The Politics of Minority Identity: The Tension Between Group Identity and Social Acceptance
The most crucial and uninterrupted failing of right-wing political parties around the world has been their inability to reach out to minority voters. In the 2016 US election, for instance, Hillary Clinton won among minority voters with a margin of 74-23%, according to CNN exit polls. In 2018, the margin of Democrats over Republicans among minorities was even higher, at 76-22%. This inability to reach out to minorities is not just a problem for the American right-wing, either. In the 2017 general election in Britain, the Labour Party won 77% of the minority vote, according to a study by Nicole Martin and Omar Khan. Outreach attempts by right-wing candidates have failed as well. In the 1996 election, in spite of extensive attempts by Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Jack Kemp to attract black voters, the Republican ticket ended up winning only 12% percent of the black vote against the Democratic ticket’s 84%, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Were it not for their continual inability to win over minority voters, Republicans would have very little trouble winning public office. According to polling by the Roper Center, without the minority vote, Republicans would have won every single presidential election since 1976 (and all but three with double digit leads). Consequently, finding a way of winning a higher share of the growing minority vote should be considered the main priority of the Republican Party if it wants to be dominant – or if it wants to continue being at all.
Historically, attempts to explain the lopsidedness of the minority vote have so far been unsuccessful and largely driven by ideological interests. Typically, they view minority voters either as monolithic entities looking out exclusively for their own ethnic group’s best interest or imaginary homo economicus individuals who irrationally believe that voting for their personal best interest will make it happen. Neither explanation is true. Anyone can do the simple calculus in their heads that the costs of political engagement (finding the time to pay attention to politics and eventually go to a voting station to vote) is much greater than the hypothetical, extremely unlikely benefit of one’s vote deciding the election. In practice, neither group interests nor individual interests explain why the same percentage of those who earn over $100,000 per year voted for Hillary Clinton as for Donald Trump in 2016 (according to the same CNN exit polls). Nor does it explain why poor people in different regions vote differently. Surely, public healthcare has similar impact for a poor voter in Alabama as for a poor voter in Detroit. The response usually given, that disagreement between poor people means trickery is afoot by some kind of magical elite, displays this argument for what it is: useless partisanship.
A much better understanding of voting is one based on ideologies and identity. According to a study published in the European Journal of Political Research (“The Tie that Divides: Cross-National Evidence of the Primacy of Partyism”), trust games (that is, games in which rewards and punishments were decided arbitrarily based on trust that each member felt for the others) showed that political differences were stronger indicators of shared identity than any race, religion, or any other common characteristics. A strong lack of trust or goodwill for members of the opposite political party shows that a major reason for joining or believing in a political party is to self-define: it is the membership and belonging in one political party of “us” rather than “them” that counts. Supporting this, “Party Identification and Core Political Values,” a study by Paul Goren, used polling data to show that particular ideological values are largely unimportant when compared to the wish for shared political identity. Political positions (such as those on small vs large government or family values) do not matter to voters nearly as much as being a part of a group. This is extremely elucidating, although it does not answer our original question: not just the question of why people join a political party at all but how people choose which party to identify with.
One powerful answer focuses on the role of public trust in charismatic individuals. Hatred for this person or love for that person, the argument goes, leads to hatred or love of this or that political party. That trust then translates into trust for a political party more generally (an example of this is the widespread utilization of celebrity endorsements, for example Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2007, to change the views of the usually politically apathetic). From this perspective, a political party is a group of people rather than a group of ideological tenets. Furthermore, according to “The New American Voter” by Miller and Shanks, one’s political views decide what one believes about a given candidate for a political party before one even hears who they are. Thus, one’s perspective on an individual person or activist (as in the example of Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama) causes a shift of one’s previous political views to more accurately mirror the political candidate, even affecting one’s views about other political candidates or activists. Thus, a politician, to shift the political views of a group, must gain trust from them in an unrelated way from politics before later convincing them to shift a political view.
