The parallels between the Triple Cities and Fresno extended into the details. People in the Triple Cities, like people in Fresno, drove American cars and listened to country music—I can still remember my piano teacher’s irritation when the classical radio station in town switched to an all-country format. Downtown Binghamton even looked like downtown Fresno. It comprised a few blocks of brick and stone structures that dated from the early years of the twentieth century, a couple of modest office towers, and a modern government complex that represented the city’s principal attempt at urban renewal after a mall opened on the edge of town, drawing all the retail business out of town with it.
Here I was in Fresno, California, a city in which I had never set foot, and I felt, if not exactly at home—I had gotten lost coming in, after all—then certainly more comfortable and at ease than I had ever felt on the San Francisco peninsula, where I had lived for six years. Now, I like the San Francisco peninsula. Silicon Valley is endlessly fascinating. But whereas I enjoy the people I meet there, the people I was meeting in Fresno were people I knew. How could this have happened?
“It’s not just party membership that the box tracks,” Arthur Finkelstein told me over the telephone the day after I visited Fresno. “It’s psychographics.”
“Psychographics” is a term of art used in the disciplines, if they may be called that, of advertising and marketing. It describes the interrelated attitudes, values, lifestyles, opinions, demographics, and so on that lead people to buy one product instead of another. If you are a large food corporation, for example, you might develop psychographic research showing that people who live in cities, listen to classical music, and watch soap operas tend to purchase whole wheat bread instead of white. Arthur Finkelstein has applied psychographics to politics. Inside the Finkelstein Box, he has discovered, lie people with a certain set of characteristics. They tend to live in regions dominated by towns and medium-sized cities rather than by large urban centers. They are for the most part white and Protestant. They tend to go to church regularly, to drive American cars, to listen to country music—and to vote Republican. I may think pronounced regional cultures better suited to Europe than to the United States, but there is a pronounced regional culture inside the Finkelstein Box all the same. I reflected that culture myself. These days the Triple Cities lie outside the Finkelstein Box. But when I was growing up there a quarter of a century ago, Arthur Finkelstein assured me, my hometown lay inside the box. Hence the reason Fresno seemed so familiar. In driving there, I had returned to the country I knew in my youth: the heartland.
“But why?” I asked Finkelstein. “Why should listening to country music, driving American cars, and living in medium-sized towns all go with voting Republican?” Finkelstein gave me the reply of an honest man. “I don’t know,” he said. “They just do.”
They just do.
Here we find ourselves once more confronting the lesson that David Brady took such glee in teaching me. When he and I talked over the history of the Republican Party, you will recall, David insisted that people belong to political parties for all sorts of reasons, a lot of which don’t have anything to do with politics. Often, David argued, people inherit their party affiliation right along with their ancestry and religion. Arthur Finkelstein makes an argument that is related but distinct enough to stand on its own. Party affiliation, Finkelstein claims, represents one more element in the constellation of characteristics with which a person expresses his culture. People in Rougemont, Switzerland, speak French, attend Catholic churches, and eat Gruyère cheese. People in the Finkelstein Box drive Fords and Chevrolets, listen to Garth Brooks, and vote Republican.
* * *
As the party on the inside of the Finkelstein Box, the GOP is the party of the great American interior. As far as it goes, that sounds reassuring. Every party needs a political base. The heartland would seem a good one. Yet there is a problem here. Cultures are durable. While living just walking distance apart, the people of Rougemont and Saanen, Switzerland, have maintained their separate identities for centuries. Thus if the GOP represents the culture of the heartland, then those who belong to a different culture—those, that is, whose psychographics place them outside the Finkelstein Box—will persistently elude it.
To some extent the Republican Party has already learned to live with this situation. The GOP makes do without the support of the media—you will notice that the major media centers, New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, all lie outside the box. And Republicans have learned to win at least occasional support from white Catholics, heavy concentrations of whom lie outside the box, in the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Yet one group outside the box has the GOP alarmed.
“I noticed that there are odd slivers of certain states lying outside the box,” I said when I spoke to Arthur Finkelstein. “What’s going on with the southern tip of Florida and the southern edges of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas?”
“Hispanics,” Finkelstein replied. “Those are all places where there are lots of Hispanics, and Hispanics are definitely outside the box.”
THE BOX WITHIN THE BOX
Journal entry:
Over breakfast last month I asked John Morgan how he would sum up the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties.
“The GOP,” John replied, “represents the descendants of people who came here in colonial and early American times. They’re the ones who took the land and settled it. The Democrats represent the descendants of everybody else. It’s sort of the first colonists versus the people who came through Ellis Island.”
Today I had lunch with Ron Unz. Ron had been studying some statistics.
“Did you realize,” Ron asked, “that here in California, white people are already in the minority?”
The difficulty that Hispanics pose for the Republican Party has all the inescapability of a mathematical proposition. It can be stated in just four points.
