Dear Liberals: Yes, You Care About Racial Majorities

You're a participant in this discussion, even and especially if you think you're riding above it.

There’s a popular pretense on the left - or maybe posture is a better word - that caring about the racial or ethnic makeup of a space is bad. (Unless we’re talking about gentrification, obviously - then, it’s good.) People who concern themselves with things like demographic change code as turbo-racists to lefties.

Probably the shortest path between where you’re sitting right now and you getting called a Nazi is hopping on Facebook or Instagram and saying something about the dwindling share of a western country’s white population. You’ll reach your destination in seconds. Even just that topic is dirty.

It’s odd that it should be. Immigration isn’t off limits as a topic - indeed, it’s one of the very hottest button issues in the United States. But its consequences, it’s outcomes, cannot be discussed in overtly identitarian terms without risking sanction. This despite identitarian outcomes being a big - perhaps, the biggest - piece of the puzzle.

It’s not, as the right often charges, that liberals fantasize about engineering black or brown majorities (leftists do that, not liberals), it’s that they think it’s just kind of bad to care at all: Let it ride, man. What will be will be.

They’re lying about this, of course. But they mostly don’t know they are.

I wonder if readers will find the following exchange relatable:

Me: Where should we go out to eat?

Wife: I don’t care.

Me: Okay, how about Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag?

Wife: No, I don’t feel like that.

Me: The Burrito Dungeon?

Wife: No, we just ate there.

Me: Pizza Greasy?

Wife: Mmmmmmm…no.

Me: Okay, where do you want to eat?

Wife: I don’t care. You pick.

It’s all rather perplexing, isn’t it? Our little starship seems to have flown into a logic singularity.

My wife has stated, quite clearly, that she has no preference regarding where we eat. But then, when several restaurants are suggested, her behavior reveals that, in fact, she does have a preference.

Which is impossible. Because she says she doesn’t.

Something is amiss. And the above situation is a delicate one to navigate. It cannot actually be true that my wife both “doesn’t care” where we eat, and also that she “doesn’t feel like” eating at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag.

Because if she doesn’t feel like eating at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag, then by definition, she does care where we eat. She literally has to.

Which brings us to our subsequent quandary. Since the choice to eat at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag is binary - we’re either going to do that or we aren’t - my wife’s first revealed preference implies a second preference: she doesn’t want to eat at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag.

Because if either of these were true:

1. She wanted to eat at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag…

Or…

2. She actually didn’t care about where we ate…

…then my initial suggestion that we eat at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag would have been accepted. If not enthusiastically, at least neutrally, or passively.

So.

Her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, my wife’s behavior has revealed two things:

1. She cares where we eat.

2. She cares whether we eat at Slippery Sam’s Family Feedbag.

She has a macro preference and a micro preference, but is pretending to have neither preference. This is very challenging.

Good thing it’s just the small matter of where to have dinner and not say, which demographic group should constitute the majority of the most powerful country in the history of the world.

If it were something important like that, we’d be in quite the pickle, wouldn’t we?

Wake me when we get to Star Trek

I don’t want to play footsie for this whole essay, so right up front, here’s what I’d like as far as who gets to be the majority in which country: I’d like it if group identity had no predictive power regarding preference.

The black trans woman mixing your cosmo? MAGA.

The little white granny sitting next to you on the bus in Little Rock? Actually an Islamist.

Your megachurch pastor’s a commie, your blue-haired barista’s a national socialist, and the guy who just skull-stomped you outside the liquor store is a neo-Hegelian who regards hyperpartisanship not only as a force for good actually, but as something like the fast lane to reaching harmonious synthesis.

In my ideal world, everyone is interchangeable.

Saying, “I don’t care who’s in the majority,” is not only a reasonable position in this world, it’s arguably the only moral one. Because any preference regarding majority share would be necessarily ill-motivated: you can’t predict what that guy believes vs. what the other guy believes, and you can’t predict behavior, so the fact that you have a favorite at all suggests that you simply like one less than the other. Which, ouch.

Unhappily, after 42 years observing conditions on this Earth, I am forced to conclude that this is not quite how it works.