What this implies, however, is that, absent a high-trust individual shifting views, ideological considerations outside of politics lead to lifelong political views. Voters consider a politician’s rhetoric reasonable not because of how logical it is but because of how the values espoused compare to the voters’ own values. The most obvious example of this occurs when two ideological positions meet directly in an argument, such as a political debate. According to a poll by Yougov, not only were the polling results on a 2019 debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn suspiciously equal (the ratio of who people thought won was 51/49), but views on who performed better were associated more with previous ideological beliefs than any other factor. On the issue of the National Health Service, for instance, 54% of respondents thought Labour (which argued that more money should be spent on the NHS) won, as opposed to 38% who thought the Conservatives did. That meant 59% of those who expressed an opinion thought the person arguing a need for more money to be pumped into the NHS won, a number essentially within the margin of error of the 62% of Brits who (according to a poll by the British Medical Association) think the NHS will get worse in the near future without further funding. Debate viewers apparently decided which political parties or candidates they believed were better for the British healthcare system based on their previous perspectives on the British healthcare system in general (with which people have a lot of personal experience) rather than the candidates or the candidates’ policies in particular (with which people have very little personal experience). Thus, the creation of belief in political principles is caused in large part by views about non-political subjects affecting ideological outlooks. Shifting these as well as trust in individuals is what is needed to shift political views.
So, we have the beginning of an answer to our original question of why minorities are left-wing: like everyone else, it is because of their non-political values, and shifting these external values is what is necessary to cause any desired shift in their resulting political views. Well, what is causing these left-wing values? For that, let’s look at a poll by Pew Research Center on multi-racial identity. The first observation is that minority groups are indeed very left-wing. On average, 57% lean Democrat and 37% Republican, a margin of 20 points. This becomes even larger when you realize that multiracial people with one White parent are disproportionately right-wing, with a Republican-to-Democrat ratio of 53%-42%. (Most of the rest of this analysis will exclude mixes of Whites and Native Americans, whom we won’t be dealing with due to their exceptionality and their not being particularly left wing.)
It is instructive to examine mixed-race voter beliefs not just generally but also on particular issues. Outside of White-Native American mixes, every multi-racial group believes strongly (with margins over 20%) that government action helps the poor get out of poverty. This is in contrast to the general public, which believes the opposite proposition with a margin of 10%, demonstrating a clear difference in political leanings on economic issues between these minority groups and the general public. Moreover, one in five multiracial people say they feel like they have to identify as one race or another. However, this statistic is highly dependent on the type of multiracial group: on one end, 30% of white-black mixes feel like they have been pressured to identify with one group or another, while only 15% of white-Native American mixes feel the same way. What I would posit is that these two statistics are connected: that struggling with identity leads minorities into adopting left-wing views on government policy.
The LGBT population provides further evidence that the struggle with identity leads to more left-wing views. The argument that LGBT leftism is only a consequence of oppression, if it were true, would have to grapple with confusing fact that even as the Republican Party has become more open to LGBT rights, LGBT voters have become less open to the Republican Party. 82% of LGBT voters voted for Democrats in 2018, up from 76% in 2012. Perhaps some of that is due to oppression, but the more recent leaders of the Republican Party such as Donald Trump have certainly been more open to gay marriage or anti-discrimination legislation than someone like Mitt Romney, so it can’t be said that the only reason for leftism among wide swaths of LGBT people in general and LGBT youth in particular is due to Republican Party policy on LGBT rights. Rather, as we shall see, the roots of the political views of this particular group are the same as for multi-racial and other minority groups: a fundamental uneasiness with accepting their status as both part of their distinct minority group and part of the larger nation, leading to a desire to embrace the greater society (and be embraced by it) and thus directly to left-wing values.
