Hillary’s Deplorables

Hillary Clinton was right if undiplomatic — the Deplorables are out there, and they’re numerous. But they aren’t a majority.

The liberal community needs to face reality. Perhaps 20% of Americans fully support the core principles of Trumpism: that the 2020 election was stolen, that a Great Replacement is underway that could destroy America, and that it must be stopped. Those are Hillary’s Deplorables. Perhaps another 20% of Americans are more or less open to these principles but are not committed to them. But let’s invert those numbers. More than 50% of Americans reject those principles to some extent, and perhaps 30% of Americans reject them emphatically.

The problem is that the Deplorables are not going away soon, compromise with them is not possible, and our existing political structure, while it has not empowered the Deplorables, has not been able to disempower them either. I’m reminded of the religious wars of the Middle Ages and beyond between Catholics and Protestants that ravaged Europe. Eventually those wars ceased, possibly because new nationalisms replaced them. In fact, the Catholic/Protestant divide existed in the United States for a long time, even though it it’s now not so significant.

Sadly, we are simply stuck with the battle between Deplorables and Liberals. We are bound to continue battling until the underlying reality changes. That change will not happen until the underlying demography changes.

The liberal side has two advantages: it is solidly in the majority nationally, and demographic trends are in its favor. But the liberal side has the disadvantage that the existing American political system, based on the Constitution, is biased against it, and that system is highly resistant to change. Tinkering around the edges will help very little. Liberals have to stop worshiping the Constitution, for ultimately, nothing less than a new Constitutional Convention that replaces the existing document can fully solve the problem.

But I don’t think we’re condemned to a perpetual battle. The Deplorables will ultimately be defeated beyond recovery by demographic change, technological progress, and the growing prosperity that technological change will bring about.

The demographic change will come about through new generations and through immigration. Immigration, even of people with different ethnicities such as Dominicans and Mexicans, is not the threat that the Deplorables imagine. The history of the Irish in the United States is instructive. In the late nineteenth century they arrived in great numbers; they were poor; and they were Catholics with an allegiance to the Pope. (Other white Europeans such as the Swedes and the Italians had the same problems, but not as severely.) Yet after two generations they were thoroughly integrated.

Asian immigrants are an interesting story. The early Asian immigrants, mostly Chinese, were poor and mostly worked as manual laborers, especially the ones who were hired to build the railroads. More recent Asian immigrants have posed a different threat: they place a high value on education and rapidly gain admission to elite educational institutions and later to employment in technical fields such as computer science, medicine, and finance.

Jews have followed a similar trajectory, starting as low-paid workers in the garment industry. They eventually rose to become business owners, and careers in finance followed — as well as careers in science and medicine. Interestingly,Jews never became as prominent in engineering as they were in science.

The major waves of immigration are probably in the past. It’s likely that Colored and Hispanic immigrants will produce generations of thoroughly integrated citizens, just as the Irish, the Italians, and the Asians have.