“The Emerging Republican Advantage,” an essay by the journalist and historian John Judis in National Journal, has ignited a national controversy.  In part this has to do with the fact that in 2002 Judis co-authored, with Ruy Teixeira, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” an empirically rich and well-reasoned study that convinced many progressives that it was only a matter of time until the numerical growth of a coalition of white professionals, African-Americans and Latinos produced a permanent or at least long-term Democratic majority.  In reconsidering this thesis, Judis puts a lot of emphasis on the aversion to taxes and big government of middle-income Americans, a discontent that benefits the Republican Party.

Judis and Teixeira are brilliant analysts of politics, but I never believed in their emerging Democratic majority thesis.  The idea of the “coalition of the ascendant”  is based chiefly on the premise that Latino voters, the most rapidly growing share of the U.S. electorate, will continue to be Democratic partisans as their share of the population increases over time.  This assumes that Latinos, in their voting behavior, will be more like black voters, the most loyal Democratic constituency, than like European-American “white ethnics” such as Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, who deserted New Deal liberalism for Reagan conservatism as they assimilated into mainstream society and moved up in income and out to the suburbs.  (A British saying had it: “Give an Irishman a horse and he’ll vote Tory”).

My guess is that Mexican-Americans, a major Latino group, will vote more like Irish- and Italian-Americans than African-Americans.  Moreover, as in the case of European-American ethnics, the ethnicity of Mexican-Americans, outside of heavily immigrant enclaves, may become attenuated pretty quickly.

By the 1970s, a majority of American with non-English European ancestors had multiple ethnic ancestries, and most of them no longer spoke the language of this or that Old Country.  They were mainstream white Americans with a mix of, say, Polish, Irish, German and Italian grandparents.  They might rediscover their Irish ethnicity on St. Patrick’s Day and forget it again until next year.

Recently native-born Americans surpassed the foreign-born in the Latino community.  The rates of English adoption and out-marriage—mostly to non-Hispanic whites—among Latinos are similar to those of earlier generations of European immigrants.

One result of Latino assimilation may be the collapse of the very idea of a “nonwhite majority” except as a meaningless statistical category.  Already a majority of Latinos identify themselves as “white” when given the option on census forms.  As I argued in a 1996 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Beige and the Black,” because of the depth of anti-black racism in the U.S., America’s informal racial caste consciousness has always been binary—not whites vs. nonwhites, but blacks vs. non-blacks.  The “white” category has been an elastic one that has expanded to incorporate successive non-black immigrant groups—first European “ethnics” and in the future, perhaps, Latinos and Asian-Americans.

I wrote in 1998:

In the 21st century, then, the U.S. population is not likely to be crisply divided among whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians. Nor is it likely to be split two ways, between whites and nonwhites. Rather, we are most likely to see something more complicated: a white-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority — a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans — offset by a minority consisting of blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again.

Jamelle Bouie has made a similar argument recently, in a 2014 essay for Democracy Journal titled “Demography Is Not Destiny”:

While there are limits to the comparison between the Latinos and Asian Americans of today with their Irish and Italian predecessors—Latinos and Asian Americans span a wide range of nationalities—the basic point stands. These are two upwardly mobile groups that are rapidly assimilating with the white mainstream. If the pattern of the past holds, the future won’t be majority-minority; it will be a white majority, where Spanish last names are common. And if that’s the case, there’s a chance that the GOP ends up getting a new crop of voters over the next two decades: Latinos and Asian Americans who have assimilated, become “white,” and thus more conservative in their political preferences.

What replaces Old World (or, in the case of Latino, other New World) ethnicities, as they become attenuated?  All American schoolchildren are taught that America is a “nation of immigrants with a melting-pot culture.”  But this is misleading.  Like Canada and Australia—and Argentina and Brazil—it’s a European settler nation, in which immigrants and their descendants assimilate to the language and political culture of the first settlers, while contributing mostly minor cuisine and folk traditions.  The single largest ancestry group in the U.S. is German, but the German contributions to American culture—Christmas trees, kindergartens and beer brands—are negligible, compared to those of the original British settlers.