The most remarkable political story of 2024 was surely Donald Trump’s victory, and the most remarkable aspect of that story was the strong support Trump earned from a variety of minority groups which had previously leaned Democratic. Trump won 46% of Hispanics and 40% of Asians. Although African Americans remain stubbornly Democratic, he did make inroads with young black men, and it appears that younger minority voters more generally are increasingly willing to vote Republican.
Trump’s uniqueness distracts from how significant this is. A decade ago, in the wake of Barack Obama’s successes, the consensus view was that the increasing diversity of the American electorate would ultimately lead to Democratic hegemony. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, appeared prophetic. Now, Trump’s election has exploded this myth completely.
Any European conservative wishing to understand the house that Donald built should closely study Patrick Ruffini’s outstanding and criminally overlooked 2023 book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Ruffini is one of the most astute observers of American politics in the business and his book’s relevance extends far beyond American shores. In it, he describes how possession of a college degree has become the fundamental class divider in contemporary America. He goes on to outline the evidence detailing how both white and non-white college graduates have been shifting towards the Republicans, thereby creating a conservative-minded working-class coalition.
The opposing force to this coalition are white college graduates: the only category of voter which has been trending leftwards, and a group which is often drawn to the major metropolitan areas where knowledge industry workers tend to congregate. As Musa Al-Gharbi outlines in his insightful new book, We Have Never Been Woke, these ‘symbolic capitalists’ are defined by their non-manual work in sectors like academia, journalism, law, and tech. Their income levels and lifestyles set them apart from most of their compatriots, and it is within this group that Woke ideology has come to predominate. “Wokeness,” Al-Gharbi writes, “can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation.”
Luckily for Trump’s Republicans and similar-minded parties on this side of the Atlantic, working-class voters continue to shun the secular religion preached by their lifestyle liberal overlords. Ruffini’s analysis of pre-2024 trends makes all this very clear. Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas—a region which straddles the Mexican border and which is traditionally more Latino than Anglo in culture—are the most spectacular example of a community which has abandoned the Democrats and embraced the Republicans. Yet there are plenty of others; Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Colombian-Americans, Venezuelan-Americans and others moving to the GOP.
Ruffini outlines many of the reasons for this including: disgust at elite Democrats’ embrace of the socialist ideology which has often ruined minority voters’ homelands; widespread irritation at Woke terminology like ‘Latinx’; and the practical impact of the progressive assault on merit-based admissions in education (which hurts Asian children especially). Patrick Ruffini is not the only writer to spot what is happening. On the Democratic side, the aforementioned John Judis and Ruy Teixeira sounded the alarm in 2023 about the exodus of working-class voters from their party, while pointing the finger of blame at the far-left ideologues who have pushed race-based quotas, open borders, transgenderism, and misguided environmental policies which increase energy costs.
It is of great benefit to examine the wealth of social science data emanating from the States in the last decade or more. The combined insights of researchers like Charles Murray (Coming Apart), Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism) and Tim Carney (Alienated America) paint a picture of a society which has fractured economically, socially, and culturally. The new socio-economic elite is cut off from ‘flyover country’ and is incapable of understanding why so much of their country’s election night map appears bright red. For many years, the most common explanation for the voting patterns of the white working-class was the easiest one: racism.
Liberals living prosperous lives in very multicultural cities on America’s east and west coasts often saw the reluctance of many Americans to embrace rapid cultural change (in the form of mass immigration and changing social mores) as something arising from prejudice against minorities. To question any of the changes taking place was to risk being shouted down, smeared or cancelled entirely. In America as in Europe, those on the Right were placed in an impossible situation where the terms of the debate were structured so as to prevent commonly-held views (like a preference for less immigration) from being put forward. That is what makes the nature of Trump’s victory so historic. Growing Hispanic, Asian, and African-American support for the Republicans has shattered core assumptions of America’s progressives.
A politician whose rhetoric is the antithesis of politically correctness (labelling Kamala Harris as a ‘DEI hire,’ calling a self-declared Native American politician ‘Pocahontas,’ etc.) attracting large-scale minority support shows that it is possible to discuss race and immigration, in admittedly inelegant ways, without self-immolating. A whole popular narrative of America’s past and future has just been vapourised. Republicans can now survey an electoral map which looks highly favourable to them in the coming years. Longstanding demographic patterns and ongoing immigration means that the United States will become ‘majority minority’ (meaning that non-Hispanic whites will be less than 50% of the population) in the next 20 years or so, but just as Republicans already dominate ‘majority minority’ Texas, there is no reason to believe they cannot win national election victories also.
The victory of Trump’s multi-coloured coalition—all colours united around a flag which is red, white, and blue—points to an optimistic future. What does this mean for European parties on the centre-right? Clearly, a similar ethnic transformation is taking place in Europe. Surveying the demographic data in his 2019 book, Whiteshift, Eric Kaufmann outlines various projections for the future racial make-up of England and Wales which suggest that whites will become a minority in the next century, even if immigration is reduced significantly from current levels.
