Return of the Sailer Strategy
For those unfamiliar with it, the Sailer (as in Steve Sailer) Strategy argues that Republicans should just ignore non-white voters, and go all-in on increasing their percentage of the white vote as the best way to win elections. Because the electorate is still so overwhelmingly white (among other things, because felons, non-citizens, and under-18-year-olds are a greater percentage of the non-white than of the white population), relatively small changes in the percentage of the white vote have a much bigger impact than relatively large changes in the percentage of the non-white vote. Plus the white vote is trending the right way (as it were) while the non-white vote (particularly the Asian-American vote) hasn’t. So it’s just an easier sell to follow the Sailer Strategy than to try to build a right-wing rainbow coalition.
Matt Yglesias has come around to concluding that some version of the Sailer Strategy is kind of inevitable:
I used to hold to the view that the growing non-white share of the electorate would, over time, tip elections to Democrats. I now think the system will remain near equilibrium and what we’ll instead see is white voters growing more Republican as Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites. Mississippi and Arizona, after all, have very large minority votes but they’re hardly hotbeds of liberalism. Instead they’re hotbeds of very conservative white people. This does mean, however, that politics will become even more abstracted away from “the issues” and questions of identity will become even more central.
I’m glad he’s changed his mind, because any prediction that X, Y or Z factor is going to lead to tipping elections over time to the Democrats – or the Republicans – is questionable on its face. Every election should be a closely fought contest between two parties that are extremely skilled at optimizing their coalitions. If that doesn’t happen, that reflects some kind of structural breakdown (which, from one perspective, Jim Crow was an example of; it raised the costs of defection by whites so high that it effectively eliminated the possibility of real political competition).
That doesn’t mean that racial polarization is inevitable, though. Racial polarization depends on one of two propositions: (1) a genuine lack of common interests between two (or more) racial groups in a polity; or (2) an existing political “sort” that makes finding such common interests politically risky/expensive. It seems to me that the policy landscape, and how it is approached by the two parties, has some bearing on (1), and the choices of opinion-leaders have some bearing on (2).
Take a look at another post of Matt’s from today, about political instability in the Midwest. The Midwest has been the primary electoral battleground for several national cycles now. The Upper South, as it has gotten wealthier and more urban, and the Southwest, as it has gotten more Hispanic, have also been contested, but the primary battlegrounds have been over the big states of the Midwest, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota.
This is, as Matt notes, a region that is suffering from long-term relative decline. (And, to a certain extent, absolute decline.) And that’s an economic circumstance that you’d expect would lead to a high degree of partisan fluidity, as a frustrated electorate keeps electing a new batch of bums who don’t do any better than the old batch at fixing the region’s problems.
But my question is: does a genuine divergence of interests exist between white and nonwhite voters in these states? And are the white voters in these states particularly amenable to a racially-based voting appeal?
I’d like to see the data on the latter. My own guess, though, is: no, and no. And my reasoning is simple: these states have been relatively volatile lately, but they are not experiencing rapid demographic change. Wisconsin is 91% white. Missouri is 86% white. Ohio is also 86% white. The Hispanic population of the region is growing rapidly, but off an extremely low base (the only major Hispanic population center is Chicago, which is a big enough city to have its own dynamics independent of the behavior of the rest of the region).
In large and diverse states like California, Florida, Texas or New York, the racial mix is too complicated for the Sailer Strategy (or its opposite) to work. Are you necessarily going to get African-Americans and Hispanics to cooperate consistently against whites in California? Are you even going to necessarily get Cubans and Dominicans to cooperate consistently against whites in Florida? Rather, what I’d expect to see is the kind of recombining ethnic coalition politics that you’ve seen for generations (and not just in America’s big cities).
In the struggling Midwestern region, meanwhile, a volatile vote in general means a volatile white vote. And if the vote is volatile, that means it’s being driven by something other than racial identity politics. So where could the Sailer Strategy actually play out?