In fact, if you were to scoop, at random, 100 white grannies off the streets Little Rock, you’d find comparatively few Islamists relative to 100 folks scooped randomly off the streets of Kandahar. You’ll find more communists in Pyongyang than in Pensacola, there are not many trans Trumpers, and blue hair is still mostly not a Nazi-coded aesthetic.

So while it may be thorny, it actually is reasonable to fret over which demographic group holds the majority in your country, provided that country is a democracy. (If it isn’t, who gives a shit?)

The following anecdote may help explain why:

Very near where I grew up lies the city of Hammtramck, Michigan. It’s an interesting place. 30 languages are spoken there, and it boasts one of the highest foreign-born population shares of any city in the state.

Historically an enclave for immigrants from eastern Europe, Hammtramck has changed drastically, just in the last few decades. It now has a significant Muslim contingent, owing mostly to an influx of residents from Bangladesh and Yemen.

Liberals were positively delighted when, in 2015, Hammtramck became the first city in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. An historic win for multiculturalism!

Those liberals were somewhat less delighted when, in 2023, that Muslim-majority council voted to permanently ban pride flags.

Muslim residents, packing the City Hall, erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote. On Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless:

“Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with a flexing bicep emoji 💪

Well... Oops.

Western democracies are quite brilliantly designed, reliably built to safeguard against slides into tyranny or authoritarian takeovers. But they all have something like a kill switch.

They are powerless to prevent their own destruction if that destruction represents the popular will. In other words, they can vote themselves out of existence.

Democracy in practice

Imagine a Gossip Girl fan society, organized around democratic principles. Its two north stars are: majority rule, and Gossip Girl.

Then imagine, in advance of the annual meeting: welcoming into the club its same number, plus one, of people who are ardent fans of The O.C.

This O.C. set votes that the society should abandon its commitment to Gossip Girl in favor of one to The O.C. Now, there is no longer a Gossip Girl fan society. There is an O.C. fan society, with an unhappy Gossip Girl minority.

I think if you asked a liberal to give you their opinion of a hypothetical group of people who were desperate to preserve a white majority in the United States (or the UK, or France, or the Netherlands, etc), they would tell you that that group was evil, immoral, and racist.

I wonder what they’d say if you asked them to explain precisely why.

We’re talking about a liberal, mind you, not a leftist. I expect a leftist would be quite content to tell you that they just don’t much like white people, and would rather see a different group take the lion’s share of social power. Fair enough.

But I don’t think a liberal would be comfortable admitting that. I don’t think a liberal would even feel that. I think a liberal would tell you that their discomfort was with demographic management, just in principle.

Functionally, the liberal would channel my wife on the way to dinner. Their response would be along the lines of, “I just don’t care who’s in the majority. I don’t think it matters.”

But by now, I think we’ve established two things:

1. In a democracy, it does matter who’s in the majority.

2. It’s not really true that they “don’t care.”

If people really “don’t care” who will end up with the largest share of representation, it follows that they should have no problem living under the ideological yokes of the following groups:

1. Skinheads

2. The Islamic State

3. The Daleks

And the thing is, I think a liberal would have a pretty big problem with any of those. All three groups would be highly likely to organize any government under their control along highly illiberal lines. Of course liberals wouldn’t want that.

Me me me

So the issue isn’t so much an inability to conceive of a demographic majority enshrining suboptimal preferences. It’s that liberals don’t like what it would say about them if they took an interest in stopping such a thing from happening.

Once more for clarity, we’re discussing liberals here. Leftists would probably be quite content to say, “yeah fuck white people,” and openly pine for some other bunch having a turn in charge. Whether, after making it, they would actually enjoy sleeping in such a bed is a different question (see: Hammtramck, Michigan).

I’m not accusing the libs of lying about what they believe, or of being too cowardly to admit it. That’s not quite it. More just that they’re operating on faulty assumptions. One being that demographic tipping points are so unlikely, or so far off down the road, that discussion of them now is all a bit hysterical.