The primary value conducive to the outlook of minority groups is a Hegelian view of the omniscient government – that is to say, the idea of an all-seeing, all-controlling government is an essential element behind the idea of an all-accepting government. So long as one is a citizen (or resident), one is under the tutelage of a power above. By being a part of a larger power or group, people receive their identity as a member of the national group, rather than just a member of their own smaller group. Take, for instance, the shift in the nomenclature for minorities. Instead of colorism, which emphasized separateness and difference, more recent terms for minorities increasingly tend to end in “American” (African-American rather than Black, Jewish-American rather than just Jewish, etc.), denoting one’s being part of America as their core ethnicity. This self-identification shows a belief in a kind of aggressive civic nationalism that makes the government into the purveyor of the self. This tendency to embrace a universalizing, objective leader is also shown by differences in religiosity: according to a Pew poll, 83% of black Americans say they are absolutely certain of the existence of God, much higher than the 61% of white Americans who say the same thing. As Hegel once said, “the State is God’s will,” that is to say, the government is, in the right circumstance, God exerting himself upon the society. And that interpretation is not too far off. The embracing of religiosity is done for the same reason as the embracing of governmental control: the desire for and path to acceptance into the broad identity of what one’s identity “should” be.
The usual explanation for the ideological consistency between being a minority in America and the left is the left’s insistence on luck egalitarianism – the belief that part of the government’s role is to stop some people from being in a better economic position than others based exclusively on their luck (for instance, the government should stop someone from getting a better education because they were born into a rich family). No amount of right-wing rhetoric has managed to overcome the fact that luck egalitarianism is not the source of minorities’ leftism. The Republican Party’s repetitious claims, most aggressively in 2012, that the Republican Party cares an awful lot about equality of opportunity did not stop 93% of blacks from voting for the opposite ticket, only 2 points fewer than in 2008. Indeed, vague arguments of luck egalitarianism have never been major drivers for black votes. Most recently, during the 2020 Super Tuesday primary election, exit polls from the Washington Post showed that in states with large Democratic black populations such as Alabama, only 18% of voters said their most important issue was income inequality. Distributive justice is not as significant a driver for minorities’ voting patterns as the wish and support for a large state for its own sake.
The first possible answer given to what can be done to lessen minority groups’ embrace of a large, accepting, paternalistic state is to refocus minorities on their own special identities as minorities rather than as members of the society at large. Putting the focus on their minority status through churches, non-profit organizations, organizations that help lobby for equality, and similar things, at least at first, can help to shift minorities to the right. This rejection of integration into the majority leads eventually to minorities emphasizing their separation from the majority. Indeed, self-segregation often creates very right-wing groups, at least for a time. For instance, ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews, who try to remain outside of society, effectively act like a single individual asking the government to get off their property, because they are a single group that wants the system to leave them alone. In Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews have two right-wing parties of their own, but as if those aren’t enough, they also frequently vote heavily for the main right-wing party in Israel (as they did in the March 2020 election, leading to ultra-Orthodox stronghold Jerusalem not voting for an ultra-Orthodox party but for a secular right-wing party). In America, a poll by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency showed that 66% of Haredi Jews voted for Trump, as opposed to only 32% of modern Orthodox Jews (who follow the expected left-leaning political tendencies for minority groups). Louis Farrakhan’s strange flirtation with the Republican Party reminds us that there is a long history of black nationalists supporting Republicans, all the way back to Marcus Garvey at the beginning of the black nationalist movement, who was a strident capitalist and demagogic opponent of Communism. Although trying to encourage separatism for the sake of political expediency is awful and indefensible, it certainly can make minorities more right-wing than if they continue to embrace assimilation through big government policies.
In fact, encouraging minority separatism is not just immoral, but it also is destined to fail in the long-term. While minority separatism may be able to gain strength in the short-term, very few people join fringe, separatist groups for very long. It is impossible for most minorities to completely dissociate themselves from the majority, so the wish to integrate will constantly weigh on them, no matter their intentions otherwise. The pressure on separated groups to integrate is generally much too large for them to separate themselves into smaller collectives by their own initiative, either economically or psychologically. When complete separation is allowed economically and created implicitly, separation does create very right-wing groups (for example, the Haredi population in Israel). However, most minorities are not as economically self-sufficient nor psychologically self-righteous as the Haredim. Constantly being a part of the society and being uncertain whether your “group” is better, worse, or equal to others raises exactly the same dissatisfaction that generated the original wish to establish one’s identity; separation simply returns minorities to the original quagmire. This is why most separatist groups try to create economic separation, for example through opposition to gentrification, and religious devotion to their own group, as in the cultist practices of the Nation of Islam. Economic separation and a feeling of cultural superiority are needed for separation, but they are very difficult for members to achieve and far too difficult for these groups to sustain popularity for very long.
