Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be speaking with Justin Gast, who's an associate professor
of policy and government at George Mason University and also author of several books, including
the forthcoming book Majority-Minority Out next Tuesday.
A really great having you on.
I appreciate your time.
Speaker 5: Thanks, Dave.
It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1: So when we kind of study and talk about reactionary thinking and ideology, which
is often fear based, it's hard not to stumble across fear being generated with this idea
that people different than you are going to take over and become the majority in your
area, country, region, whatever.
And that's going to be bad and that will be dangerous.
And, you know, some sometimes.
Tucker Carlson sometimes says dirtier and poorer will be the outcome of that.
So this idea of minority majority groups and the changing demographics has been used for
a very long time to achieve political goals.
Can you talk a little bit generally to get us into this about the different types of
reactions that societies have when we see the racial or ethnic balance shift?
Speaker 5: Sure, it's a great question, David.
You know, it depends on whether we're talking about this at the individual level or at the
societal level and at the societal level, we know precious little about how big societies
governments respond to great demographic change, and that's really what motivated this book
majority.
Now, at the individual level, there is actually extensive research what happens when we alert
people or simulate great demographic change?
And the key then and the findings are pretty consistent.
People are territorial.
They're defensive, they're fearful, they're insecure.
And most of it is driven by uncertainty, by the uncertainty of what will life be like
under these scenarios?
Speaker 1: And uncertainty generally comes with the fear that it might not be so good,
right?
I mean, uncertainty in a taken in a sort of literal way could just mean we don't know.
But oftentimes uncertainty is associated with, well, that that sounds like it could be bad.
Speaker 5: Well, it takes a special type of human, I think, to sort of embrace uncertainty,
you know, and really, you know, human reactions to uncertainty are going to be fearful because
of the insecurities associated with it.
You fear what you don't know.
You know, there are some people who sees the future who sees the prospects of uncertainty.
But yes, generally, you know, fear is is was one of the primary emotions, if not just anxiety
or discomfort.
Speaker 1: Are there societies that have been able to kind of embrace demographic shifts
that are significant without significant conflict?
Speaker 5: So embrace is a strong word.
I think that's actually a standard that I don't think we even need to necessarily meet.
I think what we really are looking for societies that can foster and cultivate a culture of
coexistence.
So my work is really concerned about whether societies pivot towards conflict or towards
coexistence because there's always going to be some degree of backlash, some degree of
discomfort.
And I find that it to be universal in all the different societies that I study that
have already undergone a majority minority transition.
And by that, I mean where the majority ethnic or religious group loses its numerical advantage
to one or more minority groups.
And in those situations, you can always expect some degree of conflict, some degree of anxiety.
But the question is whether societies are resilient and can redefine who they are in
order to evolve with the changing composition of their people.
Speaker 1: So can you give us some examples of where it's gone on the better side and
on the not-so-good?
Speaker 5: Sure.
Sure.
So I study six countries, six societies really carefully in this book, and two societies
really pivoted towards suppression of minorities.
The most overt kind of suppression takes place in the Middle East region.
And I study Bahrain, a small island off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, where you
effectively have a sort of second class system for immigrants, but also a second class system
for people of a different religious sect than that of the ruling Royal Court and party.
Alternatively, you can look at Singapore, which is another society that is characterized
by suppression.
But in a far more subtle way, Singapore is concerned with evolving into a greater sort
of civic identity.
But in its policymaking and the way it governs, it actually reinforces ethnic divisions between
its people.
Now, if you take a look at some American examples, so Hawaii, which many people obviously associate
as America's 50th state, Hawaii was previously an independent kingdom and when it was an
independent kingdom before it was forcibly annexed by the United States in 1893, Hawaii
was actually a very multi ethnic and majority minority monarchy.
And in that society, Hawaii actually embraced many of these newcomers and actually facilitated
intermarriage among them.
Now that's not to say there wasn't some nationalism.
There wasn't some backlash there was.
But there is a sort of greater understanding of what it means to be a Native Hawaiian and
that it could be something that was shared and bestowed upon someone that really took
on new meaning.
