Identity Politics

Why is it this feared and loathed thing when the non-white and the female are lining up to vote for Obama very largely because he is black, but not when large numbers of the white and the male are lining up for the other candidate for no other reason than that he is both white and male?

So much, it must be said, for longstanding Republican attempts to court the Hispanic vote. As soon as the coming Hispanic majority there moves Texas into the Democratic column, there will never be another Republican President of the United States. Will there ever be another President who is both white and a native speaker of English? Quite possibly not. The battle in future will be between a black candidate and a Hispanic candidate for the Democratic nomination, itself effectively the guarantee of election.

Worth watching, therefore, is the increasing attempt by the Israel Lobby to bring the Latinos in line, not least out of shared antipathy towards the blacks, the WASPs , and the "white ethnics". If the Latinos really were the Great Brown Hope of American Catholicism, then they would side instead with the Latin Catholics and the Syrian Catholics, the Melkites and the Maronites, who with the Arab Orthodox and the ancestrally Orthodox Palestinian Anglicans (it's a long story) founded Arab nationalism in general and the whole concept of Filastin in particular, and provided almost the latter's entire leadership inside the Green Line until 1973, despite the overwhelming Sunni Muslim majority among Israeli Arabs, as among Palestinians generally. The former Balad MK Azmi Bishara, who was driven into exile as recently as 2007 because of the bombardment of Lebanon, was a Catholic from Nazareth, where, in an echo of the roots of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, he was educated by the Southern Baptist Mission.

But then, the "white ethnics" would also take that view if they really were the existing pillars and bulwarks of Catholic and Orthodox America. Furthermore, if the road to American Christendom really did have its signs painted in Spanish, then the speakers of that tongue would be solid social conservatives as well as solid economic populists in the New Deal tradition. As it is, so far are they at least from the former, that they might be susceptible to the blandishments of those with the closest possible ties to Hollywood and to the New York media. And thence, of course, to Wall Street.