• Fully 64 percent of Americans believed that creationism should be taught alongside evolution. Only 26 percent disagreed. Thirty-eight percent went so far as to say that the theory of evolution should be tossed out of the classroom and only creationism taught to children.57
• A Pew Research Center poll in 2006 saw some attrition, but, by 58 to 35 percent, Americans still favored the teaching of both creationism and evolution.58
A majority of Americans gave public schools poor to failing grades in how they deal with the issues of evolution, religion, and homosexuality.59
What do these number shout out?
America remains a predominantly Christian country. Those three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled that the state constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriages were denied retention. They were fired by the people of Iowa. In Oklahoma, a proposition to prohibit use of Sharia law in state courts passed with 70 percent of the vote.
Social and moral conservatism has a greater appeal to the American people than does the Republican Party. Why would Republicans abandon a host of issues that are far more popular than they are?
HISPANICS AND IMMIGRATION
In early 2000, veteran GOP strategist Lance Tarrance addressed the Republican National Committee. “For the last three decades we’ve had a Southern strategy,” said Tarrance. “The next goal is to move to a Hispanic strategy for the next three decades.”60
With Hispanics expected to double their share of the population to close to 30 percent by mid-century, Tarrance would seem to have a point. And Bush and Rove pursued an Hispanic strategy. The focus of their effort was on amnesty for the 12 to 20 million illegals in the country, though there was no evidence this is Hispanics’ highest priority. Amnesty, however, is a voting issue for tens of millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom oppose it.
After the Republican rout of 2006, Bush shifted this Hispanic strategy into high gear. To succeed Mehlman as party chairman he chose Senator Mel Martinez, who began his tenure with a press conference in Spanish and English. In 2007, McCain took the lead on Capitol Hill for the Bush-Kennedy bill providing a path to citizenship for illegals. This was to be his road to the Hispanic vote, and the White House.
However, an uproar ensued, magnified by cable TV, talk radio, the Web, and syndicated columns. And though it had the support of the political, corporate, and media establishments, the Bush-Kennedy-McCain immigration reform bill, amnesty by any other name, was stopped cold.
McCain had almost derailed his presidential campaign. In that same election cycle, Hillary Clinton had to withdraw her support of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give driver’s licenses to illegals and Spitzer had to abandon the idea when 70 percent of New Yorkers opposed it. By the primaries, every Republican candidate was sounding like Tom Tancredo.
What did the Bush-McCain leadership in pushing a path to citizenship for illegal aliens avail them or their party? McCain lost the Hispanic vote by a margin of 67 to 32 percent. By 2009, Rove was doing commentary on Fox News. And Martinez had resigned his chairmanship, quit the Senate, and was berating his party.
[T]he very divisive rhetoric of the immigration debate set a very bad tone for our brand as Republicans.… there were voices within our party, frankly, which if they continue with that kind of rhetoric, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, that so much of it was heard, we’re going to be relegated to minority status.61
On the issue of immigration, what do the polls, political experience, and pubic referenda teach us? Consider the following:
• California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, designed to prohibit social welfare for illegal aliens, was supported by 64 percent of whites, 57 percent of Asian Americans, 56 percent of African Americans, and 31 percent of Hispanics. Governor Pete Wilson, behind by 20, rode Prop 187 to a 10-point victory.
• In Arizona in 2004, Proposition 200, mandating a cutoff in social services to illegal aliens, won in a landslide, despite the opposition of McCain and the GOP congressional delegation. Fully 47 percent of Hispanics voted for Prop 200.
• According to a 2010 Rasmussen Poll, Americans by 87 to 9 percent believe English should be the official language of the United States.62 According to a Zogby poll, 71 percent of Hispanics agree.63 In Missouri a proposition mandating that all state agencies use English passed by nearly 7 to 1.
• A Rasmussen poll found that 77 percent of all Americans oppose giving driver’s licenses to illegals and 66 percent think it “very important” that the government secure the border and halt illegal immigration.64
• In 2011, three Rasmussen polls were conducted. Results: 61 percent favor having their state adopt a version of Arizona’s law requiring police to ID any suspect they think may be here illegally; 61 percent oppose granting automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens; and 82 percent believe businesses should have to use the federal E-Verify system to determine the immigration status of new employees.
Washington views the immigration issue as finding a way to bring illegal aliens “out of the shadows.” America sees the issue as securing the border and sending illegals back home.
As Obama prepared to take the oath, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that only 31 percent of Hispanics rated immigration as an “extremely important” issue for the new president to address, while 57 percent said the economy was extremely important.65 Immigration was listed as the sixth most important issue by Hispanic voters.
