October 4, 2009

Older VDARE.com column: How the GOP can survive in 2050

Here's an excerpt from one of my VDARE.com columns:

Recently, the bloggers Cold Equations and One STDV looked at the Census Bureau’s 2050 population projections, and in effect tried to update the 1997 Brimelow-Rubenstein forecast of the partisan tilt of the playing field in the 2048 and 2052 Presidential elections, assuming the GOP garners the same share of the vote within each race as in this decade. Upon that base, I built a model with a few more factors, such as age and citizenship differences.

The result: If—as in some time-loop nightmare—we just refought the 2008 election over and over, mere demographic change alone would propel the Democrats from 53 percent last year to 59 percent by mid-century.

That is, if the GOP keeps doing what it did in 2008, the country will become a more or less one-party regime—just like the President’s chosen hometown of Chicago. And that might be the best case scenario. Think Detroit. Or New Orleans.

And yet the GOP’s plight is not hopeless. Looking at my statistical model of the 2048-2052 elections: if

1. The GOP’s share of the white vote grows from 55 percent to 70 percent; and
2. White turnout returns to the level seen in 1992 (during Ross Perot’s insurgent run),

Then, all else being equal, GOP candidates would still win in the middle of the 21st century. The party would get a 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent majority in the popular vote in 2052.

To put that in current perspective, about one third of Obama’s white voters would have had to switch to Republican by 2052.

That certainly wouldn’t be easy.

But does anybody have a better plan?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

15 comments:

Mark said...

Do your statistical models take into account declining immigration (and perhaps even out-migration by Asians) due to the declining quality of life in the USA? They should.

Aaron said...

The Sailer Strategy and the Frum Strategy are variations on the same theme (call it the Sailer-Frum Strategy): Republicans have no hope of getting a sizable percentage of Hispanic votes, much less blacks, and demographic trends will only worsen this problem in the future. Therefore, change the Republican message in order to increase the number of white Republican votes. The disagreement is over which voters to target. Frum wants to win back college-educated whites; Sailer apparently wants to mobilize working-class whites, those who are hurt most by immigration etc.

One question I haven't seen addressed by Sailer or by Frum is, how to bring in your target voters without alienating lots of your current voters? Frum wants (or says he wants) to bring back moderates without losing the support of the "base", including social conservatives. How can he do that? Sailer wants to polarize the discourse on race, culture, and immigration, thereby bringing in more whites, but I don't recall him addressing the fact that this would probably drive away the moderate white Republicans and independents who hate "racism" as much as any Democrat does. Has Sailer ever calculated the net white votes he can win in his strategy?

One thing is clear: the Republican Party can't win by talking like vdare.com. There's a wide consensus among non-liberal whites on race, culture, and national identity. That consensus is basically the liberal position in 1965. That's what the political right has to work with.

Republicans need to talk about race as much as possible, but in a moderate way: on topics like affirmative action, police "profiling", "white privilege", illegal immigration, etc. Republicans need moderates like David Frum and Charles Krauthammer to read Steve Sailer's columns and translate them into publicly acceptable discourse.

Otis the Sweaty said...

"One thing is clear: the Republican Party can't win by talking like vdare.com."

Yes they can, they just need for the economy to get sufficiently horrible.

If unemployment is around 14% in 2012, the Republicans will be able to win on sheer racial resentment should they decide to go that route.

Anonymous said...

I received an imbecilic recorded message from Newt Gingrich last week warning me that the US was going to turn into a European social democracy unless and all I could think was "We should be so lucky. I'd like to live in Sweden or The Netherlands or Germany. More likely the US is turing into Argentina or South Africa".

Michael Carr - Veritas Literary said...

Here's one way. Roughly half of all Hispanics in the US are white. They're more like the Italian immigrants from 100 years ago than their fellows from Havana or Oaxaca. Stop labeling everyone with a Spanish-sounding last name as brown and watch these people become the new Riccis.

David Blue said...

In answer to your question, Steve, I don't see an alternative strategy, which does not mean that this one will be adopted let alone made to work.

I do not think creating polarization is an issue. (Shaping it, yes, creating it, no.) The situation is self-polarizing.

I think it's a little like the late Roman Empire, when too many barbarians had been admitted into the Empire's lands for there to be any real hope of assimilation or even accommodation on mutually pleasant terms. The cant that had accompanied the Roman elites' handing over the land to the barbarians had been refuted by experience. (Lower class Romans culturally could not embrace barbarians in the numbers that the elite demanded of them, even if the barbarians had wanted only to be accepted.) Community relations were openly harsh.

