Pat Buchanan has ended up over at Human Events, where he's now showing his true colors in a post on changing demographics entitled Has the bell begun to toll for the GOP?". Spinning off the news that of the children now born, less than half are non-Hispanic whites, Buchanan announces, that they portend the collapse of the Republican party. (Oh the huge manatee!)
Republicans now depend on the vanishing majority for fully 90 percent of their votes in presidential elections, while the Democratic Party wins 60 to 70 percent of the Asian and Hispanic vote and 90 to 95 percent of the black vote.
The Democratic base is growing inexorably, while the Republican base is shriveling.
Already, California, Illinois and New York are lost. The GOP has not carried any of the three in five presidential elections. When Texas -- where whites are a minority and a declining share of the population -- tips, how does the GOP put together an electoral majority?
Now here's the point where Buchanan should reveal the supersecret way that the Republican party has of finally stealing the Hispanic vote out from under the Democrats. But we hear nothing of the kind from Buchanan.
Instead he complains, using statistics pulled from Goddess knows where, that Hispanic are ill-educated ("Their dropout rate matches that of black kids"), non-taxpaying ("... majority of Hispanics are among that half of the population that pays no income tax"), and dependent on the government dole.
Hispanics benefit disproportionately from government programs.
Government puts their kids in Head Start before public school and provides them with Pell grants and student loans after public school.
From kindergarten through 12th grade, government educates their kids for free. Government provides them with free or subsidized health care through Medicaid and clinics. Government provides their families with public housing and rent supplements. Government provides the food stamps that feed the family. Government provides them with an annual earned income tax credit, a check just for working.
Note the repetition of the claim, which we have seen in other areas of the Republican fantasy land, that public education is welfare.
But it is for Hispanic women that Buchanan reserves special blame. In his view, they are immoral trollops who keep having babies without marrying the fathers to cash in on the welfare extravaganza.
Yet curiously, Buchanan doesn't explain how all of these lazy scroungers have managed to steal all of the American jobs! And perhaps most despicably, Buchanan doesn't address the high rate of casualties among Hispanics in the various wars the Republicans began, and then failed to fund with taxes on the (mostly) white rich people that are their base. From HuffPo (11/12/11):
The first American soldier killed in the operation was Jose Gutierrez, 22, who arrived here as an undocumented child from Guatemala, crossing Mexico hidden in a train. And among the first seven American war prisioners, "one was a woman from Panama and another the son of Mexicans."
The total number of Hispanics killed in action until February 2009 was 450, according to United States Military Casualty Statistics, compiled by the Congressional Research Service.
... That is a little less than 11 percent of the total of casualties ...
Among Marines, the rate was even higher. Of "969 Marines killed in Iraq, 39 were African Americans and 139 Hispanics," or 14 percent of the total.
Buchanan's post does provide something of a clue to what the Republican response will be to the declining numbers of their white base. We can expect to see more of the
Kris "K" Kolbach types who wish to restrict the vote essentially to white people, though various devices such as Voter ID, gerrymandering, and various kinds of intimidation of the Joe Arpaio variety.
It's also curious that although Buchanan complains that Asian-Americans are voting for Democrats, he's unable to pull any "statistics" out of his nether region to support his thesis that non-whites vote for Democrats because they are government-dependent, lazy and immoral.
Since Buchanan can't rely on any of these stereotypes for Asian-Americans to explain why they tend to vote Democratic, he remains silent, proffering no explanation. In so doing, Buchanan betrays his main objective, which is simply to malign Hispanics.