Pat Buchanan made some interesting remarks on the decline of the Republican Party due to immigration. In an interview with Bill Steigerwald (October 9, 2008) he said:
Q: Are we witnessing the end of the Republican Party’s 40-year cycle of power, as Chalmers Johnson says in The Nation?
A: I’ve written that. I think what is killing the Republican Party is the alteration of the electorate. You have to remember when we put this Nixon coalition together, probably 92 percent of the electorate was white. African-Americans were probably 7 percent, if that, because they didn’t vote in the South, and the rest was 1 percent. Now the white population is down to 66 percent and in voting terms it’s probably not much more than say 75 percent.
Republican (strategy) is (based on winning) the white vote. Nixon and Reagan won it by 67 and 64 percent and that simply was enough to win the election. But now you’ve got to do more than that. You’ve got to start getting some of these other minorities to put together a coalition and eventually, by the time as we move closer to the center of the century, if you got every white vote in the country, you couldn’t win on that alone. (laughs) And we can’t get them all! (laughs) Let me tell you this to make a flat statement: Foolishly, the Republican Party is condoning the importation of a brand new electorate which will doom the Republican Party.
Q: And that is?
A: This new electorate? Ninety percent of the immigrants coming in are from Third World countries and every single minority population which comes from the Third World votes Democratic — anywhere from 60 percent to 95 percent. These folks are predominately poor — and they believe in government. And the reason they believe in government is the best of reasons for them; they get more out of it than they pay in. The bottom 30 percent in income in the United States doesn’t pay any income taxes at all, I don’t think. When Barack Obama says we’re going to hit the top 5 percent (of income earners), the top 5 percent pay 60 percent of all income taxes.
Buchanan is right that immigration has had a profound impact on both parties. The Nixon and Reagan coalitions are in decline. That is bad news for the Republican Party. The opposite is true for the Democrats. Immigration, legal and illegal, has been their not-so-secret weapon. Immigration, especially from poor countries helps the Democrats in the way Buchanan identifies, but also ensures a permanent welfare state. So, the Democratic coalition is growing in strength.
The Republicans are in decline because their core constituency is.
John McCain has many strengths, but he is a Democrat in all but name on the immigration issue. The Republican Party needs to look elsewhere for a leader to reverse their decline. More on this important topic later.
No Comments