In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, a narrative developed that white working class voters supported Trump because of their “economic anxiety.” Eventually we learned that the movement was more of a reaction to the former guy’s xenophobia.
Some of the same people who were wrong last time are now lighting their hair on fire about the fact that in 2020, Trump increased his support among Hispanics. The tale they tell is that it has been the Democrats embrace of “wokeness” that turned off Hispanic voters. They counsel that the party needs to get “tough on crime” and address the so-called “border crisis” to win those voters back.
In his piece making that argument, this is how Ruy Teixeira describes Hispanic voters:
Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.
As so many political commentators do, that description assumes that Hispanic voters are a monolith, ignoring the fact that they come from over 20 different countries in Europe, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Here is what Meaghan Winter found when it comes to Hispanic identity.
Almost everybody I spoke with said that Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are all unsatisfying terms: They rely on the false idea that there’s some fixed and universal pan-Latino identity, when in reality the wide range of people who represent Latinidad don’t come close to sharing the same history, let alone uniform tastes and opinions. “We as Latino people hold three different stories in our bodies,” José Humphreys, a second-generation Afro–Puerto Rican and the pastor and co-founder of Metro Hope Covenant Church, in Harlem, told me. “There’s African heritage, there’s Native and Indigenous heritage, and European. Those three stories … manifest in different ways.”
Some polling has found that Hispanics reject the nomenclature of Latinx. Perhaps pollsters should ask how those same voters feel about Latino and Hispanic. They might be equally unpopular. It is very possible that preferred terms would be “Mexican-American,” or “Cuban American,” or Puerto Rican. That distinction showed up in the 2020 exit polls from Florida, where Biden lost the Cuban-American vote 41-56, but won the Puerto Rican vote 68-31.
Looking at individual states, we also see a huge gender gap among Hispanics in some of the exit polls. Nevada stands out – where Biden won 66% of the Latina vote and only 45% of the Latino vote. While not quite as dramatic, Arizona saw a 10 point gender gap among Hispanics. It is those kinds of numbers that led Eric Garcia to explore why Latino men are moving away from Democrats.
But the dramatic difference among Hispanic voters in 2020 was documented by Public Religion Research Institute.
The differences between Hispanic Protestants, Catholics, and those who are religiously unaffiliated persist through many questions in the survey, with Hispanic Protestants notably more pro-Trump, conservative, and Republican than Catholics or those who are religiously unaffiliated. Religion is the largest demographic divider among Hispanic Americans, excepting only partisanship.
It is Hispanic Protestants who are Trump supporters – by a large margin.
We tend to assume that the vast majority of Hispanics in this country are Catholic. But for years now Pew Research has been documenting the fact that a growing number are converting to Protestant evangelicalism.
Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church and converting to evangelical Protestantism in increased numbers, and evangelical organizations are putting more energy and resources toward reaching potential Latino congregants. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the country, and Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity—meaning they tend to go to church, pray, and read the Bible more often than both Anglo Protestants and Latino Catholics.
Here is what Pew documented between 2007 and 2014:
From an anecdotal perspective, I would suggest that you would be hard-pressed to find a majority-white megachurch in Texas that doesn’t have a specific outreach effort to Hispanics. Many of them are planting sister churches within that community.
In her book about Christian nationalists, “The Power Worshippers,” Katherine Stewart documented one of these outreach programs led by Jim Domen, founder of a group called Church United. It recruits Hispanic pastors to politicize their congregations. The group receives both logistic and financial support from Christian nationalist groups.
Church United’s busy schedule of activities costs money. It is unclear from the organization’s reporting where it comes from. The mailing address takes us to the Newport Beach, California post office box of a real estate investment company run by Larry Smith, a businessman with close ties to activist organizations. Smith currently sits on the board of Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries. He has also served on the board of the Family Action PAC, which seeks “to recruit and elect qualified leaders who will advance a culture in which human life and family are valued, personal responsibility is encouraged, and liberty thrives…Domen told me that the FRC [Family Research Council] also donated approximately $50,000 to Church United efforts in 2018.
The issues these groups are promoting will come as no surprise. The emphasis on “human life and family” are code words for abortion and gay rights. So the appeal is the same as we see with Christian nationalists – the true base of Trump’s support.
Given all of that, it is doubtful that Democrats adopting a “tough on crime” or “secure the border” message will have much of an impact on Hispanic protestants. Much as with Christian nationalists, it is the party’s commitment to equal rights for women and LGBTQ Americans that is at the heart of the division.
Well, this is mighty depressing.
Democrats had this fantasy. We would unite White progressives and liberals, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in a grand unified base. At the same time we would have intersectionality, bringing together all iterations of sex and gender, along with feminists and. . . and it was all nonsense. We have friction between Black and Asian, between Hispanic citizens and Hispanic immigrants, between feminists and trans just for a start.
