At some point, at least in most functioning democracies, demography does become destiny. The immigration of so many Catholics to what had been an overwhelmingly Protestant United States—initially from Ireland and Southern Germany in the mid-19th century—mobilized an anti-Catholic politics that stretched from the Know Nothings of the 1850s through the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and beyond. Eventually, however, the Democratic and then the Republican Parties both became sufficiently Catholic that the immigration restrictions that had been placed on non-Protestant nations were lifted, though incredibly, not until 1965. In other words, “at some point” may be a long time coming.
That’s a useful perspective through which to evaluate the political fallout from the decennial census data released last Thursday. To no one’s surprise, it revealed an America clearly on track to lose its white majority at some point in the 2040s. Between 2010 and 2020, the “white only” share of Americans declined markedly from 64 percent to 58 percent, a reduction that was about two points more than demographers expected. The reduction wasn’t confined to percentages. For the first time in census data ever, the actual number of white Americans declined over the past decade—by 5.1 million people.
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