and poverty is lower than it is for non-Latino whites. Entrepreneurship, family cohesion and traditional values all run strong among Asian Americans, and reliance on government runs weak.
And yet, Asian Americans -- now the fastest-growing minority in America -- are rapidly becoming a core constituency of the Democratic Party.
I've joked for years with my Indian American relatives and friends that they are the new Jews because their parents bury them in guilt and overeducate them. It turns out it doesn't end there. Sociologist Milton Himmelfarb observed that "Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." Well, Indian Americans earn like Jews and ... vote like Jews.
And maybe for similar reasons. The comparison to Jews is instructive. Perhaps the most common explanation for the GOP's problem with Asian Americans is the party's pronounced embrace of Christianity, which turns off many Jews as well.
According to Pew studies, barely a third of Chinese Americans are Christian and less than a fifth of Indian Americans are.
"Whenever a Gujarati or Sikh businessman comes to a Republican event, it begins with an appeal to Jesus Christ," conservative writer Dinesh D'Souza recently told the New York Times magazine. "While the Democrats are really good at making the outsider feel at home, the Republicans make little or no effort."
My friend and colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, an Indian American and devout Catholic, says the GOP has a problem with seeming like a "club for Christians."
That rings true to me. I've attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn't a Christian. I've never taken offense, but I can imagine how it might seem to someone who felt like he was even less part of the club.
A few years ago, Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist, reported this finding: As racial and ethnic diversity increases, social trust and cohesion plummets. "Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer," Putnam found. "People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle."
The villain isn't racism or bigotry or anything so simple. The phenomenon is much more complex. Indeed, it's not clear why this happens, but it's clear that it does. Economic inequality and cultural attitudes do not matter much. "Americans raised in the 1970s," Putnam writes, "seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s."
Part of the explanation stems from the fact that people with shared experiences and cultures draw strength from working together, whereas with strangers, language often becomes guarded, intentions questioned.
The GOP is not a Christian club, but there's no disputing that Christianity is a major source of strength and inspiration for many Republican activists. This is nothing new and, generally speaking, there's nothing wrong with this. The abolitionist, progressive and civil rights movements were all significantly powered by Christian faith.
As someone who's long argued for theological pluralism and moral consensus on the right, it strikes me as nuts for the GOP not to do better with Asian Americans, particularly given how little religion has to do with the policy priorities of the day.
Twenty years ago, conservatives started referring to Judeo-Christian values in an effort to be more inclusive. The challenge now is to figure out how to talk in a way that doesn't cause decent and dedicated Christians to pull in like a turtle, while also appealing to non-Judeo-Christians and the nonreligious. That'll be hard, requiring more than name-dropping Confucius or Krishna.
Count me in, a conservative party caucusing with Republicans could actually have some clout. It would force Republicans into more conservative policies in order for them to maintain any kind of party power federally.
How do you expect people who are not Christians to be attracted to a party that announces it’s a Christian party? I’m a Christian, and so were the Founders. But like the Founders, a person’s religious beliefs should not be forced on others. That’s why they deliberately created a country with no official religion. We are for freedom of religious expression...but not for creating a religious-based political party.
Slayer,
I’m more than fed up with these baboso’s like lindsey graham, or john boehner who profess to speak for the party.
I wouldn’t give anus heads like these guys two minutes.
Time to quit capitulating to RINO crappola.
You doing ok LLS? all ok here.
LLS
I think that you are on to something!
LLS
Okay, you get freedom of expression, but if you go back and read Goldberg's comment again toward the end of the article, you'll see that he is appealing to Christians to refrain from free expression.
He's just practicing a mitzvah, a good deed -- practicing Jewish piety by asking Christians to stick a sock in it (so that God and conscientious Jews don't have to listen to their impious drivel).
There, that fixed it!
That’s what I call strategery
And that is just the pragmatic argument.
Agree, but actually that's not what is happening. The author claims that is happening, but that's just a bushwah liberal appeal to motive in lieu of argument: "oooh, oooh, oooh, your Christian witnessing is putting me in an 'iron maiden' and torturing me with red-hot irons to confess the magisterium of the Catholic Church and the Holy Office / the prophetic truth of Mohammed and the Koran /.... oh, what was it again? Zionism? Zeusism? Zoroastrianism? Herpes zoster? Oooh, oooh, oooh, you're torturing me!!!"
Free expression isn't even in the same ballpark as "you have to convert to Xtianity or Hesychasmism or Nestorianism, if you want to be a Republican."
