The minority vote

To contact us Click HERE
A lot ofpundits are talking about the role of the minority vote in this election. BTW,whites are now a minority in the US, so I can speak as one minority to myfellow minorities.
First ofall, everyone has vested interests, but everyone doesn’t have the same vestedinterests. And this can operate at an aggregate level as well as an individuallevel.
Vestedinterests aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Acting in your individual orcollective self-interest isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
How wedeal with our vested interests is a good test of our Christian commitment. Forinstance, antebellum white Southerners had a vested interest in maintaining theinstitution of slavery. The Southern economy was largely agrarian. That’slabor-intensive. Slave labor supplied cheap mass labor.
Ofcourse, most of us think that’s a paradigm-case of allowing a vested interestto betray Christian priorities.
I’m noexpert on minority communities in the US. I speak as an outsider. But it’s myimpression that these groups generally vote Democratic for very differentreasons.
To beginwe, we need to guard against hasty generalizations. As Marco Rubio points out,Latino-Americans don’t comprise a monolithic voting block. There aresignificant regional variations. Still, the Latino vote is disproportionatelyDemocrat. (That may change over time.)
I thinkthe reason many Latinos vote Democrat is because many of them are here, or camehere, for the economic opportunities and social programs, as well as to escapethe violence and corruption of the countries they left behind. 
However,there’s a danger of destroying the very thing you came for. If Democratpolicies bankrupt the host country, then America ceases to be the land ofopportunity.
Ofcourse, there are exceptions. Not all Latinos came here to escape poverty.Eduardo Saverin’s dad moved his family to the US, not because he was poor, butbecause he was rich–which made his family a target for kidnappers (or so I’veread).
Likewise,not all Latinos are here because they came here. There’s always been someLatino presence here. Like many borders, the Southern border is a line on amap. A legal and political boundary rather than a natural barrier. It wasn’talways there.
Now, avested-interest can either have short-term or long-term goals. ConservativeLatinos like Marco Rubio and Miguel Estrada are Republican because they thinkthat in the long-run, Latinos are best served by GOP policies.
It’sunderstandable if Latinos to feel defensive about Republican rhetoric on illegalimmigration. Due to a sense of ethnic identity and solidarity, it’s natural tofeel picked on.
RudiGiuliani once said he cracked down on the mob because he felt Italian-Americansneeded to police their own.
Bycontrast, I don’t think Asians vote Democratic for the same reason. Rather, Isuspect Asians naturally align with the Democrat party in large part becauseAsians come from traditionally non-Christian countries and cultures. (There arerecent exceptions like S. Korea or the Chinese underground church movement.)
As such,they don’t feel any in-built affinity for the religious right. They don’tnaturally identify with Christian social conservatism. That’s somewhat alien totheir national or ethnic experience.
This, inturn, is reinforced by other factors. Many Asian-Americans are collegeeducated. College tends to secularize students.
Inaddition, many Asians have located on the West Coast, which is alreadyleft-of-center. And immigrants are apt to assimilate with the dominant,preexisting culture.
Theblack vote is paradoxical. For one thing, it was Southern Democrats who enactedand defended Jim Crow. Likewise, some Democrat policies like sodomite marriageor desegregation busing are unpopular among many blacks.
However,blacks generally vote Democrat for two reasons: in terms of historical memory,they associate the civil rights movement with Democrat politicians like BobbyKennedy and LBJ.
That’s agenerational thing. You’re not going to have a major partisan shift until thatgeneration dies out.
Theother factor is the way the Democrat party panders to black voters throughsocial programs. There are, of course, black conservatives  (e.g. Tim Scott, Allen West, KenBlackwell, Roger Innis, Michael Steele, Larry Elder, Ward Connerly, ShelbySteele, Thomas Sowell, Stephen Carter, Clarence Thomas) who think Democraticpolicies are detrimental to the long-term interests of blacks, but it’s anuphill climb.
I thinkJews usually vote Democrat in large part because Marxism is a Jewish ideology.And I think that, in turn, reflects a reaction to centuries of clericalanti-Semitism. There’s some pushback from conservative Jews like Dennis Prager,Michael Medved, and David Horowitz, but in the US the Jewish right is farsmaller than the Jewish left.
You alsohave so-called “neocons.” These are hawkish, but they may be socially liberal.