Kamala Harris

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It wasn’t a good autumn for Joe Biden and the Democrats. The president’s approval rating was down to a Trump-like 41 percent in an NPR poll released on Monday.

Why?

British prime minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied to a question about what is the most important influence on his term of office with, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Biden isn’t that suave, but he would have some justification for blaming the Democrats’ tumble on a series of unfortunate events. But much of the ruling party’s growing unpopularity stems from inevitable outgrowths of their fundamental 21st-century political strategy of exacerbating divisiveness in the name of diversity.

And Democrats alienated Hispanics and, increasingly, Asians by anointing blacks as their moral leaders and deciding that black interests trump all others. Thus, in this new poll, Biden’s approval rating among Hispanics was only 33 percent. (Granted, that’s a small sample size, and the number is drawing attention precisely because it’s something of an outlier. But still, it’s another example of a trend worrying Democrats.)

The big decline in Biden’s polls happened in August during the tactically inept fall of Afghanistan. The press had been covering for him, but Kabul punctured the administration’s claim to competence.

Biden also bet heavily that he could double down on the already expansive Trumponomics with lavish spending on the Democratic Party’s Christmas wish list without provoking retail price inflation.

After all, the government had long been printing money to keep interest rates quite low, with the outcome being mostly asset price inflation (which pleases asset holders, so it’s not as politically fraught as supermarket inflation). Biden presumably looked at the recent past and reasoned: Who really understands macroeconomics anyway? So maybe we can push our luck much further and get away with it.

But now we seem to be back finally to 1970s-style inflation.

And, of course, Covid keeps mutating unpredictably, undermining the appeal of the administration’s mantra that they will succeed by following The Science. In truth, nobody much knows what will happen next.

But other political problems the Democrats are running into are closer to inevitable by-products of their grand strategy of riding the diversity train to triumph.

As I’ve been pointing out for years, in an era of high immigration and the worship of diversity, it makes sense for the Democrats to try to assemble a coalition from the fringes of American society: immigrants, blacks, LGBTQ+, and so forth, and to encourage the concoction of more of their constituents by not defending the border, encouraging teenage girls to have themselves disfigured, etc…

One downside to diversity, of course, is its disunity. What can bring together so many odd lots of voters?

The Democrats’ main strategy for that has been to foster hatred of core Americans as something all Democrats can agree upon, tearing down the statues of their ancestors and denying their accomplishments. As Joe Biden said in Kenosha in 2020: “A black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Tom Edison.”

Core Americans have tended to be remarkably easy-going about all the defamation. But, eventually, even straight white males start to catch on.

Moreover, there is a constant struggle among the various activists to exalt their group as the most oppressed. Blacks seemingly won a historic victory on May 25, 2020, over the immigrant ethnic groups that are actually supposed to provide the Democrats’ incremental votes to be the sacred cows of wokeness.

But the subsequent black crime spree has left the Democrats in a tight spot, with even San Francisco Democrats like Gavin Newsom and London Breed now talking tough on crime.

The Hispanic revolt against the Democrats is likely due to their politicians allowing, even encouraging, blacks to steal with impunity during the Mostly Peaceful Protests.

What about Latino criminals? At present, we don’t have terribly reliable statistics on how much Hispanics are contributing to the murder and robbery surge of the past eighteen months.

It could be a significant amount. For instance, in California in 2020, there were 40 percent more black murder victims, reflecting the obvious tsunami of black-on-black shootings. But Hispanic victims were also up 34 percent, while white deaths increased 9 percent.

It would be useful to know how much Hispanics are participating in the crime wave because it could help us understand if the murder surge is more due to the police pulling back or to blacks becoming more exultant.

But in any case, Latino voters seem less sympathetic toward their own criminals, much less toward black lawbreakers.

It’s not widely recognized that Hispanics appear to have become relatively more law-abiding over the past four decades. Criminologist Barry Latzer’s informative 2016 book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America reported that from 1980, the peak year of Miami Vice-style killings over powder cocaine, to fairly sedate 2009, the white homicide mortality rate declined 50 percent, the black rate dropped 54 percent, while the Hispanic rate plummeted an impressive 75 percent. In 1980, Latinos were murdered 62 percent as often as blacks (which is a lot), while in 2009 they were slain only 35 percent as much.

The reasons for this relative improvement in Hispanic behavior are not certain. In fact, it hasn’t much been noticed. But Latinos can reasonably take some pride in it while resenting the attention devoted to black crooks who come to unfortunate ends at the hands of police and the subsequent egging on by elites of black rioters.

Something similar may be starting to happen among Asian voters. Matt Taibbi points out that the parents’ revolt against the woke school board in Virginia’s Loudoun County, a wealthy and fast-growing Washington, D.C., exurb of 421,000, took place in one of the more Asian counties in the country. Loudoun’s Asian population increased by an order of magnitude between the 2000 and 2020 Censuses, growing from 9,000 to 90,000.

Dumbing down their kids’ schooling in the name of black self-esteem is anathema to Asian parents. Taibbi quotes one Indian-American:

“You watch. Indian and Chinese immigrants who typically vote Democratic will vote the other way because education for children is their number one issue. It’s why they came here.”

Nor are Asians immune to the rise in black crime. A New York Times headline reads:

In Fight Against Violence, Asian and Black Activists Struggle to Agree: Calls for unity have ebbed over disagreements on one main issue: policing.

In other words, the apparent increase in beatings of small elderly Asians by large young black muggers and maniacs is causing Chinatown activists to demand more cops on the beat, much to the dismay of BLM activists. It’s almost as if Asians and blacks have different interests and blaming everything on ex-President Trump saying the words “China virus” is a rapidly deteriorating Band-Aid.

The Democrats deciding they must put blacks in charge (symbolized by Joe’s affirmative-action choice of the inept Kamala) is like making the drummer the leader of the rock band. Drummers are important, but they tend not to be the main composers. It’s as if John and Paul had responded to George’s complaints about not getting enough songs on the Beatles’ albums by realizing that Ringo had even fewer and declaring, in the manner of Ibram X. Kendi, that Beatles records would feature nothing but the drummer’s ditties until equity had finally been attained.