This is the inevitable and predictable dead end of identity politics. Point #1: we picked the wrong ‘identities.’ Turns out race does not trump religion. Who knew? Well, obviously not largely secular Democrats. Point #2: we don’t understand how numbers work. The US will likely become a majority minority nation and 18 years later the edge of that wave will be old enough to vote. So this great transformation is either well off in the future, or may not even occur. Point #3: Blacks have a unique relationship with Whites which is not even a little like the relationship between Whites and Asians, or Whites and Hispanics, or men and women. We need to get over the notion that the Civil Rights fight is a template for every conflict.
People come together around shared interests and shared ideas. They do not come together around some shared identity that unites Mexicans and Cubans and Venezuelans and Puerto Ricans. The funny thing is we have adopted racialist thinking while opposing racism. Well, not funny hah ha. We have bought in uncritically to the notion that all non-whites have the same issues as Blacks. For the record, this country has done some bad things to Mexicans and Chinese, but nothing like the hell we visited on Blacks and Indians.
Hispanics aren’t even Hispanic except in the shorthand of Whites, and they also aren’t Blacks. We lump the approximately 600 million people south of the Rio Grande together, and even more preposterously, we do the same for the 4,500,000,000 people we are pleased to call, ‘Asian.’ Odd, because we are perfectly capable of imagining that Whites will splinter and not vote as a block, but if you have more melanin in your skin you’re only capable of voting like everyone else who is not white.
And we’re the anti-racists.
You are doing a pretty good job of describing why someone like Ruy Teixeira is so wrong. But as someone who has been steeped in the study of racism over the last 10-15 years, all of the things you mention are what anti-racists try to fight against.
If your point is to say that racist views have permeated parts of the Democratic coalition – I’d say that you are 100% right. That’s why we need to call out the Teixeira’s when their analysis is imbued with racism.
At the street level, of course there are some racists on our team. I’m more concerned at the level of organizers and party intellectuals.
After decades of insisting that race was not important, that we should be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character, we just tossed that away and decided, yep, it’s all about race. We embraced identity politics. And what did we mean by ‘identity?’ Race and sex. Which leaves us in the bizarre position of insisting that there are A) Great differences between Black and White, Hispanic and Asian, straight and gay, cis-gender and trans, while simultaneously insisting that, B) We are all precisely equal, and none of these identities should change how we are perceived in the real world. So, very different and just the same.
We bought racialism – the belief in the importance of racial differences – and renamed it identity politics. Our categories are the same as the categories insisted on by our enemies: Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, gay, straight, cis, trans. We bought our opponents’ world view, and as a result we’ve left ourselves without ammunition to fight White identity groups. What’s our position, that identity politics is great for everyone but White people? OK for women, not OK for men? Fine for gays, not fine for straights? Show me a consistent principle in there, something that isn’t just tit-for-tat.
“Which leaves us in the bizarre position of insisting that there are A) Great differences between Black and White, Hispanic and Asian, straight and gay, cis-gender and trans”
That is an inaccurate reading of the point being made and is basically the repetition of a right wing talking point. A more accurate statement would be that there are great differences in how people have been (and are) treated based on their race and gender. If we can’t all agree on that one, then there’s a gulf that will be impossible to overcome.
Oh, a rightwing talking point is it? Better call out the Inquisition, I may be guilty of heresy.
So the oppressors define identity? I agree with that to an extent. I’m only a Jew when I have to confront an anti-semite. But that’s defensiveness on my part and has little bearing on who I am. I don’t much like being defined by other people, particularly people who dislike me for an irrational reason, for example, being a Jew. Do you?
Identity politics by its very nature is balkanizing. We saw the effect in, fittingly, the Balkans, but also Rwanda, the Middle East, the sub-continent, etc.. Russia’s invasion of the Donbas is based on ethnic/linguistic identity, Russians uniting Russians.
The multi-ethnic, multi-confessional nation-state can unite around shared ideas and goals, but cannot unite if the primary identifier is not nationality but ethnicity or religion. The melting pot approach was the better approach for long-term national survival. Better for Democratic politics as well, because there’s no particular reason why gays and Blacks, or Hispanics and Koreans, or White and Indian, should be on the same side of a given issue, except for this: they are all Americans and share a future as Americans.
Long ago I was tasked with writing a kid’s bio of Colin Powell and General Benjamin Davis Jr. the man who formed the all-Black Red-tail fighter squadron in WW2. I interviewed one of the old Red-Tails who, in a brutally racist era, fought for the opportunity to fight for his country. I’m not embarrassed to say it was moving. I could barely get through it, acutely conscious that I was a pipsqueak talking to a genuine hero. Despite having very little reason to love the USA, he did. Because of that man’s courage and patriotism, generations of Black men and women rose through the ranks, so that today no one is shocked at the fact that our Secretary of Defense is a Black general. The United States is the ultimate multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, multi-linguistic nation in the world, and if we are to succeed as a nation we need to look less to me and mine, and more to us and ours. Groups A, B, C, D, E and F, along with sub-groups a, b, c, d, e and f, can’t accomplish anything; Americans can.
“Prosperity Gospel” strikes again!
(and who actually prospers???)