What’s left is the Deep South, which has always been racially polarized, Appalachia, and the Southwest. Appalachia has indeed been trending toward a kind of white identity politics, and it’s worth exploring why, because this is a region that was accessible to Democratic candidates long after the Deep South had switched to the GOP (Michael Dukakis, for example, won West Virginia in 1988). As for the Southwest, it does not strike me as implausible that Arizona, Colorado and Nevada come to experience voting patterns reminiscent of Alabama and Mississippi. Arizona in particular has a highly polarized population: the white population has swelled from the influx of relatively better-off retirees fleeing the cold of the Midwest, while the Hispanic population has swelled from mass immigration from Mexico. Economic and generational divides overlap very closely with the ethnic divide in this case, so there is a genuine divergence of interests between the two groups across a whole host of questions. But the fact that Arizona is the poster-child for a particular kind of politics doesn’t mean that kind of politics is a plausible winner on a national basis.
But even if it were plausible, Matt’s last point from the quote above remains the crucial one. The only people whose interests are served by identity politics are politicians, because when identity drives politics, politicians no longer have to work to win votes by delivering services or promoting economic development. If you are a partisan strategist – for either party – the holy grail is to assemble a stable coalition of voters who are not thinking about the quality of the schools or the crime rate or the unemployment rate, but instead about whether the candidate is “one of us.” Then all you have to do is bribe a handful of voters at the margins to win elections. But if you actually care about policy outcomes – whether you are on the left or on the right – that’s disaster. The very stability of our political system will prevent either coalition from materially moving the distribution of resources away from one “team” toward the other. What you have instead is an arms race, a great deal of energy expended to almost no result.
Think about my two possible drivers of polarization above. Either there is a genuine divergence of interests between ethnic groups – Arizona is a good example, because of the overlap between economic and generational divides with the ethnic divide. Or there are common interests, but the political system is organized to frustrate finding those common interests.
Now ask yourself: in whose interest is it to frustrate the citizenry from organizing around common interests?
It ain’t the citizenry’s.
Right, the Wisconsin dispute, judging from photos of crowds, is a whole bunch of white people yelling at each other.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 16, 11:22 PM · #
The long run survival strategy for the GOP is not to be the white party, but to be the nonblack party in an America in which the Democrats are increasingly seen as the black party.
But to get there, to set themselves up for attracting significant numbers of Asians and Latinos, the next time the GOP has power, it will have to take some dramatic steps to have the government stop legally classifying Hispanics and Asians like junior blacks. Right now, the government, in effect, pays people to be legally privileged minorities, so we get more people claiming to be legally privileged minorities and more self-appointed racial leaders defending those privileges.
We’re never going to stop giving government preferences to blacks and American Indians, as the descendants of the historic victims of building America. But giving them to immigrants and their descendants is just nuts. It can’t be defended on grounds of principle. It just conjures up ethnic activists to defend and extend those legal privileges.
Think of it this way: if the government started giving out low interest SBA loans and preferences on government contracts to people born on Wednesdays, there would soon be organizations like the Children of Woe devoted to defending the privileges of Wednesdaytarians. How much stronger is this impulse when it tracks real differences in who is related to whom?
So, the GOP must take a number of steps that will drive current ethnic activists crazy because it will cut their careers off at the knees. For example, abolish the legal concept of “Hispanicity.” This used to be called “ethnicity,” but the only allowed answers were Hispanic and NonHispanic. On the 2010 Census, it wasn’t even given a conceptual category like ethnicity. It’s just are you Hispanic (and therefore eligible for money and prizes reserved by the government for Hispanics) or not? That can’t be justified. So, get rid of the Hispanic category. Let people choose black or American Indian. Suddenly, you’ll see a lot more self-identified non-blacks.
Similarly, reverse the ridiculous decision to shift immigrants from Pakistan and India from the Caucasian category to the Asian (formerly, Oriental) category made by the Reagan administration in 1982 so that Indian immigrants could get minority development low interest loans and preferences on government contracts. This just created a self-interest among South Asian businessmen to back Democrats who defend racial preferences. The GOP needs Indians, the most articulate of all the new groups, in the Caucasian tent pissing out, not outside pissing in.
The long run goal should be to have only three legally recognized groups: descendants of American slaves, American Indians registered with their tribes, and everybody else.
In the short run, defunding other ethnic activists will cause an enormous brouhaha, but, when it’s over, the GOP will come out in a decent position.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 16, 11:49 PM · #
“The long run survival strategy for the GOP is. . .to be the nonblack party in. . . America. . .”
Check!
