The WASP-less election

Perhaps least recognized on that list is the pervasive influence of the American literature, art, music, food, religious beliefs and ideas produced by the great diversity of African-American and immigrant cultures—Irish, Jewish, Italian, Indian, Japanese, Latino, Russian—that a century ago would have been regarded as altogether foreign. In the past half-century, the carriers of the traditions of Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain, more often than not were named Mailer, Malamud, Roth, Baldwin, Ellison, or Morrison. Forty years ago, when I published a book called The Decline of the WASP, even I thought it was a little smart-assed. It turned out to be closer to the mark than I thought, maybe even prophetic.

It’s not surprising that the great changes of the past few decades would produce a major backlash in our social life and politics, the Birther movement most obvious among them. The laws to deny illegal immigrants housing and jobs or to require voters to show photo IDs or other forms of identification are partly a political ploy by Republicans to keep poor people and minorities, most of them Democrats, from the polls, but they also trade on the nativism and xenophobia generated in every prior era of great demographic change…

But despite fears on the right of a white culture left behind and triumphalist rhetoric on the left about an emerging Democratic majority powered by our growing Hispanic population, the new, non-WASP members of our political elite are also a reminder to both parties that immigrants, their children and grandchildren, and the grandchildren of slaves, who for most of the prior century had generally been categorically regarded as comfortably Democratic and vaguely liberal could—like the Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases—become among the most conservative voices in American government.