As a result, this kind of separatism either becomes too popular to remain separatism (as in the NAACP, in which the Pan-African elements quickly disappeared when it became clear that they were unpopular) or the group becomes a small, unimportant sideshow (as in the Nation of Islam, which has a mere 20,000-50,000 members in the entire United States, only a few times the membership of the Klu Klux Klan). Creating more assimilatory organizations, however, would be undesirable from a political strategy point of view. Assimilatory organizations like the NAACP tend to be even better for left-wing political parties in funding, getting supporters to polls, and providing the talent to run for political office (as demonstrated, for example, by the NAACP’s institutional support of left-wing politics in recent decades). The reason for assimilatory organizations’ love for left-wing politics is the same as the reason previously discussed for minorities’ love for left-wing politics – larger government allows for perceived acceptance into the greater community.
Let’s recap. The individuals in the group want to become a part of a bigger group through the government. Treating the group as if it were a single individual doesn’t work for very long before the group is forced to act as the individuals within might, not as a collective individual. But, in spite of everything, we don’t really have a simple solution coming from this analysis. To change political views, we not only have to actually convince people to embrace right-wing policies, we also have to change minority groups’ fundamental ideologies of life. And so, everything just returns to minorities voting left inevitably and perpetually. The clearest, quickest, and most helpful way of getting minorities to support right-wing candidates at this point is to just do away with the idea of minority groups, of oppression or the idolization of a particular idea of the majority, etc. But that answer isn’t a very viable solution. It’s like answering, “How will I be able to buy food if I don’t have a job?” by saying, “If hunger didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have to.” To answer our increasingly difficult question with a real, possible answer, we will have to take a detour and examine not only how racial minorities use the political system but how the political system uses them.
A good place to start our examination of how race is used in political strategy is the so-called “Southern Strategy.” However, the traditional idea of the Southern Strategy has no place in modern discourse. Explained infamously during an interview of Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater in 1981, the continued belief in this strategy does not make much sense in our era, with its concerns about implicit bias and dog whistles of dog whistles. Neither Atwater’s campaign style nor his description of the policy makes much sense in relation to modern political campaigning.
What is commonly called “The Southern Strategy” nowadays is the usage of campaign slogans, messaging, and arguments that utilize veiled, coded bigotry against a particular minority group. For example, birtherism, the contention that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, was used and popularized to subtly imply that as a black, Obama was not a true American and didn’t understand true American values; rather, he was a foreigner with the values of one. (Indeed, such rhetoric was a broader issue than just birtherism. Consider Marco Rubio’s canned line that he used at the Republican national debate in 2016: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing…He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world; we want to be the United States of America.”) But even this seems a little odd. Why would someone be appealing so hard to such a small base of aggressive White supremacists, and why would aggressive bigots need to be convinced not to vote for someone whom they are already bigoted against? Why would anyone even have to mention it? It’s because it’s not dog whistles that are being used: it’s something a little more insidious.
