Pat Buchanan: The European tribes of North America have begun to die

More white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before – not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s – has this happened. In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe – the European tribes of North America – have begun to die. The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe. In political terms, this is depressing news for the Republican Party. For nearly 90% of all Republican votes in presidential elections are provided by Americans of European descent. In 1960 white folks were close to 90% of the entire U.S. population and 95% of the electorate. Nixon’s New Majority was created by pulling Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern conservative Protestants, white folks all, out of the Roosevelt coalition and bringing them into a new alliance that would give Nixon a 49-state landslide in 1972, which Reagan would replicate in 1984. But since that New Majority gave the Republicans five victories in six presidential elections, four of them 40-state landslides, the political world has turned upside down, and demography is the cause. Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote, a 3-to-2 victory over Obama among America’s majority. In any year before 1980, that would have meant victory. But in 2012 whites were only 74% of those who went to the polls. Thus, Obama’s sweep of 80% of the African-American, Asian and Hispanic vote, one-fourth of the electorate and rising, enabled him to coast to a second term. America’s white majority, 64% of the population and 74% of the electorate, still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white babies were outnumbered by babies of color.