In the 20th century after Americans took over the archipelago.
Because the Americans put in a very strong assimilationist regime that basically treated
any person of color, any person who was not white Anglo American as someone to be dominated
in a sense.
And so what you saw was a lot of intermingling among Hawaiians with people who were previously
thought of as immigrants, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Filipinos, and that intermixing
create a preconception of what it means to be Hawaiian in the future.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
And there you know, it's very popular among some in the United States to say Hawaii is
just a mess and they give different reasons.
Reasons why, but not often cited, is this.
I mean, it's interesting, you would think, because Hawaii is a blue state, typically
votes.
For Democrats, you would think that the right might have wanted to seize on multiculturalism
is the reason why Hawaii is a mess economically or whatever it is that that's often stated.
But maybe it's not even necessarily that well-known a story in the United States?
I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think of Hawaii as a mess at all.
I think of it actually as a paragon in many ways.
You know, the way that they have been able to embrace demographic change over the course
of their history to broaden the understanding of what it means to be Kanaka, to be a Native
Hawaiian is really actually exemplary for how I think we want to evolve the civic identity
of what it means to be American.
Speaker 1: Very generally speaking, top level there is the idea that in the United States,
the way the political divisions are, the left tends to be more accepting of demographic
changes, while the right tends to be more fearful and critical of demographic changes.
Can you flesh that out a little bit more in terms of whether that general assessment is
always or mostly correct and maybe some of the exceptions or kind of strange interplays
to this perspective?
Speaker 5: Sure, it wasn't always true, particularly when the left was associated with unionism,
which in historically speaking, you know, we're talking 80 to 100 years ago was actually
relatively close and kind of reproduced a lot of the social and cultural inequities
in American history.
But certainly in the contemporary moment, that's true.
Generally speaking, the left not only embraces demographic change, it almost anticipates
it.
You know, with the election of Barack Obama, many Democrats crowed about demography being
destiny and how this was the path to electoral victory forever more after.
And certainly, Republicans have not just, you know, I think, you know, fear demographic
change, but they've actually leaned into that fear and allowed it to consume much of its
politics.
Until now, in many ways, the Republican Party is very nostalgic party right now, yearning
for for an earlier period in American history that when they can make America great again.
And so, you know, in light of that demographic, you know, the relationship with demographics,
I think that is generally the case.
But it's also been reinforced by our politics ever since the Democratic Party really moved
to the center economically and embraced kind of greater neo liberalism.
The real differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United
States are principally on cultural issues right now, right?
I mean, certainly there are economic differences, but the real gaps are on cultural matters.
And a lot of that is about how you treat minority groups, whether they're minorities, because
of their sexuality, because of their ethnicity, because of their religion, whatever it is.
You know, generally speaking, that is where you see the greatest kind of rift.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems even things like wanting a citizenship question on the census
or the focus on critical race theory to the extent that any of the people focusing on
it understand what it is.
These things seem to be not so indirectly related to exactly these same issues we're
talking about.
Speaker 5: Oh, I think you're being modest.
They are directly related.
OK, I'll take the demographic change.
Absolutely.
You know, one of the greatest dividers, but also uniters in the in the course of history
of great demographic change in majority minority transitions is the socialization of youth.
You know how we actually educate our young people going forward and our schools, the
sort of engines of of of integration and upward mobility together?
How are you integrating your schools and are you learning a common language and moving
forward together?
Or are you going to have debates over what we teach in schools?
And many ways, you know, textbooks have have actually have a long history of being debated,
whether they recognize the contributions of minorities over history, how you treat historic
inequities and perhaps the inconvenient truths of the country's history.
That's quite common.
And then, you know, with regard to census questioning, that's a matter of power when
you are excluding, you know, people from the population count.
You're also excluding them from power.
And so these questions are integral, and they're produced by the fraught politics of demographic
change.
Speaker 1: Can you give some other examples of the sort of battles that are being had?
So we've got the citizenship question, critical race theory.
You've talked about textbooks and how history is taught.
