The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream

"There are many wrong ideas about politics that many people on the American right believe and there are many wrong ideas about politics that many people on the American left believe, but there are few thoroughly wrong ideas that both people on the right and the left believe. The most important misapprehension about American politics is the idea of an inevitably rising demographic majority for the Democratic Party. That idea says that nonwhite voters and young people are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans. And so as portions of those populations grow, Democrats will gain and retain a natural political majority. The significant movement toward the Republican Party and Donald Trump in the 2020 election shows us that idea is really wrong. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Richard Alba, who is one of the leading sociologists of demography and ethnic identity in the world, argues that even the idea of a rising nonwhite majority is a mistake. Most likely, a large share of Latinos will start to consider themselves to be white in a larger sense. Alba says there is going to be a new American mainstream, which is much more inclusive than today, and that this will radically change how we think about ethnicity and race relations in the country. There is a huge disjunct between how activists, academics and many people in the publishing industry and the think tanks and the media think about American identity and how American identity is actually evolving. This year, we have seen the creation of a separate dorm for Black students at NYU, so students can choose to live in racial separation from others, while each year of the last twenty years we’ve exceeded the record for interracial marriages. What Richard Alba is showing, with a lot of empirical evidence, is that that sociological phenomenon will likely change the way we think about ethnicity and complicate how we conceive of the somewhat lazy catchall ‘people of color.’"