Time to Retire "Demographics is Destiny"

Stop trying to engineer future politics through racial bean counting

The Economist recently ran a poll of various countries across the world on whether they prefer Trump or Harris. Here are the very funny results.

What are the implications here for conservatives? One might say that if you want America to become a country that values small government and individual liberty, you need to import groups like Turks, Nigerians, and Egyptians. We definitely need fewer people of Northern European descent.

That would obviously be a very stupid conclusion to draw from the data. But why exactly did third worlders prefer Trump while wealthier countries supported Harris? Is it because Nigerians are more pro-market than the Dutch? Of course not. Trump just has a cultural appeal to the third world masses, while repulsing populations that are better educated.

The point here is that people, especially those who are poor, mostly don’t develop political attitudes based on issues, whether they’re thinking about their own countries or other nations. Yet immigration restrictionists on the right make a habit of taking recent election results, and using them to argue that non-white people have some kind of essence that is always going to drive them towards left-wing positions and candidates.

According to the NBC Exit poll, Harris only won the Latino vote by 53% to 45%. In 2020, Trump lost the same group by 33 points. That is a 25-point improvement within four years. Some argue it is too early to draw conclusions about demographic shifts, but given Trump’s strong performance in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada, there’s basically no way he did not improve his Hispanic vote share.

Meanwhile, immigration restrictionists make election forecasts based on demographics regarding what’s going to happen twenty or thirty years down the line, and want their estimates to be the basis of policy that would wreck the American economy and reduce the size of our internal market, which is one of the key ingredients driving American growth.

Conservatives pride themselves on being IQ realists, or being the people who take demographic realities seriously and don’t romanticize the poor. Yet rightists also think that few things are as important as making sure that the underclass in America remains white. Here’s one of my favorite Election Day tweets, from Michael Tracey, who went around talking to voters in Pennsylvania.

This woman’s main issue is preserving Social Security. And she voted Republican. This is the real white non-college voter (assuming this woman is white, which doesn’t matter either way). This group happens to vote Republican for mainly tribal and class-based aesthetic reasons. They love Trump more than they loved Romney not because Trump gave them any new policies, but because he curses a lot and has gold toilets, while Romney talks in complete sentences and looks like he might have once read a book in his life.

As voters, sometimes the white underclass will be on the side of liberty, and sometimes not. The same is basically true for any other demographic. If your view is that the white masses vote more Republican than Hispanics because they’re more pro-capitalist or love liberty, your understanding of how people relate to politics is completely wrong. It’s tribalism and vibes all the way down, and Hispanics have gone to the right in response to the Democrats becoming coded as a more feminine and educated party. Third world populations, the white underclass, and Hispanic men all like Trump for basically the same reasons.

I have no idea how descendants of poor Hispanics will vote in thirty years. What I do know is that, like all lower-class voters, they will be very uninformed about the issues, have malleable political opinions, and pick their candidates largely based on superficial and ultimately irrational considerations. Intellectual life is about spreading the right ideas among elites, so that voters have better options to choose from. Politics is about marketing whichever candidates one happens to be selling. These two processes move on parallel tracks. Neither of them depends on the demographic future of the country. In even-numbered years, the masses will show up to put their weight behind one faction of elites or the other. They won’t, except in a very indirect and limited sense, be determining the intellectual content of our debates. This is less true for more insular and culturally independent groups like many Muslim populations, but Latin Americans and most of Asia pose no such challenges. As for high-skilled immigrants, their political and social views are if anything even more malleable than those of the poor, though the methods one uses to persuade them need to be more substantive.

If you want your ideas to be well represented in future generations, the way to do that is not to try to engineer the perfect demographic balance while fooling yourself into believing that the underclass of any race is on your side due to some deeply rooted trait that it has and other groups don’t. It is to get out there and convince fellow elites, and take the product you come up with and try to sell it to the masses, which again, is a marketing exercise, not the kind of persuasion one finds in the world of ideas.

I see the demographics as destiny argument as in effect a withdrawal from intellectual and political life. Conservatives tell themselves they can lose Elite Human Capital forever, and not worry that their side is increasingly deranged. As long as they make sure that fewer Mexicans are around, the white fatsos will save us by the sheer weight of their numbers. The love of liberty beats in their clogged hearts. Liberals clearly aren’t the only ones with delusions about their lower class supporters.