Instead, what is being done here is closer to stereotypes than outright racism. A study by the National Hispanic Media Coalition showed that stereotypes have a large effect on how people view minorities (in this study, Latinos). Among those with low familiarity with Latinos, for instance, only 59% said they view them (as a group) positively, while a much higher 72% of those with high familiarity with Latinos say the same. Separately, 71% of those with low familiarity with Latinos say they see them as possibly criminal. According to the same study, those who watch political talk shows such as the “O’Reilly Show” that tend to speak in negative ways about Latinos had a much higher rate of believing negative stereotypes about Latinos (like lack of intelligence) and were less likely to believe positive stereotypes (such as honesty) than those who do not. Clearly, stereotypes transmitted through the media can change one’s view of others. And yet, this does not transmit when talking about individual Latinos. As discussed earlier, studies show that differences in trust between different races are quite small when compared to differences in trust based on political party. Thus, it should be more politically expedient to focus on showing the differences between political parties than talking about race. Rather than trying to focus on race per se, what is happening in the case of the Stereotype Strategy is the attempt to wrangle individual minority candidates into broader stereotypes voters have of minorities.
The rhetoric behind this wrangling is one of trickery. If people can see what you are doing, it won’t work on them. The entire strategy is to make someone believe a slander against your political opponent. An easy way to do that, as we have discussed earlier, is by decreasing public trust. If a politician is hated personally, it will cause significant responses to tiny events. Take, for instance, the 2016 election, when FBI Director James Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a short period of time. It wasn’t objectively a very major event, and the investigation was quickly reclosed, but support for Clinton took a nosedive in that time. Public trust of Hillary Clinton was so low that even a minor accusation of an infraction was enough to make a large number of people think she had committed a crime. And this was what the entire campaign against her was trying to do. By emphasizing her email scandal and her mishandling of the 2012 Benghazi attack, the attempt was at least to put in people’s minds an idea of Clinton as criminal and untrustworthy, so any implication of possible wrongdoing meant crime and lying. The Stereotype Strategy operates in the same manner, but by using common collective stereotypes. You will rarely, for instance, see a visually Hispanic politician be referred to repetitiously as a liar or a cheat. Their stereotype is honesty. Their stereotype is also low intelligence, so instead much of that will be alleged. For example, look at Donald Trump’s insult of 2016 primary rival Marco Rubio. The insult was not that he was liar, but rather that Rubio was stupid. Take, for instance, one Trump quote: “The Rubios of the world could not get into that school.” Note the usage of the plural in “Rubios.” The attempt is to make Marco Rubio into the stereotype attached to his clearly Hispanic name, not by calling him personally stupid but by conflating him with the negative components of his group’s stereotype.
This is also the reason for so-called non-sequiturs, especially those regarding physical attributes. These seemingly irrelevant comments are capable of tying together the stereotype of a group with a particular member, thus decreasing public trust. In general, there is no reason to point out the physical oddity of how someone looks, because that is not what matters. What does matter, however, is that how they look is similar to how other people of their ethnic group look. And as soon as they are identified with their ethnic group, they are no longer viewed as an individual. They cannot have policy or nuance or gain wide-ranging support. Their campaign will die.
The Stereotype Strategy is not anything like the Southern Strategy; the reason it seems similar is because the original innovations of the old Southern Strategy were needed to unlock this new access to bigotry. Indeed, it is not clear the people doing this (aside from a select few brilliant campaigners such as Lynton Crosby) even know what they are doing. A lot of the time, this stuff is caused by an infinite regression of inaccurate interpretations of accidental or unclear statements, eventually making an innocuous statement into an offensive one. These inaccurate interpretations happen especially often on social media, where actors of different intentions can get together and misinterpret each other until slander becomes the truth. The best version of a campaign using the Stereotype Strategy works when the victim does not actually have the identity he is being attacked for, but merely seems like he might. (For example, the focus on Pete Buttigieg being a “sneaky” establishment figure mixed with the focus on physical attributes such as his supposedly rat-like nose was tying him to the stereotype of a Jew, even though he is not Jewish.) In that case, there is no risk of discovery; indeed, there is no discovery to begin with.