Tea Partiers and Christian conservative Republicans 99% of the time don't do that, but they get taxed with it constantly, and for the most part falsely, as a cheap and socially acceptable way of sneering at their faith and their devotion to it.
I do.
I do, too. The "Mormon thing" was a big issue with a lot of conservative Christians.
Didn’t the states where some conservatives may have foolishly sat out the elections vote for Romney anyway? Romney was supposed to be competitive in “moderate” states but certainly was not. Thre wasn’t a single moderate state upset for Romney. There were few upsets at all in 2012.
Since the 1870s, the GOP has been the party of middle America. The Democrats were the party of “Rum , Romanism and Rebellion”. This has been slightly updated to Urban poor, alienated immigrants, and the grievance lobby and cultural Marxism. Not much has really changed. In so far as the GOP is the conservative party. Those people put off with talk of a Judeo-Christian tradition are generally alienated with America. As a UES Reform Jew, I can tell you that the same Jews complaining of Christian religiosity at Republican events are even more put off by Orthodox Jewish religiosity. At the same time, they are hypocrites who fully support progressive attempts to immanentize the eschaton through leftist social programs. And most would not otherwise be Republicans, since they buy into socialism as charity. Of course, there are some secular fiscal conservatives. But if they couldn’t vote for Mitt Romney, who never brought up social issues, and did not make religion and issue, how do we get them? It wasn’t the GOP, which made social issues a factor this year. It was the left.
Selling out religion won’t get us votes. But there are things we can and should change. The hackneyed anti-intellectualism that has become the hallmark of the degraded Jacksonian tradition has to go. 50 years ago, National Review readers made “Don’t immanentize the Eschaton” into a bumper sticker. In the last decade, we used terms like “Freedom Fries” and “Cheese eating surrender monkeys”. That is not improvement. One can oppose leftist social engineering without being anti-intellectual. There is a conservative intellectual tradition in America. There is an older tradition reaching back to Plato. We have 3000 years of history, while the ersatz intellectuals of the left are all but parodying their own failures of the last 250 years.
As for non-Muslim Asian Americans, I think Jonah misses a few key points. The first is that they are educated and aspiring, so anti-intellectualism turns them off. They also assimilate not to American culture but to liberal urban culture, since that this where they live. The same thing is happening with the third generation Cuban Americans. Castro is passé, John Stuart is cool. And to get good jobs in the thoroughly world of information technology and the “knowledge workforce”, outward adherence to PC shibboleths is important. Just like whites, they know that they can lose their jobs for not being PC. They understand that this will hurt their children’s futures. And they understand that perceived oppressed groups are allowed to keep their traditional culture in multicultural America, so long as they vote Democrat.
The GOP and the conservative movement allowed the left to control the commanding heights of culture. It ensures the left’s victory. Walking away from religion won’t fix this, it will make it worse.
If I were in India, I would support the Hindu BJP, which is an explicitly Hindu party.
One cannot support it without being anti-intellenge though.
“Anti-intellectual”
It is a ridiculous assertion that questioning, debating or criticizing leftist ideas is being “anti-intellectual”, the whole idea that the Ivory Tower idiots are above reproach is the very definition of “anti-intellectual”.
I guess a “peer review” is considered a hate crime too.
Peter Singer thinks children should be aborted years afer birth. This is not intellecualism, this is savagery.
Margaret Sanger, Kinsey, Freud etc etc are not above criticism and disagreeing with their barbaric notions is not in any way “anti-intellectual”. Labeling those who dissent from the lefty orthodox as “anti-intellectual” is a convenient sheild that is the height of hypocrisy.
There is nothing more intellectual than dissenting, challenging, questioning, criticizing orthodoxy! Those that believe critics are “anti-intellectual” are describing themselves.
“How can one call the GOP a “Christian club” when it nominated for its presidential standard bearer a non-Christian?”
are you showing your bias or your ignorance?
What are you implying? That Romney is a Christian? That the GOP is really a Christian club? Or both?
When you bother to read an entire paragraph before responding in silly cant, I will respond. Or, you could simply re-read the last sentences “One can oppose leftist social engineering without being anti-intellectual. There is a conservative intellectual tradition in America. There is an older tradition reaching back to Plato. We have 3000 years of history, while the ersatz intellectuals of the left are all but parodying their own failures of the last 250 years.” and retract your response as baseless.
Amen brother! Me too.
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