Ah, yes, immigration [legal or not], the thing that made America, is the thing that will destroy it - God is an ironical bastard, no?
So I think the Asian vote in America is not a lost cause for conservatives - you just need candidates who have the ability to knock down the 'racist' caricature liberals have so convincingly sketched out. I'm not so sanguine about the Hispanic vote, though - as with blacks, I think there are strong cultural currents pushing Latinos to the left - much of it has to do with the role of the Catholic church in Latin America and it's pronounced socialist tendencies [the current Pope is a perfect expression of that dynamic] - and then there's the indelible stain of corruption running through all of the Latin American ruling class which is a cultural memory that most Latinos simply cannot rise above.
One thing for sure, immigration under the 'melting pot' paradigm that built America without benefit of a welfare state and immigration under a 'multicultural' paradigm that serves in many ways to cast that melting pot America as something of an evil thing and where the welfare state grabs onto the poor early and is reluctant to let them go are fundamentally incompatible - the America you get with the former [the America that became quite possibly the greatest country ever] will inevitably not have much in common with the America you'll get with the latter - liberals amuse their egos by thinking that's a good thing - I tend to doubt very much that they're right about that.
[of course it isn't all about media bias - another key difference between Canada and US when it comes to attracting certain ethnic groups towards certain political ideologies is that unlike America the True North is in general pretty liberal in its sympathies, which means if you're a conservative you have to be careful about sounding too extreme to have any shot at political office - therefore you rarely hear a conservative wade with too much enthusiasm into the minefield of social issues - that's obviously not the case in America - in short, if there are Rick Santorums in Canada they don't run for office and they very definitely do not run for leadership of a party - conservatives in Canada would love a guy like Christie - in the US, the far right can't stand him - there is no recognizable far right in Canada - it's there, you just don't see it. Now, I'm not suggesting that American conservatives imitate Canadian conservatives - Canadian conservatives have several advantages that make their lot in life simpler than it is for American conservatives: one, the liberal vote in Canada is split between four parties, whereas there's only one conservative party - huge advantage; two, foreign policy and military spending are not issues - if they were, conservatives in Canada would definitely face more headwinds; and finally, there are not millions of illegals flooding across the Canadian border and bringing with them all the cultural and demographic complications they do - indeed, if the US could lock down its southern border and implement an immigration policy as reasonable and rational as Canada's, focusing as it does on skills and education and ethnic diversity, this demographic time bomb waiting to blow American conservatism away might be disarmed. So, although imitation isn't possible, I still think the GOP could learn something from looking at the way Canadian conservatives navigate their waters, at least when it comes to the Asian vote]
Pew has found that 55 percent of Hispanics have a negative view of capitalism, the highest of any group surveyed — higher even than self-identified supporters of Occupy Wall Street (47 percent). Let me repeat: Occupy Wall Street supporters like capitalism more than Hispanics do.I do submit, though, that yes the numbers do indeed seem quite bad - and yet the GOP should look to Canada where Asians I believe in the majority vote conservative and ask themselves: why are Asian immigrants to America so very bloody liberal and yet in Canada they lean to the right? What the christ is going on there? Again, is this the baleful result of media bias? The 'if you're a conservative you're a racist' meme just doesn't play as convincingly in Canada as it does in the US even though the media in Canada is just as left wing as it is south of the border - but of course there was never institutionalized slavery in Canada nor Jim Crow racism - indeed, Canada, up until quite recently, was a very WASPy place and therefore opportunities for explicit racism were not plentiful - aside from the French/English conflict which is/was cultural, not racial [even though all racial conflicts are essentially cultural] there's just no significant history of a racist narrative in Canada and therefore the left wing media in Canada can not endlessly play that card the way they do in the US - there is no abiding caricature of the racist white capitalist in Canada for the left to exploit the way there is in America.
So I think the Asian vote in America is not a lost cause for conservatives - you just need candidates who have the ability to knock down the 'racist' caricature liberals have so convincingly sketched out. I'm not so sanguine about the Hispanic vote, though - as with blacks, I think there are strong cultural currents pushing Latinos to the left - much of it has to do with the role of the Catholic church in Latin America and it's pronounced socialist tendencies [the current Pope is a perfect expression of that dynamic] - and then there's the indelible stain of corruption running through all of the Latin American ruling class which is a cultural memory that most Latinos simply cannot rise above.
One thing for sure, immigration under the 'melting pot' paradigm that built America without benefit of a welfare state and immigration under a 'multicultural' paradigm that serves in many ways to cast that melting pot America as something of an evil thing and where the welfare state grabs onto the poor early and is reluctant to let them go are fundamentally incompatible - the America you get with the former [the America that became quite possibly the greatest country ever] will inevitably not have much in common with the America you'll get with the latter - liberals amuse their egos by thinking that's a good thing - I tend to doubt very much that they're right about that.
[of course it isn't all about media bias - another key difference between Canada and US when it comes to attracting certain ethnic groups towards certain political ideologies is that unlike America the True North is in general pretty liberal in its sympathies, which means if you're a conservative you have to be careful about sounding too extreme to have any shot at political office - therefore you rarely hear a conservative wade with too much enthusiasm into the minefield of social issues - that's obviously not the case in America - in short, if there are Rick Santorums in Canada they don't run for office and they very definitely do not run for leadership of a party - conservatives in Canada would love a guy like Christie - in the US, the far right can't stand him - there is no recognizable far right in Canada - it's there, you just don't see it. Now, I'm not suggesting that American conservatives imitate Canadian conservatives - Canadian conservatives have several advantages that make their lot in life simpler than it is for American conservatives: one, the liberal vote in Canada is split between four parties, whereas there's only one conservative party - huge advantage; two, foreign policy and military spending are not issues - if they were, conservatives in Canada would definitely face more headwinds; and finally, there are not millions of illegals flooding across the Canadian border and bringing with them all the cultural and demographic complications they do - indeed, if the US could lock down its southern border and implement an immigration policy as reasonable and rational as Canada's, focusing as it does on skills and education and ethnic diversity, this demographic time bomb waiting to blow American conservatism away might be disarmed. So, although imitation isn't possible, I still think the GOP could learn something from looking at the way Canadian conservatives navigate their waters, at least when it comes to the Asian vote]