Immigration is also an issue on which the GOP is more in tune with African Americans. Some 56 percent of black Californians voted for Prop 187. A 2006 Field Poll found 59 percent would punish employers who hire illegals; 66 percent supported building a wall on the border; and only one in four favored letting illegals have driver’s licenses.66
“Amnesty for illegal workers is not just a slap in the face to black Americans,” argues T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami. “It’s an economic disaster. I see … the adverse impact that [illegal immigration] has on the political empowerment of African Americans, and the impact it has on the job market.”67
Few Republicans better exemplify the power of the issue than Lou Barletta, mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a state McCain lost by 10 points, though he invested more money and time there than in any other state.
After imposing a tough local ordinance on illegal immigrants in his hamlet of 23,000, which had been overrun, Barletta was so popular he won the GOP primary with 94 percent and the Democratic primary as a write-in, with 63 percent. In 2008, Barletta challenged eleven-term incumbent Paul Kanjorski in the Eleventh Congressional District, which Gore and Kerry won by wide margins and Kanjorski won with 73 percent in 2006. While Obama was carrying Pennsylvania by 10 points, Barletta came within 3 points of unseating Kanjorski, who revised his stance on immigration and came out sounding like a Minuteman to win. In November 2010, Lou Barletta routed Kanjorski to become the new congressman in the Eleventh C.D.
WINNING THE YOUNG
When Michael Steele was elected RNC chair to succeed Martinez, he said he would bring the traditional values party into untraditional precincts. “We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”68
To whom Steele was appealing here was uncertain, as two thirds of African Americans regard rappers as poor role models. But there are two issues, critical to the Republican base, with which the young of the nation agree with the GOP: immigration and affirmative action.
In 2010, Harvard University’s Institute of Politics conducted its 17th Biennial Youth Survey on Politics and Public Service. On the proposition “Qualified Minorities should be given special preferences in colleges and hiring,” 14 percent of young people agreed, and 57 percent disagreed. Asked if immigration had done more good than harm, 23 percent of the young said it had been beneficial, 34 percent said harmful.69
Should illegal immigrants get driver’s licenses? Only 24 percent of the young a
greed, while 58 percent disagreed. “Should illegal immigrants get financial aid at state universities?” Of the young responding, 29% said yes; 50 percent said no aid.70
Despite the cult of diversity in which they are immersed from day care center days to college dorm, American’s young yet believe in equal justice for all and special privilege for none.
BALKANIZATION OF BARACK’S PARTY
The Democratic Party has been described as a gathering of warring tribes that have come together in the anticipation of common plunder. While the party has, since FDR, claimed the allegiance of more Americans than the GOP, it is an unstable coalition. In Steve Sailer’s phrase, it is the party of the four races—blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics—led by an African American, as vulnerable to being pulled apart at its ethnic and ideological seams as was the New Deal coalition that was shredded by Richard Nixon.
Obama emerged from 2008 with 45 percent of the white vote, 64 percent of the Asian vote, 68 percent of the Hispanic vote, 95 percent of the African American vote. But by fall 2010, his support among whites had plunged to 37 percent, and white Americans had become the most energized of all anti-Obama voters.
Other fissures and fractures have become visible. The Florida Senate race between GOP Governor Charlie Crist and Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, which “evolved into a battle … tearing apart Democrats,” exposed one division. Democrats had nominated Kendrick Meek, the only black candidate with a chance of winning a Senate seat. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Obama all went to Florida to campaign for Meek. But Meek’s ex-House colleague Robert Wexler, who represented Palm Beach County while Meek represented Broward, “all but ordered the state’s many Jewish voters to back Crist.”71
With Meek lacking the solid support of his own party, Bill Clinton eventually urged him to drop out in favor of Crist. Meek refused and ran third. The Senate Democratic caucus now contains twelve Jewish senators, but not one African American.
Tensions have also arisen over campaign contributions from wealthy Jewish Democrats that have helped to defeat members of the Black Caucus deemed hostile to Israel. In 2011, when Bill Clinton went to Chicago to campaign for Rahm Emanuel, who was running for mayor, the ex-president had the race card played against him, again, as he had had in the 2008 primaries. Former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun, an African American running against Rahm, called Clinton’s endorsement of Rahm a “betrayal” of blacks.
President Bill Clinton does not live or vote in Chicago. He’s an outsider parachuting in to support another outsider. For him to come on the day following Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday to insert himself in the middle of a mayoral race, when the majority of the population and mayoral candidates are African American and Latino, is a betrayal of the people who were most loyal to him.72
Translation: Cities where people of color are the majority should be run by people of color. Representative Danny Davis, another African American in the race, agreed emphatically.
The African American community has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the Clintons, however it appears as though some of that relationship may be fractured and perhaps even broken should former President Clinton come to town and participate overtly in efforts to thwart the legitimate political aspirations of Chicago’s Black community.73
In short, the mayor of Chicago should be a black man or woman, not a white like Rahm Emanuel, and Clinton is thus depriving the black people of Chicago of what rightly belongs to them by virtue of their numbers.
Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, both now part of the Democratic coalition, are also growing in number and side with the Palestinians. But these are not the only fissures in the Obama coalition. There is a chasm between blacks and gays. Prop. 8, the California initiative to outlaw same-sex marriage, won 70 percent of African American voters. Black preachers implored their congregations to vote to ban as an “abomination” what gays, lesbians, and liberals regard as the civil rights cause of the new century. On social issues like abortion, Hispanics and blacks often vote against white liberals.
The forty million African Americans and fifty million Hispanics, living side by side in urban America, often clash over spoils and turf. In New Orleans, after the damage caused by Katrina, black resentment at Mexican workers coming to take jobs rebuilding the city spilled out into public acrimony. In California, black and Hispanic gangs are waging a civil war. Black-white prison violence has been eclipsed by black-Hispanic violence.
On referenda to cut off social services to illegal aliens and keep them from getting driver’s licenses, blacks vote like Republicans. Having been displaced as America’s largest minority, blacks see Hispanics as rivals for the benefits of affirmative action, which was first established to undo the consequences of slavery and segregation, from which few Hispanics ever suffered.
When it comes to race preferences in hiring, promotions, and college admissions, Asians are often classified with whites and are increasingly the victims of reverse discrimination. Their interest in ending affirmative action may one day drive Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Americans out of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
When black Mayor Adrian Fenty picked Korean American Michelle Rhee to shape up D.C.’s failing public schools, and Rhee fired scores of black teachers, the black wards east of the Anacostia River cut Fenty dead.
As the Party of Government, Democrats find common ground on growing the government and redistributing the wealth of the private sector to the public sector, from those who have to those who have not. When the pie is expanding, everyone can have a larger slice.
The crisis of the Democratic Party is that while it prospers by expanding government, we have entered an era when millions detest government, and America’s fiscal crisis mandates that we cut government. In brief, as America enters this era of austerity, the compelling U.S. national interest in reducing the size of government will clash repeatedly with the vital interests of the Democratic Party.
The question now is not who gets what, but who gets cut. The tribes that make up the Democratic coalition could be at war with each other over who gets cut. Successful politics is about addition, not subtraction. But in the coming age of a Balkanized America, politics will also be about division.
THE NATIONAL QUESTION
On the national question, Americans are united.
There still exists in their hearts the will to remain one nation under God and one people united by history, heritage, and language, committed to the proposition that in America men and women are to be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Americans still believe that we are all equal in rights, not because of where we came from but because of who we are: Americans.
In all thirty-one states where referenda have been held, traditional marriage has been affirmed, and same-sex marriage has been rejected. In every state but one where Ward Connerly’s “civil rights initiative” that outlaws race, ethnic, and gender preferences has been put on the ballot, it has won. In every state where making English our official language has been put to the voters, they have said yes. In almost every state, county, and municipality where restrictions on public benefits for illegal aliens have been put to the vote, they have been endorsed by wide majorities. The agenda of the Left—de-Christianizing America, multiculturalism, racial preferences, and unrestricted immigration—has been imposed from above and resisted by a people who do not understand the strength that is theirs if they will but unite and fight.
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THE LONG RETREAT
He who defends everything defends nothing.1
—FREDERICK THE GREAT
The bubble of American triumphalism has burst.2
—ANDREW BACEVICH, 2009
[T]he idea of “the West” has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic.3
—ANNE APPLEBAUM, 2009
Washington Post
In 1954, the French Empire in Indochina fell with the surrender at Dien Bien Phu. In Algeria, another
war of national liberation began against a French rule first imposed in 1830.
By 1958, the Algerian war had outraged world opinion in that anti-colonial era and brought down the Fourth Republic. Charles de Gaulle, the hero of World War II, was recalled. Gaullists believed the general would crush the rebellion and restore Algérie française forever. But de Gaulle came to see the war as unwinnable and organized a vote that the forces of independence won. The Évian accords, granting independence in 1962, followed.
The one million pied noirs whose families had lived in Algeria for generations saw de Gaulle as a second Pétain who had surrendered sacred soil, but the general would survive assassination attempts and rule for seven more years. Eventually, the French came to see de Gaulle’s decision as the submission of a statesman to the inevitable.
The wars in Indochina and Algeria brought down the French Empire. And the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought America to her own de Gaulle moment. But how did the world’s last superpower come to this pass?
SIREN’S CALL TO EMPIRE
In 1991, with the disintegration of America’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Empire, and his 100-hour triumph in Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush went before the UN to declare that America intended to create a “New World Order.” At that moment, we succumbed to the temptation of all great powers to what Garet Garrett called the “greater thought.”
It is our turn.
Our turn to do what?
Our turn to assume the responsibilities of moral leadership in the world.
Our turn to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere—in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and Pacific, by air and by sea.…
Our turn to keep the peace of the world.
Our turn to save civilization.
Our turn to serve mankind.4
“But this is the language of empire,” wrote Garrett:
The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Its grand intentions were peace, law and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added the noble myth of the white man’s burden. We have added freedom and democracy. Yet, the more that may be added to it, the more it is the same language still. A language of power.5
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 37
