Prop. 187 as original sin: the founding myth of today’s Republican party

As Heather MacDonald shows at National Review Online, Hispanics went from 25 percent of the California population in 1990 to 35 percent today, while whites went from 57 percent of the population to 43 percent today, and this massive demographic shift delivered that once solidly Republican state to the Democrats. But Jeb Bush and RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, repeat the old saw that it was not the Hispanicization of California’s population, but evil Proposition 187 (meaning those mean nativist Republicans who didn’t want to give state services to illegal aliens), that drove hordes of otherwise Republican-leaning (!!!!) Hispanics away from the Republican party and thus delivered California to the Democrats. To be still blaming 187 for California’s Democratic ascendancy while ignoring the massive fact of the state’s racial transformation, these Republican bigwigs have to be living in an almost clinically pathological fantasy.

It is a fantasy born of liberalism. Liberalism says you can’t make generalizations about people, or at least negative generalizations about nonwhite people. So the idea that Mestizos are a low-income, low-skill group and therefore are naturally prone to vote Democratic cannot be considered. The truth is right there, right in front of these Republicans’ fat faces, but liberalism, enclosing their minds as in a layer of fat (“They are enclosed in their own fat,” Ps. 17:10), tells them that the truth cannot be true. It is, as I said, almost a clinical divorce from reality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 01, 2007 09:55 AM | Send