Re: Giving Tuesday Was A Great Success: Raised Over $20K, Which Will Be DOUBLED By Matching Grant
From: Intellectual Embargo [Email him]
In VDARE.com's first DLive stream at the beautiful castle in Berkeley Springs, John Derbyshire brought up the increasingly popular talking point, "Demographics must not be destiny, Trump won with more non-whites than Mitt Romney!" Or in other words, Trump lost non-whites, but didn't lose them quite as badly as Romney did. Mr. Derbyshire and Mr. Brimelow didn't have time to get into this topic deeply during the stream, though it is a critical topic. Something that gets left unsaid, in response to this flimsy criticism, is that the real topic we are trying to understand the heritability of political views.
The heritability of views is something often understood implicitly. We know value and moral statements are judged in physical brain structures. And we know brains are biological organs created in accord with the organism's genetics. We know we don't all have the same genetics or identical brains. With all these facts accounted for, some heritability of political views within groups becomes quite an obvious conclusion.
When we review the scientific data on the topic we find that political views are heritable, and that views on specific issues, like immigration, are much more heritable than complex and more ephemeral topics like what political party or "wing" that person supports.
The paper "Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations" published in 2014 in the journal Behavior Genetics looked at studies that included over 12,000 twin pairs. In the discussion section they write ". . . the phrase ‘‘Left–Right’’ appears highly subject to local and cultural definitions and may indicate group identification more than ideological position." They go on to say "The finding that the environment accounts for nearly all the variation on measures which use the phrase ‘‘Left–Right’’ is similar to explorations of party identification in the US during the 1980s and 1990s, which find that ideology is heritable, but party identification is not"
That is a critical fact. Party identification and if someone considers themselves "left" or "right" is highly complex and not nearly as heritable as, for example, your view on feminism). So while someone online might be quick to say something like "Hispanics will never vote Republican, because of racial conflict with whites" they're going down a dangerous path that one day they might get proved wrong on. In fact, one of the things that could get Hispanics to vote Republican is, ironically, racial conflict. If the "Black Lives Matter" movement continues to get large support from the Democrats, Hispanics whose living situation puts them in conflict with blacks more often than whites might find Democrats increasingly unpalatable, and may become open to voting Republican.
None of this is to say that we should hope that non-white races feud enough to push some of them to “our” side, because that could put additional pressure to usurp what little power we have on our own side. Consider this when Hispanics are much more against gun rights than whites, and less interested in free speech and more enthusiastic about hate speech laws than whites, if they were to start voting Republican in large numbers, what might that mean to elected Republicans who need to prove to their brand new constituents that they're worth supporting in the election cycle? Maybe a hate speech law that protects Hispanics. Might want to pump the brakes on those gun rights, but a new welfare program is almost always appreciated.
So while we could say "C'mon, they'll never vote with us," the reality is they simply aren't us. Even if they did vote with us, that would just move conflict from between parties to within parties. That's why we shouldn't plant our flag in the ground on party politics—our differences run so much deeper. Voting differences, or the lack there of, simply don't even begin approach the true meaning of "demographics is destiny."
