Since Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, many conservatives have grown increasingly afraid of the republic they claim to love.
That year, America’s first Black president won about the same share of the white vote as Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the Democratic nominee lost 40 states. But for Obama, this was more than enough. Thanks to demographic change and high turnout among Black voters, he won the White House comfortably, even as roughly 60 percent of white voters backed his opponent.
Faced with Obama’s victory, many liberals celebrated the apparent emergence of a durable Democratic majority. Many conservatives, meanwhile, eulogized their dearly departed nation. “The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore,” Bill O’Reilly declared on Fox News’s election night broadcast, as returns began looking unfavorable for Romney. “The white establishment is now the minority.”
The GOP leadership implored their party to reconcile itself to this new reality. In its “autopsy” of the Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee argued that “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.” It counseled Republicans to embrace immigration reform.
But others on the right took the opposite view. In their eyes, moderating on immigration would only deepen the dispossession of “traditional America.” Conservatives needed to arrest demographic change, not acquiesce to it. Republicans had to keep left-leaning groups out of the country and those already here, away from the polls.
This perspective ultimately carried the day. Conservatives proceeded to kill immigration reform in Congress and enact a variety of voting restrictions in red states.
Right-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, rationalized contempt for liberal democratic norms. In a 2016 essay, Michael Anton argued that the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no…
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