Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Because I Got Nothing

Cut and Paste Blogging:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/republicans-need-minorities-anyway.html

Keep in mind, though, that the racial dynamics of the modern Democratic Party are far more stable than they were 50 years ago. The New Deal Democrats were holding together a coalition of pro-civil-rights liberals and white supremacists. The Obama-era party is a coalition of nonwhites and white voters who are comfortable with diversity. The Obama coalition may fracture, and in any case, the Republican structural advantage in Congress will give it a viable power base for years. But the hope for building a nearly all-white party that regularly wins presidential elections is highly optimistic, not to mention more than a bit horrifying to contemplate.

That's a point I've made to my students for years.  FDR cobbled together a coalition that was bound to fall apart.  Reagan may have done the same thing.  We will see if immigration reform drives a real wedge between the Wall Street Republicans and the Walmart Republicans.

But the Reagan coalition is fading away as a result of demographic change and the loss of the college educated.

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