The killer for the Romans was that they could not re-start. It was not that they had lost undisputed ownership of their land and had to begin again to win it back. It was not only that they were over-taxed, over-regulated, enervated and religiously divided. It was that they did not have and could not develop an organic elite, one that favored them as naturally as elite Romans in days of old favored Romans as a whole over non-Romans. Whoever the Romans chose as their leaders, they could not get anybody reliably to favor their interests, whereas the barbarians could find leaders to represent them.

It's that way now, and I don't see how this can be remedied. Nobody of the ruling class wants to favor white interests for real. They will not do it. They may make noises like maybe they would, to get elected, but they'll see the people who would want them to follow through on that as racists and inferior, not like them. They will have no reluctance to break any undertakings, and seek accommodation with their peers on the other side.

In other words, that problem of building a party that would deserve 70% white support is non-trivial, to put it mildly.

Bruce Banned said...

There's a wide consensus among non-liberal whites on race, culture, and national identity. That consensus is basically the liberal position in 1965. That's what the political right has to work with.

That consensus needs to be broken, to return to the original non-liberal views on race, culture and national identity.
The political right cannot pander to liberals, because they're not going to vote for the right anyway in any shape or form.

Republicans need moderates like David Frum and Charles Krauthammer to read Steve Sailer's columns and translate them into publicly acceptable discourse.

The GOP only needs moderates if they want to keep throwing elections with duds like McCain.

Anonymous said...

Sad blog entry, Steve. You're obviously deeply attached to the disgusting GOP-Dem system. No way out, huh? Certain kinds of people will just have to get used to a permanent trend of political marginalization in their own country, huh?

This country is seething right now in 2009. And we, as a people, will end this two party fixed system soon, or we will descend into a long period of chaos and civil warfare.

Last night "conservative" Drudge linked to a big article at the left wing Guardian UK about the spiraling out of control catastrophe that is California. The main points of that article are that race has got nothing to do with it and the New World Order global village value system is here to stay.

Apparently, Steve, you also believe the current value system is here to stay. That is your mistake.

Anonymous said...

There is no need to demonize blacks to make the point. Republicans should simply say, "If you want to do more to help African Americans, you should vote for the Democrats--they are the party of the African Americans. We Republicans believe that everyone should be treated equally regardless of race." That is all you need to say. It would be very hard for anyone to denounce that as a racist statement.

Anonymous said...

The GOP's not winning 70% of the white vote. Not now, not ever.

White Advocate said...

KingM is right: many Hispanics are potentially assimilable, much more so than blacks and even many asians. We should be encouraging the assimilation of Hispanics capable of college education and their intermarriage with whites. Elite Hispanics have no problem voting in their genetic interests south of the border, it seems like they ought to be able to do the same here in the USA. However, NONE of this is problem unless without a serious, long-term immigration moratorium.

Mark said...

Roughly half of all Hispanics in the US are white. They're more like the Italian immigrants from 100 years ago than their fellows from Havana or Oaxaca. Stop labeling everyone with a Spanish-sounding last name as brown and watch these people become the new Riccis.

Really? So that's why the percent of California 19-year-olds in college fell from 43% to 30% in the space of a single decade?

Interesting...

David Davenport said...

Republicans need moderates like David Frum and Charles Krauthammer to read Steve Sailer's columns and translate them into publicly acceptable discourse.

]I.e., "Republicans" need Jews to tell Repubs what is publicly acceptable discourse.

MaryJ said...

Roughly half of all Hispanics in the US are white. They're more like the Italian immigrants from 100 years ago than their fellows from Havana or Oaxaca. Stop labeling everyone with a Spanish-sounding last name as brown and watch these people become the new Riccis.
-----
White Hispanics appear to be just as tribal as the brown kind. Most of the worst open borders agitators/HIspanic nationalist types are white Hispanicas, e.g., the Diaz-Balarts, Linda Chavez, Mel Martinez, Robert Menendez, blonde haired blue eyed Maria Elena Sanchez, etc. Remember it was the white Cubans who turned Miami into a Spanish-speaking city. One thing I've observed after reading immigration talkboards where Hi9spanics post for some time: they are obsessive about the Spanish language which holds all the disparate racial groups together. I forget who said it (Samuel Huntington?), but a wise observer once pointed out that the Spanish language is to Hispanics what the Ummah is to Muslims. Their extreme attachment to their language -- whether white or brown -- is one of the big things that's keeping them from assimilating into our culture.

TGGP said...

KingM, hispanics aren't black, but they aren't italians either. See Generations of Exclusion, which Sailer has discussed before (repeatedly bringing up the main takeaway lesson).