LatinX-plaining the Election⁠↗

Like it or not, while politicians may trumpet the finest members of their political tent to supporters, they’re also liable for the worst members, at least as perceived by their enemies. Just as Trump was pegged as at least passingly sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, white nationalists with his failure to renounce their sordid lot during the Charlottesville tragedy, the same dynamics hit Biden with his political coalition. I’m afraid you can’t quite have the Bernie wing inside your tent without that rhetoric coming to signify your candidacy, at least partially, to those who view such tendencies with suspicion. To be blunt, Miamians have heard this populist socialist rhetoric before: university-educated radicals rallying the working classes against the oligarchic upper classes, in the name of lofty and vague ideals that require a political revolution to implement, while accepting some urban violence as the cost of doing business. It’s the rhetoric of the Latin American Left—and many of the Hispanic voters of Miami wanted nothing to do with it.

To understand Miguel doesn’t require a deep reading of Octavio Paz’s El Laberinto de la Soledad and a voyage to the heart of the Mexican soul, but rather a very basic sort of human empathy, and the ability to see the world through the eyes of a working-class father and his aspirations for his family’s future. Miguel doesn’t know or care about ‘LatinX’, this preposterous invention that can’t even be pronounced in the language of the culture it purports to represent. He cares about safe neighborhoods and good schools for his kids (per Pew, the economy was the number one issue for Hispanic voters, with violent crime and healthcare higher than immigration). As a citizen in a democracy, he’ll vote for politicians who promise and hopefully provide that, rather than those that preach some half-baked gospel about ‘defunding the police’ in the face of urban chaos (much of it driven by those same liberal whites).

While Hispanics do cite immigration as one of their top 10 issues of concern in elections, they are not a single-issue polity on the topic, nor are they universally on one side of the debate.

Border residents, many of whom are Hispanic, are very concerned about border security, even if they’re not fans of Trump’s disruptive wall. Of course they are. Many Hispanic immigrants know what lies on the other side of that border, it’s precisely what they came here to escape. Insofar as that means threats like crime or drug cartels, they want nothing to do with it, as would anyone if their backyards backed into Mexico (instead of say Prospect Park).

‘Diversity’ is all fun and games, until you actually get some real ideological diversity, and then suddenly you realize the whole thing is more than just taco trucks and reguetón. Or as William F. Buckley so memorably put it: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” You cannot have members of a different culture and religion integrate into your society as full-fledged citizens, citizens with a political and economic voice, and not have those views manifested somehow in your politics. Hispanics simply won’t take ideological dictation from the current batch of elites. If you somehow imagined the ‘browning of America’ necessarily meant an electoral boon to the Left, then you possess a parochial view of the Spanish-speaking world.

The problem with basing a political platform on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what happens in a truly majority-minority nation when non-whites (at least as currently defined) assume their equal place in the economic and political firmament. The Diversity Industrial Complex’s first move, when faced with the paradigm-shattering development that their dualistic worldview is insufficient, is to redefine ‘white’ to include the more successful of the new arrivals (as happens with Silicon Valley employment stats and Asians).

The Hispanic world, in all its sweep and variety, is a lot more than just salsa music and tacos, or knee-jerk opinions about immigration policy. As has happened countless times in the shared history of these two cultures out here on the American fringes of the Western world, we’ll have to find some way to live with each other or suffer dramatic consequences.