Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Does the G.O.P. Need More Asian-Americans?

Mytheos Holt suggests that the Republican Party might be well advised to reach out to Asian-Americans, especially to those who still consider themselves Hindus:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-reagan-coalition-is-dead-gop-now-needs-more-than-old-white-men-to-grow/

It's hard for me to imagine how anyone might go about encouraging Americans to identify with Hinduism, since good Hindus are supposed to stay in India. However, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian Indians do not have this problem, and they are under-represented in some corners of American culture. This web site assumes that everyone's heard something about Sikh Americans wanting to keep up their warrior tradition and running into cultural issues in the U.S. military. (If you haven't, Google "Sikhs in U.S. Army.")

I personally don't like the politics of demographic identity...partly because a lot of us are multiethnic, and instead of looking for someone just like us, demographically, we check to make sure that a group is not totally restricted to people with blue eyes or super-curly hair or whatever, and then assume (sometimes wrongly) that it's open to us too. However, the Republicans are lagging behind...not in appreciating people who are multiethnic, but in appreciating people who are consciously multiethnic, who've taken the trouble to trace their roots and write down their histories, as President Obama has. It shouldn't matter. It doesn't bother me. On the other hand it can't hurt.

We need fiscal conservatism and limited government. We need more people who understand the need for these things. The more of them, and the more different kinds of them, the better.

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