Point one: The Hispanic population is growing more quickly than the population as a whole—since 1990, Hispanics have increased their numbers by 38 percent, rising to 31 million, while other Americans have increased their numbers by just 9 percent. By 2005, Hispanics will make up 14 percent of the population, passing African-Americans, who make up 13 percent, as the nation’s largest minority. Then, by the middle of the twenty-first century, a date that my children will see even if I do not, Hispanics will account for a full one quarter of the population.
Point two: Hispanics vote Democratic. For the last two decades, Hispanics have consistently given Democrats between 65 and 75 percent of their vote. Some Hispanics, notably Cubans, vote Republican, but they make up only a small proportion of the Hispanic whole. Even when Hispanics live inside the Finkelstein Box—300,000 live in Fresno County—they occupy, so to speak, a box within the box, voting Democratic. It is Hispanics, for example, who ensure that Fresno is represented in the state senate by a Democrat.
Point three: During the 1980s the Republican Party achieved rough electoral parity with the Democratic Party for the first time in half a century. If the GOP cannot persuade a sizable proportion of Hispanics to become Republicans, then the GOP will revert to minority status and stay there.
Point four: Broadly speaking, as my friend John Morgan points out, the Republican Party represents the descendants of those who arrived in America during the colonial or federalist periods. Of all the immigrant groups who came afterward—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Slavs—the GOP has failed to make even one—just one—a loyal part of the Republican constituency. This doesn’t necessarily doom the GOP to fail with Hispanics. But it certainly isn’t encouraging.
* * *
In California, where the trend toward a large Hispanic population is further advanced than elsewhere in the nation, Republicans have responded to Hispanics in two ways. Both bear examining. First a few words of background.
FROM WHITE TO BROWN
For decades a smaller proportion of the population of California was mad
e up of minorities than was the case in almost any other large state. Few African-Americans lived in California until after the Second World War. Even then the proportion of African-Americans in the state never exceeded 7 percent, about half the national average of 13 percent. As late as 1970 nine out of ten Californians were white.
Then the inundation began.
Between 1970 and 1995, two million legal immigrants entered California, a quarter of the total that entered the entire nation. At least half the legal immigrants to California were Hispanic. During the same period hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants entered the state. The number of illegal immigrants can only be estimated, but even the lowest estimates place it at one million. At least 80 percent were Hispanic. Not only were Hispanics arriving in large numbers, once they settled in California they gave birth in large numbers. The Hispanic birth rate proved so high that by 1991 the number of babies born to Hispanics exceeded the number born to whites, even though whites still outnumbered Hispanics by two to one.
The millions of Hispanic immigrants to California were joined by at least a million Asian immigrants and by hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Near East. Together, they represented an influx so great that Ron Unz, who has made a close study of immigrants in California, believes they turned the white population of the state into a minority sometime during the 1980s. The peculiarities of federal racial classifications make it impossible to say this for certain. The government used to force everyone into one of four categories: white, Asian, black, and Hispanic. Hence in government statistics the hundreds of thousands of Iranian and Egyptian immigrants to California actually served to make the state “whiter,” offsetting the rising numbers of Asians and Hispanics. After attempting to correct for this anomaly, Ron has concluded that white people of the kind that the term “white” ordinarily implies—that is, European whites—found themselves outnumbered in California fifteen or more years ago.
FIRST GOODWILL, THEN ANIMOSITY
For a time the most noteworthy aspect of relations between white Californians and the new, mostly Hispanic immigrants was how well they got along. Even in areas where the concentration of immigrants was heaviest, relations proved peaceful. For example, between 1976 and 1996 the five counties that make up the Los Angeles basin—Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura—saw immigrants inflate their population by 40 percent. About a million new immigrants arrived from Asia while more than two million arrived from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. In the Balkans, a population shift of half that magnitude would have prompted open warfare. In the Los Angeles basin, the economy and political system absorbed the new immigrants without fuss.
Then in the early 1990s the white attitude toward the new immigrants shifted.
Ron Unz notes several causes. A recession struck. Although it proved mild in most of the nation, the recession was severe in California, largely because the end of the Cold War led to heavy cutbacks in Southern California’s aerospace industry. As tens of thousands of Californians were losing their jobs, the California real estate bubble burst, causing housing values to plummet. Then, after the verdict in the Rodney King trial, rioting erupted. “It’s impossible to overstate the effect of the Rodney King rioting on white Californians,” Ron says. Much of the violence pitted African-Americans against immigrants, especially Hispanics and Koreans, who had begun to displace African-Americans from their neighborhoods. When white Californians turned on their televisions, they saw smoke spreading across the sky.
For decades white Americans had moved to the Golden State because it seemed just that, golden—a land of sunshine, good jobs, affordable housing, and excellent schools. Now California was golden no longer. When its white inhabitants looked around, wondering who might be to blame, they saw a lot of faces, especially brown faces, that they weren’t even sure belonged there.
