I agree with the observation that Jason L. Riley makes in his Wall Street Journal column. It’s probably a perspective you haven’t heard if you get most of your information from the NYT, WaPo, CNN, or the Huffington Press:
Mr. Manchin isn’t being obstructionist so much as practical, and he’s forcing Democrats to confront tensions within their ranks that they can’t ignore forever. As more college-educated whites have joined the Democratic Party, it has lurched further left, causing discomfort among the more moderate black, Hispanic, Asian and working-class white Democrats who outnumber them. Unlike these progressive white elites, polling shows that minorities in the main tend to support things like voter-ID laws, school choice, race-blind college admissions and the presence of more police officers in high-crime neighborhoods.
David Shor, a data scientist and Democratic strategist, first voiced these concerns in an interview earlier this year with New York magazine. Democrats have tended to treat racial and ethnic minorities as more progressive by nature, but Mr. Shor said that view was a mistake. “Roughly the same proportion of African-American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative,†he said. “What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for conservatives at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.†Mr. Shor cited the left’s attacks on law enforcement after the death of George Floyd as an example. “In the summer, following the emergence of ‘defund the police,’ as a nationally salient issue, support for [Joe] Biden among Hispanic voters declined,†he said. “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.â€
That’s one of the I believe unappreciated risks of increased immigration. Most of today’s immigrants aren’t progressives. They’re more socially and religiously conservative than the progressive who form the Democratic Congressional leadership. Defunding the police is a lot less interesting to them than reducing the crime in their neighborhoods.
Maybe they’ll become more progressive the longer they’re here. Maybe their children will be more progressive. I wouldn’t bet on it.