Such an eventuality need not be feared. As Ruffini writes in his book, the “white majority isn’t being replaced; it is being blended into a new multiracial mainstream majority.” This is bad news for both white supremacists and leftist race hustlers whose status in American life depends on amplifying ethnic tensions. But it does not need to be bad news for principled conservatives.
Woke ideology, like some of the less admirable aspects of American popular culture, crossed the Atlantic and took root here quickly in recent years. At the heart of this worldview is an emphasis on group status and perceived power inequities between such groups. Even some politicians who were ostensibly on the European Right embraced such thinking wholeheartedly. In 2020, Ireland’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar bemoaned the fact that Ireland’s civil service was “very white,” while adding that the same problem existed in the Irish police, military, and education sector, and calling for special targets for recruitment of ethnic minorities. Granted, this was a special case. Ireland remains abnormal for the continued domination of a left-liberal worldview which other countries are now abandoning, and Varadkar’s Fine Gael are on the Left wing of the European People’s Party grouping. Yet similar beliefs could have been expressed across other EPP parties without too many eyebrows being raised.
European conservatives should have the strength to oppose all racial quota initiatives in future, while also opposing any efforts to enshrine a self-loathing oikophobia within their educational systems or wider historical narrative. Europe is somewhat deficient when it comes to the civic nationalism and widespread patriotism with which America is blessed. At the same time, the vastly older European nations can rely on bonds of language, customs, and religious heritage. Promoting a greater understanding of these should be at the heart of each country’s system for naturalisation of the newcomers and education of the young. Likewise, equality before the law is a treasured principle which may not have developed without Europe’s rich intellectual tradition. It needs to be upheld—and that means that proposals for racial discrimination against native born Europeans should be viewed as every bit as immoral as racial discrimination against non-white immigrants or their descendants.
Given that Trump’s campaign was centred around the need for more secure borders, it should also be clear that Europe’s conservatives can be vocal about tightening up Europe’s external borders and strengthening their nations’ asylum processing and deportation systems without alienating voters from minority backgrounds The progressive elites in capital cities often emphasise the need to maintain a major flow of low-skilled, low-wage immigration on economic grounds. Aside from the question of whether they are right about this socio-economic model—and the recent economic track record in post-Brexit Britain is far from positive—this kind of dependence on foreign labour allows policymakers to ignore the problems which ail the native working-class.
A strong case can be made that decreased immigration could force governments to invest more in training and educating people in regions which have often been left behind. History teaches that a more restrictionist approach can help to promote internal social cohesion and progress in a way that both the Left and Right should welcome.
David Roediger has noted that America’s restrictive immigration policies between the 1920 and 1960s, for instance, coincided with major advances for black Americans, who moved to the industrial cities of the north to fill the gaps in the labour market. Recent developments suggest that America is still succeeding in integrating newcomers, but it needs to be acknowledged that the U.S. enjoys a major advantage given the cultural similarities—particularly relating to religion—between America and the Latin American countries from which so many immigrants originate.
Relatively few Muslims are moving to America. Only 4% of immigrants in 2022 were born in the Middle East and North Africa. Being much closer to those regions, Europe attracts far more Muslim immigrants, and it is undeniable that the groups which have proven hardest to integrate in various European countries (Germany’s Turks, France’s Algerians, Britain’s Pakistanis, and so forth) have shared one crucial commonality. Geography is America’s friend when it comes to attracting migrants with a similar culture. The same is not true of Europe, and it is time to face that difficult fact. While it is right that race should not be a criterion for determining whether potential immigrants are admitted, politicians should make an unapologetic case for considering the importance of culture and acting accordingly.
Aside from cultural questions like immigration, Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of the situation in America suggests that a new policy approach should be undertaken to keep working-class voters inside the Republican Party. He proposes steps which would benefit workers without a college education and those on lower wages, like a more expansive vocational education system and a move away from regressive taxation.
The death of public debate about working-class concerns in Europe says a great deal about the domination of media, politics, and academia by college-educated progressives. Not only does this mean that some topics are downplayed in public discourse, it also ensures that issues which are of concern to a narrow stratum of society are given excessive consideration.
Climate policy is one such example. In their analysis of where the Democrats have gone awry, Judis and Teixeira reference a poll showing that climate change was the sixth biggest issue for college-educated respondents (i.e., the new Democratic base) but only the fourteenth biggest issue for working-class respondents. Those seeking to identify the reason for Trump’s broad class appeal should not underestimate the importance of his plan to unleash American oil and gas production. Not only will this create employment opportunities across the country for manual workers, it could also be a key part of reducing the cost-of-living pressures which helped to sink Biden and Harris.
A new conservative coalition can be built in Europe. It will certainly not be American conservatism, which is too individualistic and modern to ever be completely reconciled with its more communitarian and ancient European variant. Nevertheless, the lessons from America suggest that an agenda of strong borders, traditional values, national patriotism, affordable energy, and economic opportunity for all can be a recipe for electoral success here, just as it already has been for the next American president.