JUST INSANE
As I’ve said, Republicans in California tried dealing with Hispanics in two different ways. The first was to ostracize them.
Written by a group of anti-immigrant activists in Orange County, Proposition 187 appeared on the California ballot in November 1994. As mentioned earlier, the initiative would have denied illegal immigrants an array of government services. Proposition 187 would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving care at public hospitals and—the initiative’s most inflammatory measure—it would have excluded their children from California’s public schools. “Prop. 187 would have forced hundreds of thousands of children out of school,” Ron Unz, who fought the measure, told me. Governor Pete Wilson, running in 1994, endorsed the initiative, swinging the full weight of the California Republican Party behind it.
“What do Hispanics value most?” Ron Unz said. “Their families. So what did Republicans do? They went after Hispanic children. It was just insane.” In his late thirties, Ron grew up in Southern California. While studying at Stanford for a doctorate in engineering, he realized that he could write a software program that would prove useful to traders on Wall Street. In his spare time, he wrote the software, then founded a company called Wall Street Analytics. The company made him rich. Instead of retiring to play golf, Ron has devoted himself to politics. He is skinny, cerebral, and friendly. He speaks in measured tones, often pausing, even in midsentence, to think. A native of California, Ron is determined to reconcile the Republican Party with immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants. Over lunch one afternoon, he argued that although Proposition 187 was intended to cut off services only to illegal immigrants, nobody should have been surprised when the measure offended legal immigrants. In many cases, legal and illegal immigrants belonged to the same families. For that matter, in many cases legal immigrants came here illegally themselves, acquiring legal status only in 1986, when President Reagan signed legislation granting amnesty to three million illegal immigrants. “Maybe Anglos think you can draw a line between legal and illegal immigrants, but try telling that to the Hispanics in this state,” Ron said.
Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly, receiving 59 percent of the vote. When it was blocked by the federal courts—the 1982 Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, requires states to provide public education for all children—Governor Wilson, who had been reelected, launched a legal fight on behalf of the measure that he pursued throughout his second term, associating the Republican Party with Proposition 187 for another four years. (In 1999, as we have seen, the measure was set aside as the result of arbitration.)
Proposition 187 may never have taken force, but its effects were felt all the same. Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Hispanics in California cast between 30 and 40 percent of their votes for Republicans. In 1994, the year Proposition 187 was on the ballot, that figure fell to less than 20 percent. It has yet to recover. “Prop. 187 was a catastrophe for Republicans,” Ron said. “It will take at least a couple of generations for Hispanics to forgive us.”
Now, it is worth pausing to note that you didn’t have to be rabidly anti-immigrant to support Proposition 187. After having lunch with Ron Unz, I had breakfast with former Governor Pete Wilson.
A former marine, Pete is still lean at 67. For a man who spent so much of his life in high office, he is utterly unassuming—when we walked into Il Fornaio, a high-tech gathering place in Palo Alto, the maître d’ failed to recognize Pete, giving us a table against the back wall, perhaps the worst table in the dining room. Pete never complained. (As one diner after another approached the former governor to pay his respects, the maître d’ looked perplexed, as if he was trying to figure out just how much of a mistake he had made.)
“Prop. 187 wasn’t an anti-immigrant measure,” Pete said. “It was the biggest taxpayer revolt since the Boston Tea Party.” For years the federal government had failed to police the border with Mexico, permitting immigrants to stream into California illegally. Then the federal government had forced California to provide the illegal immigrants with billions of dollars’ worth of services a year. “Those bastards in Washington were fall
ing down on the job,” Pete said, “and they were sticking our taxpayers with the bill.” Pete spoke earnestly. His sincerity was transparent. He never had any intention of seeing children thrown out of school. He knew the initiative would get tied up in the courts instead. “That was part of the beauty of it,” he said. Pete, who was convinced that Plyler v. Doe had been incorrectly decided, intended to take Proposition 187 all the way to the Supreme Court, forcing the Court to rule that the federal government, not the states, must bear the costs of caring for illegal immigrants.
A taxpayer revolt. Pete Wilson’s stand sounds so reasonable, so Republican. Indeed, we have heard from one young man, Justin Adams, who joined the GOP largely because he admired the courage Wilson displayed in supporting Proposition 187. Justin on the one hand, several million Hispanics on the other. The problem is that this is not a winning calculation.
NATURAL REPUBLICANS
In 1996, two years after the passage of Proposition 187, Proposition 227 appeared on the California ballot. Written by Ron Unz himself, Proposition 227 was intended to ban bilingual education in the state’s public schools. Ron’s own mother had been born into a Yiddish-speaking household in Los Angeles, yet when she attended school she had learned English quickly. Bearing in mind his mother’s experience, Ron based his initiative—the Unz Initiative, as it became known—on the proposition that Hispanics and other recent immigrants were no different from the generations of immigrants who had come to this country before them. Their children should not be taught in the native language of their parents. They should be taught in English.
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