Another is that, through some kind of osmosis, the principles and precepts of liberal democracy will just sort of infiltrate these other groups. Such that if, a la Hammtramck, Michigan, the United States should become majority Bengali-Yemeni, it won’t really matter. Because by that point, they’ll all just be John Stuart Mill acolytes anyway.

Numbers & demographics

Available data suggest that on these scores, liberals are wildly, powerfully wrong.

Most projections show the United States becoming a “majority-minority” country by about 2042. That’s around the time my son should be finishing college.

At that time, the non-Hispanic white population of the United States will dip below 50%. Which, of course, doesn’t mean anything, does it? Since, when you cross the southern border into Tijuana or Juarez, everything is literally exactly the same as when you were in San Diego or El Paso. Right?

European census-taking doesn’t work in quite the same way as in the US, so national projections are harder to come by. But Paris is already majority-minority in terms of its youth. City-wide, foreign born residents will likely outnumber the native French by sometime in the 2030s, and Marseilles could tip this decade.

42% of Berliners have a migrant background. Frankfurt is already majority-migrant. Only about 40% of people in Amsterdam have two Dutch parents, and native Dutch are the minorities in many neighborhoods. Rotterdam and The Hague have also already tipped.

Only around ⅓ of London is white British. That’s been the case since the early 2010s. Birmingham is hovering around 50/50 white/non-white. Manchester is still up around ⅔ white, but that’s not remotely true for its youth. So it’s probably looking at a tipping point sometimes in the 30s or 40s.

This is not a question for the distant future, is the point. This is, in many cases, an already resolved question. Stateside, we are probably not going to be zipping around on jetpacks by the time we’re contending with this.

Now, I hope you’ve noticed a few things.

The first being that I made it through all that without using the word “replacement,” and also without lamenting this as some kind of ethnic apocalypse. That’s not because I’m passing judgment on those whose hackles are farther up than mine, it’s more just that I have loose preferences.

I’ve lived under Islamic governments, and found them mostly tolerable. I’d have a strong preference for alcohol being available somewhere, just because I like my whiskey, but if I’m limited to sipping illicit beer in speakeasies, so be it. And if I have to go teetotal, it’ll suck, but maybe I’ll live longer.

I’ve never lived in Latin America. I don’t think I’d want to be gay under a Latin American government. Or a woman. Depending on which specific culture dominated. But since I’m not gay or a woman, I guess I can be okay with that too. Plus, I really like tacos.

India is a little harder for me to imagine. My wife had a pretty rough time living there as a single woman, which suggests that my daughter might too if she moved to say, Brampton or Malton in Toronto, or Newton or Fleetwood in Vancouver. But she’s not Canadian, so that’s probably unlikely. And no major Canadian metropolis is expected to tip overall anytime soon.

My daughter wants to go to college in Europe though, and that’s a little trickier. It may only be a minority of Muslim transplants to Europe who are Islamic separatists, but as the overall population grows, so grows that minority.

And this is a group that has, sadly, brought with it a propensity to commit sexual violence at rates far higher than the native born populations of the host countries. The primary victims of this surge may themselves be migrants, but as the father of a daughter, that’s not really something at which I can just shrug.

This is all to say that there’s not any such thing as getting to remain on the fence anymore. For good or ill, this is happening.

To state, “I don’t care” is to reveal a preference. Because others do care. If you think those people are evil because they care, you’re not riding above the fray, you’re just staking out a different position to theirs. And that is not a morally lighter undertaking than what they’re doing.

You are playing the game of demographic management, even if you insist you aren’t. The only exceptions to that are if you really, honestly don’t have a problem with Sweden becoming part of an Islamic caliphate, or if you’re simply unaware that policy and governing preference can be predicted by group membership (they can).

Leftists, at least, are being honest about what they want. I can respect them for that. Same goes for nativists, who are crystal clear about their goals and intentions.

If gooey, squishy, one race, the human race liberals want to drift through this next century - this century that will see massive, unprecedented, civilization-altering demographic change - draped in their gossamer veils of blissful ignorance, that’s fine. They can have at it.

But I am not going to tolerate their projecting an air of moral superiority - over anyone - while they do it.

Pick a fucking restaurant. If you’re not going to, you will eat whatever you’re served. And you won’t complain.