Facing the Future

“In the United States, political change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” the Republican political analyst who helped devise the racial grievance-driven Southern Strategy, in 1969’s The Emerging Republican Majority. That book’s intensive taxonomy of which whites broke for Nixon and why—Phillips referred to his research as an outgrowth of “taking zoology in the classroom”—inaugurated a pop-Darwinist tendency among commentators: extrapolating prophecies of America’s political future from some supposedly imminent preponderance in the changing population. Accordingly, Democratic partisans have made Phillips’s titular locution their own, taking the country’s looming majority-minority status to mean a likely voting bloc perpetually blue.

“Facing the Future” examines the use and abuse of the “emerging majority,” our contributors asking how the idea of a coming consensus has been used to manipulate voters and paper over dissension within ethnic and racial groups. In an examination of Phillips’s career, Astra Taylor argues that the bipartisan fondness for this essentializing trope occludes solidarity and organizing across both race and class. Geraldo Cadava and Rick Perlstein wonder whether predictions of a millenarian shift will ever lose their appeal, given that demography has not managed to be destiny in the past half-century.

Political affiliations are not actually written into our DNA, despite the growing fondness among conservatives for Great Replacement fearmongering, as Gaby Del Valle describes in an essay on the recent eugenics revival. The current immigrant experience is less that of an invading Democratic foot soldier and more of a buffeted member of the precariat, per Pooja Bhatia’s report on the liminal protections provided to migrants. Dennis M. Hogan’s chronicle of Staten Island demonstrates the long and sordid history of mob violence against newcomers to this country, whose growing diversity hasn’t secured a permanent liberal stronghold. See Arizona, as Kyle Paoletta details, a rapidly expanding state more in thrall to a culture of economic growth than to either party; or Texas, where Dave Denison searches for a long-lost left populism now struggling to be revived.

It may have been Americans who coined the term “emerging majority,” but the unpredictable politics of demographic change are playing out across the globe. Lily Lynch surveys the “demographic oblivion” faced by the Balkans’ native-born population, pinched by low rates of fertility and high rates of emigration; filling in the gap are migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines, as well as Russian émigrés fleeing Putin’s regime. Writing on the German trial of neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Underground, Michael Lipkin reconsiders the country’s famed memory culture in its current era, marked by an ascendant far right and a plentitude of citizens with an “immigration background.”

What evolutions does the future actually hold? Probably not the matriarchal society of “wooms” and veiled men auditioning for the privilege of donating sperm, as depicted in Chantal Clarke’s short story. Perhaps we’ll look like the motley multiracial amalgamations depicted on this issue’s covers, or we’ll be uploaded to the cloud to live a pixelated life à la Gao Hang’s low-res portraits. Or we’ll be hunted like dogs by dogs—robot ones, to be exact, like those Rebecca McCarthy finds on campus at the University of Pennsylvania, already used today to police the southern border of a country terrified of what (and who) is to come.