Demographic Changes in the U.S.A.

On a recent NPR episode of On the Media a guest Mathew Sheffield had some interesting points that I thought I would share.

• The most profound demographic shift in America is not the gradual change white-majority to a white-minority. Rather it is the change from a theist society to a secular one.
• Republican voters favor many “liberal” policy changes. Examples are all over the place, like gun control, less regressive tax laws, nationalized healthcare, and on and on.
• The Republicans who are in office, and who are that are foremost in the media, hold far more extreme views than those that vote for them.

Q: If Republican-voting people favor the Democrat policies, why don’t they simply become Democrats?

Answer

• Republican voters don’t like Democrat candidates (by definition, so no surprise), but they also do not like Republicans. They just don’t like anybody (largely). The one exception is that many actually like the outlandish behavior of Trump, but largely they are voting out of fear.

• One very big fear of Christian voters is the trend of secularism in the U.S.. They have had the majority for a long time, and they fear losing control. When you are used to hegemony, equality feels a lot like oppression.

• You can see this as the yearly “war on Christmas”. The idea that being “forced” to say “Happy Holidays” is some form of repression, is to miss the opportunity to spread goodwill to a larger audience. Isn’t this a tenet or something?

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of the show:

BROOKE GLADSTONE These are people who work hard, they go to church and they feel they have no future in a secular America.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD That’s right. The biggest demographic trend in America over the past decades has not been the growth of Hispanics in the country. It actually has been the growth of secularization among Americans. Depending on the survey, about 30 percent of Americans say they have no religious beliefs at all. And that rapid transformation of people that conservative Christians personally know. They’ve seen their children, they have seen their brothers, they’ve seen their sisters, their wives, their husbands leave the church and no longer believe it. And it is a frightening prospect because Christians have enjoyed hegemony in the United States for so long. Losing utter, complete power feels like oppression. Just in the same way that a lot of you know European Americans feel like if they see African-Americans in movies or see Hispanic Americans on stage more, that that’s somehow offensive to them. Because when you’ve had hedgemony equality feels like oppression.

BROOKE GLADSTONE Are we supposed to sympathize with people who don’t want to share?

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD You have to think about the resentful or scared Republican electorate as people who are in a cult, and that’s what it is. It’s a cult of conservatism. It means that there may be a chance for at least some of them to see the light in the same way that I did. I had no idea of the corruption, the greed and the bigotry that I was enabling. I thought that I could change it, but I was wrong. There is no saving of conservatism. It has to be destroyed.

Republicans, and especially Trump, don’t care about Christians. The only significant laws introduced in the Trump presidency has been a gigantic give-away to the wealthy at the expense of the poor and young. But as long as they keep talking about Christian things, and performing the requisite Kabuki theater, then it will continue to be a reasonably effective play, especially while the “Libtards” are seen as “too snobby towards Christians”.