— Pat · Mar 17, 04:01 AM · #
@ Sailer
The government doesn’t have to define groups in order for ethnic groups to form. I mean, I definitely get the idea that the term hispanic is a made up, catch all phrase that essentially exists to classify a massive and diverse group of people. But on the other hand, I don’t know just how relevant this is. Because Hispanic people still form a culture that is distinct from WASP’s.
Or to put it succinctly… how does your model account for a phenomenon like Jews being a strong Democratic demographic? It’s not like you get to check that box on a census form.
— Console · Mar 17, 02:51 PM · #
I still remember older people talking about various European nationalies as having distinct, usually negative, characteristics. The dutch are this, those Bohunks do that, the I-talians are different in this way, etc. The whole time I’m thinking what are you talking about, they’re all just white people? I suspect that a lot of hispanics will intermarry, assimilate and become “white people” in a few generations.
— vaildog · Mar 17, 04:22 PM · #
Young asians and hispanics do not identify with the republican party. THink about the face of the republicans in last election: the tea party. A bunch of angry and irational old white people who are yelling about how they are going to ‘take back their country.’ Very appealing to young hispanics and asians.
— cw · Mar 17, 06:46 PM · #
Let me put it another way. Why, if I was not a white person, would I want to join a party that has positioned itself since forever as the defenders of the status quo, in which the status quo is that of a white dominated culture and economy? There is a very small pool of non-white people who are going to be attracted to this.
There is a much bigger pool of white people, on the other hand, who will vote democrat because they would like to see the status quo dismantled.
So the democrats have a strategic advantage in their position re race and culture. It will always be like this until the republicans change their stance (or the return of Jim Crow), but if they do that then they face a tough competition with the democrats on their own turf, and they lose the diehard whitey’s to some non-viable third party. Their racial strategy has them screwed over time.
— cw · Mar 17, 07:28 PM · #
“As for the Southwest, it does not strike me as implausible that Arizona, Colorado and Nevada come to experience voting patterns reminiscent of Alabama and Mississippi.”
Arizona does indeed seem to be headed in this direction. But, in Colorado, probably the fairest way to look at it is to see the state as a political boundary area. Colorado Springs has politics that resemble the American South as does quite a bit of the rural Front Range. But, elsewhere there is not “racial block voting” among whites and the trend doesn’t seem to be in that direction. White voters are deeply divided on a partisan basis pretty much in lockstep with residential population density — the further you must walk to your neighbor’s front door, the more likely you are to be on the political right. In Denver, Boulder, central city Fort Collins, and resort towns (which have high residential density surrounded by open space), the GOP is getting less than a third of the white vote in many cases. Colorado also had much deeper gender divided in partisanship in 2010 than the nation as a whole. The “Sailor Strategy” plays well in Colorado Springs and the exurbs, but alienates women and urban white men here.
Nevada is harder hit economically than anyplace else in the country right now (most mortgage holders are upside down, e.g. and real estate prices are down 60%), so it may very well see significant demographic change. A major difficulty with a “Sailor Strategy” there is that the state has a high level of transience and little social capital, so transmission of coherent voting strategies from one generation to the next is challenging. It is also hard to see a place where tolerance is so much at the core of the local economy, and where populations are so intensely urban flipping to a traditional, rural Southern kind of political identity structure. White block voting in the South is driven to a great extent by a perception of cultural coherence that is threatened from the outside and causes Southern whites who otherwise lack common interests to subordinate their personal self-interest for this greater imperative. I don’t see that emerging in places that are less culturally distinct.
— ohwilleke · Mar 17, 09:58 PM · #
Sailer, I’m having a hard time reconciling your thoughts bout how the GOP, by moving around racial boxes, can attract Indians and Pakistanis (the wealthiest minorities in America and increasingly politically active, plus becoming culturally visible in a way East Asians did more slowly and possibly less thoroughly), with your happiness that the GOP was scapegoating Muslims, which seems a good way to alienate a generation of them.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Mar 17, 11:49 PM · #
Just letting you know that I’m retiring from The American Scene effective now. Bookmarks deleted, all writers will no longer be read anywhere. Your continuing promotion of Steve Sailer is appalling beyond belief. Shame on you.
— Ray Butlers · Mar 18, 11:26 AM · #