Must-Read: The divide between Democrats and Republicans in the United States in 2016 is best conceptualized as a divide between those who think that an America in which black, brown, yellow, red, etc. people vote is great and in which they have a great deal to gain and those who think that an America in which black, brown, yellow, red, etc. people vote is no longer great and in which they have something--maybe not a great deal, but something--to lose:
Francis Wilkinson: [Race, Not Class, Dictates Republican Future][]: "The class compositions of the Republican and Democratic parties keep evolving...
...Democrats have been shedding working-class white voters for decades, while the GOP, long the party of management, entrepreneurs and inherited wealth, has acquired a new affinity for blue-collar blues, including a presidential nominee who promises to keep economically unviable coal operations in business while crushing labor competition from low-skills immigrants.... Thomas Edsall... " the "Great Democratic Inversion."... "The 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters"....
[But] stories about the disaffected working-class supporters of Donald Trump apply almost exclusively to white voters. Other working-class voters--blacks and Hispanics--are poised to provide lopsided support to Hillary Clinton.... Working-class nonwhites, having endured decades of veiled hostility from the Republican Party, now face overt antipathy from the Trumpified GOP. They show no great desire to abandon the Democratic coalition.... There is no expansive, working-class rage in the U.S. There is white conservative rage... [that] may burn brightest in deindustrialized America... [but] extends across class and educational demarcations, from blue collars to billionaires....
Democrats... [are] managing an increasingly unwieldy coalition extending from white cosmopolitan millionaires who send their kids to private schools to low-paid Hispanic service workers and black factory and office workers facing economic dislocation.... Keeping that coalition pointed in the same general direction might be impossible without the dedicated efforts of the Republican Party.... A large majority of white conservative respondents believed that whites' economic prospects might dim--they would be discriminated against--as racial diversity flowered. The implications for status anxiety, powered by a fear of whites changing places with nonwhites in the socioeconomic hierarchy, are obvious....
If it doesn't diversify and become more accommodating to nonwhites, the GOP will only grow crazier and scarier, and its effort to wield power with the support of a shrinking white base will become even more extreme. At some point, this could even entail radical efforts to suppress nonwhite votes, abandon democratic norms concerning court appointments and basic governmental operations, and engage in and rationalize frightening levels of demagogy in the pursuit of increasingly scarce white votes.
Of course, that point is already passed, isn't it?
As I say, Mitt Romney in 2012 was preaching weak-tea Trumpism in his attitude toward Obama voters:
[If] you have no skill or experience, in which case you're welcome to cross the border and stay here for the rest of your life....
47 percent of the people... will vote for the president no matter what... who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them....
These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.... And so my job is not to worry about those people--I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives....
[Obama] followed the old playbook... especially [to] the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.... Focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote.... He made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars....
Forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women.... Obamacare... anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people....
[For Black and Hispanic voters]... making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity, I mean, this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus....
The amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called DREAM Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group...
