A Looming Minority: Demographic Angst

White people will become a minority in the US, since white births have fallen below 50% for the first time in US history. The white majority is past childbearing. That's huge; it may explain a lot of things, like America's political polarization, the extreme anti-immigrant politics of the South and West, the conservative urge to cut funds for services like education--increasingly, they'll be spent on minority kids.

As a New York Times (05/17/12) article pointed out, the younger and older generations won't look like each other, and working together will get harder. It's already hard. There is, now, a split between older voters and younger over education budgets, for example: seniors vote against and vote them down regularly. In one of my towns (I pay taxes in two), the school age population is already markedly more minority than those of voting age, and the budget is voted down more often.

A good portion of the radical right-wing social agenda could be explained by the fear of becoming a minority. Anti-women: yeah, it's those young women of color who are having all those babies, and that's probably because of the breakdown of marriage and the family, which is why they've got to stop gays, too. Stop Obama, too, the black President. Cut government spending, cut jobs and gut public employee rights: sure, minorities and women work for governments disproportionate to their share of the population.

Terrorism and wars abroad? Terrorists are seen as foreign and dark-skinned, even though we've had our own homegrown WASP terrorists, like the Oklahoma bomber, the Washington snipers and so many school shooters. So, we launch a war on Terror, or the mealy-mouthed alternative the Obama administration came up with, and increasingly, it seems, Muslims are targeted and recruited (through sting operations), which somehow translates into Brown people--the ones who are threatening to take America away from the desperate grip of older, "conservative" un-brown people, who want to "take America back."

Corporate conservatives are using all of the above to fund a politics that is all about establishing corporate dominance: eviscerate regulations and workers' rights, and reduce already low, loop-hole-ridden corporate taxes. But they also want to insure they get Government's business, including more and better wars.

Scott Walker of Wisconsin isn't their hero; he's their employee.

However, corporations aren't American; they don't hold any special allegiance to the US. They can be just as exploitative of the US as oil and mining companies have been to nations like Ecuador and the Congo. Corporate money flows to Republican extremists not because corporations are anti-gay, or anti-minority, but because right-wingers will toe the corporate line and most are true laissez-faire believers.

Barbarians ripped off Rome in the fifth century; corporations want to do it here, now.