With nothing to do, Texas liberals are reduced to dreamy forecasts about the future of Texas politics. They’ve gone from “hope and change” to “hope and pray,” except that they don’t generally pray.
The clung-to hope among Texas liberals, and it is their only hope, is that as Hispanics become a bigger percentage of the population, Texas will swing back to the Democratic Party. At the very least, Texas will become a swing state, or so the incantation goes.
Unfortunately for liberals, a brand new Baselice poll in Texas reveals that Hispanics favor the Republican Cruz to the Democratic Sadler by 9 points and Obama’s edge on Romney is a paltry 9 points. Texas Hispanics are becoming Republican, and doing so faster than Hispanics in other states. This is par for the course. Texas leads.
Texas liberals will surely rack their brains and come up with an excuse for why Cruz/Sadler is a one-time-thing for Hispanics. That way they can go back to expecting a growing Hispanic population to someday save them from irrelevancy.
There are problems with this expectation, though.
Texas has been getting more and more Hispanic for decades. In that same period, however, Texas has gotten more and more Republican.
To be sure, there is a major mitigating factor here. During the same time period conservative Texas Democrats have been switching parties. So, while Hispanic Texans have been adding Democratic votes, other Texans have been shedding them even faster. This is basically true.
The problem with this phenomenon offering long term hope to liberals is twofold.
First, rural Texas hasn’t fully switched parties yet.
Liberals can count this process as over, much as they’ve counted out the oil and gas industry with authoritative pronouncements about alternative energy. In truth, oil and gas probably doesn’t have much more than a century, century-and-a-half of growth and expansion left before it starts to contract. So, in a way the liberals are right, if a bit premature. Mostly they are wrong.
They aren’t as badly wrong about the Texas party switch being finished, but they are wrong. Anyone with family in east Texas hears someone new every cycle saying they just voted Republican for the first time in their life. The Democratic Party long ago forsook these people in order to triple-deliver the Manhattan/San Francisco style vote, and it will be the party’s undoing.
Secondly, and more importantly, Hispanics are becoming Republican.
Let’s back up. Hispanics are conservative and always have been; virtually nobody argues with this.
Hispanics were Democrats for various reasons. First, Democrats were the immigrant party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because they were the labor party. Working conditions were pretty poor in some places and the Democrats took up their cause. Secondly, the Democratic Party took up the cause of the poor, a feature that appealed to the Catholic sensibilities of Hispanics. Finally, the Democratic Party made room for Catholic immigrants in the face of nativism.
The Democratic Party has managed to strategically give away two of these hills, and the other has succumbed to the forces of time. In fact, the Democratic Party no longer truly owns any of these advantages, and their old constituencies are coming to understand this.
How has the Democratic Party given away all three advantages with Hispanics?
First, the Democrats’ old moves are hurting average union members in a new world. You think not? Then why card check? If unions still served member interests, they wouldn’t have to intimidate members into voting with them. The situation has ripened for a counter-revolution in how the rank-and-file behave politically. If not a counter-revolution, the slow bleed has already begun.
In truth, the labor movement’s legitimate gains happened a long time ago, and is now engaged in fattening labor leaders and politicians to the detriment of members. They are endangering employers ability to employ people.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has taken to spending the vast political capital they accumulated building the social safety net, and they have nearly drained it.
By force of habit they push for more freebies, but these freebies are different. Instead of reinforcing the dignity of people, these freebies damage it by stealing initiative and self-reliance. They are always packaged with a ready-made victim narrative to reinforce self-doubt, hopelessness, and dependency on a paternalistic party.
It is a deep historical irony that Republicans like Paul Ryan are protecting the social safety net against its parent party, who, like rats who’ve stayed too long in the presence of their offspring, have decided to eat them.
What else can be said about a party that decided to take the better part of a trillion dollars out of Medicaid to pay for the unwanted, unsolicited monstrosity called ObamaCare? Or a stubborn refusal to admit that age demographics require a restructuring of social security if it is to survive at all?
Finally, faithful Protestants and Catholics have found each other politically. A couple dozen decades getting to know one another can have that effect on people who, while perhaps different in some flashy ways, are almost identical where it counts politically. Time has built this relationship, and we are in a new American era of cooperation among the faithful.
The political partnership of Tony Perkins, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee is a nice symbol of this, but it isn’t driving it. It is the other way around. Realities on the ground drove this partnership, and others like it all over the land.
Losing or taking for granted these major factors that wed Hispanics to the Democratic Party for decades has created another problem. It has opened up the Democratic Party to latent weaknesses they’ve had for some time, but that were suppressed by strengths now gone.
Roe vs. Wade was a time bomb for the Democratic Party. It drove the parties to realign on ideological lines. We used to have a party of northern conservatives and liberals plus southern inroads (GOP) and a party of southern conservatives and liberals plus northern immigrants who had less stake in the Civil War (Democratic Party).
The New Deal, Great Society caused significant realignment, but Roe vs. Wade cemented them into the American liberal and the American conservative parties. Americans are conservative in label by a strong plurality. Americans are conservative on the issues overwhelmingly, including Hispanics.
Our country’s elite helped a left wing snob become President and the Democratic Party’s mask was put in a drawer for a while. Government takeover of health care? Forcing Christian businesses to pay for abortions? The only American President ever to publicly support redefining marriage? A rhetorical campaign to help switch our expansive “freedom of religion” into a cramped and oppressive “freedom of worship” from the President himself? The Democratic Party may have overestimated the number of Sean Penns in the country by a 10 or 20 million.
In addition, there is the promotion of Julian Castro as the Democratic anti-Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz largely embodies the Hispanic future in the Republican Party. The choice of Castro as Hispanic Democrat standard bearer in Texas might even hasten a manly Hispanic realization of how unappealing the Democratic Party has become.
Finally, one of the most important factor of all – lots of Texas Hispanics are making money now. Building small businesses turns people into fiscal conservatives. It teaches people how hard it is to create wealth and jobs, and reveals the recklessness of the government class in presuming upon the health and growth of businesses.
By finding themselves on the wrong side of everything that gave them dominance among Hispanics, the Texas Democratic Party has opened itself up to their latent weaknesses with the same group.
Historical inertia is the only friend the Texas Democratic Party has left with Texas Hispanics. In truth, the party no longer has much business receiving their vote.