However, not all iterations of the Stereotype Strategy are bad for the stereotyped candidate. Indeed, stereotypes exist for all kinds of things. There isn’t one monolithic negative stereotype: indeed, the insider-outsider is one of the most common clichés in modern culture. This is the idea of the person who is part of the bad group yet nevertheless fights against their group out of either righteousness or pure incompetence. This kind of person is someone who comes from the unachievable elite leader class but is nevertheless so naturally good (or incompetent) that he or she sees the average person as a person and does not reconcile his or her beliefs with the beliefs of the so-called establishment. At its core, this is populism. No populist, at least in the Anglosphere, is a real person. Bernie Sanders is a stereotypical elderly Jewish socialist; endless articles have been published in Israeli newspapers or other news targeted at American Jews focusing on how much of a stereotype or how bad for Jews everywhere he is because he seems to prove anti-Semitic stereotypes (here’s one: “I rage at Bernie Sanders, the last Jewish Bolshevik. But I can’t hate him,” by Lev Stesin). Sanders is in fact extremely popular, especially among groups with very little interaction with Jews (for instance, Latinos who live mostly in southwestern United States, quite far from where most Jews live), and provides a good example of positive stereotyping.
This positive stereotyping is exactly the missing piece to figure out how to integrate minority voters into a more right-wing coalition. Let’s take Boris Johnson as an example. Johnson is someone who has spent his entire career defining himself as a foppish, stereotypical elite who doesn’t really know why he was granted a position of power but sure is trying his hardest. The generally non-Conservative voters who make up the socially oppressed or low-class – that is, the poor – love him. Even after the Brexit referendum shifted politics in 2016, Labour was still winning among the lowest class, DE, and lost the second lowest, C2 by only 7 points (according to an exit poll by Yougov). Compare that to Johnson’s more recent results. He managed to take these groups that usually act as the backbone of the political left and integrate them completely. In the 2019 election, Johnson won the DE social class by 13 points and the C2 social group by 18 points, in large part because of his foppish manner. Johnson’s campaign showed people they did not need a great large government to accept them; rather, they were already accepted and understood by the ruling class, at least this caricature of it. They were no longer “lower-class Britons”; they became just “Britons.”
In America, the potential to flip minority groups through the usage of the “insider-outsider” image is similarly demonstrated in the right’s relationship with the ethnic white vote. Italian Americans and Irish Americans used to make up a significant part of the left coalition until, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appealed to them and showed them that he understood their concerns. Reagan did this from the perspective of an elite Hollywood actor, but someone who had played the everyman in the movies. These previously left-leaning groups moved right because Reagan showed them, with his high personal public trust, that could also identify with the elite.
Donald Trump in 2016 as well as Scott Walker in 2012 did the same thing. There has been much misleading analysis about the voting patterns of the white working class, all based on the fundamental notion that people vote exclusively based on class or that Trump’s trade arguments were particularly important. But then, why did free trader Scott Walker win among the same groups? The reason is simple: both politicians represent different ideas of the American elite talking to the average white ethnic child of immigrants and communicating a message of understanding and acceptance. Walker, who described himself as “aggressively normal” during his short-lived presidential campaign, is a Midwestern WASP in his early 50s with a boring, normal family life. He is the stereotype of the average American, statistically speaking, and thus the stereotype of American leadership in a democracy. Trump, on the other hand, is a stereotypical billionaire. He goes through wives every few years, lives in a big tower with his name plastered in gold on it, and made his money in real estate and bankruptcy. He is also the American elite. His direct campaigning to ethnic whites, describing them as part of an America threatened by an “other” (immigrants and foreigners) demonstrated his message that these previously excluded white voters were already included as part of the big society. Thus, they voted for him, because there was no longer any need to give more power to an inclusive government to achieve acceptance and inclusion. They already felt included because they were being talked to on their level as individuals within the larger group.
So, we have finally arrived at an outline for Republicans to entice minority voters. Do not try to deny or minimize your elite roots; rather, present yourself as both defined by and rebelling against these roots. Try to understand and speak to voters not as numbers or members of groups, but as individual people within the greater group of “Americans.” The path to being cast in a damagingly bigoted way also opens up the path to being cast in a positively bigoted way. And then, only then, when they are treated as if their individuality matters more than their part in a collectivity, can minorities throw off the yoke of the collective and join the broader society.