There's Let's make English officially the one official language of the United States.
What are some of the other kind of ways in which we can see this battle thought?
Speaker 5: Sure, you can see it in the battles over culture, over music and over art and
over sports.
I think back to Colin Kaepernick's effective cancelation from the NFL when he was taking
a knee before the national anthem in protest of police brutality and.
Discrimination, I think, of the battles over Confederate monuments and and the desire to
protect them.
Right.
You can also look at the world of commerce, know do we see racialized poverty?
Or do we see the marketplace as a as a place of interdependency?
The politics of affirmative action and whether it's education or employment, all of these
are very much related to demographic change and how we manage it.
Speaker 1: So there is the question there's sort of empirical questions about is the demographic
change happening and what data points do we have as you researched in the book about other
places that that it's happened, that's one side of it.
There's also the reality that for a lot of people, this rhetoric really resonates, and
some at least have Donald Trump's rise to power was, you know, Mexico's not sending
its best, China's treating us very unfairly, etc.
You know, Muslim terrorists are coming up through the US-Mexico border.
Ms-13 is being released into the community.
All of this different stuff, it seems very politically effective.
And I'm curious your thoughts on how can it be diffused so that it's not so politically
effective?
Or is there something visceral about it that just works?
Speaker 5: Sure, there is something visceral, but it can be defeated.
And, you know, politicians and public officials more broadly, including even business leaders
and civil society leaders, have to become more adept at calling out fear mongering for
what it does, it divides.
And if we're going to survive as a nation, if we are and this is the most nationalist
thing I think I can say is you want to survive as a nation and if you want to survive as
a nation, you have to cultivate some degree of solidarity and unity.
And when you have, you know, politicians trying to profit in the short run to win elections
with divisive rhetoric that doesn't have a huge evidentiary basis, we're all going to
lose.
And so I think that, you know, the opponents of this kind of fear mongering have to call
those things out.
You know, people like Donald Trump are trying to divide American society, which weakens
us in the future and weakens us economically, weakens us socially.
And so I do think that that's the way forward.
But complementing that idea is you can't just tear down the opposite side tactics.
You also have to have a strategic vision yourself, and that's where the creativity comes in.
We have to actually cultivate an understanding of who we are as a country in one in a way
that evolves from the historic understanding of a white mainstream.
It has to be one that is not necessarily hitched to race or ethnicity or religion, but one
that's is about a civic sense of belonging, a civic sense of purpose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's tough.
I guess we would benefit from having sort of like a some kind of a PR consultant help
with this conversation.
But you know, when they say immigrants commit more crime and they're taking our jobs and
so on, I mean, it's very it's easy in a sense to say that stuff's not true.
And here we have all the studies and native born Americans commit crime at a higher rate.
And why wouldn't they?
They don't have a fear that they're committing crime in a different country.
You know, we can do all that stuff, but it just seems like you're kind of, you know,
pushing a boulder up a mountain in a sense, because it's just it's always tougher to to
interject facts when the emotions work so well.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Well, look, we have to invalidate these falsehoods, you know, when they're being made.
We can't let them stand because they shouldn't stand.
You know, they're completely false.
And in some cases, they're just exaggerations.
In other cases, they're absolutely flat false.
But that's a negative strategy.
You have to have an affirmative strategy to right.
And you know, whether it's a PR agency or just some visionary, you have to work as a
as a country.
I think as a people with a million leaders, not just one who is thinking clearly and strategically
about what holds us together as a country, what holds us together as a nation
Speaker 1: and what is the best argument is, is it basically this country is built on people
from all over coming here and contributing what they have to contribute.
And almost all of us are here for that reason.
And it's it is.
I mean, I don't even know.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here about what is that positive vision?
Speaker 5: Sure.
Well, let me give you some fodder and you know, we can keep you.
We can keep the conversation going offline, you know, and all of you can continue to think
about this in the shower and tomorrow morning.
There's there's some enormous advantages that the United States has in reconsidering who
we are.
You know, first off, we are a country where everyone has some kind of immigrant story.
Even Native Americans these days are heavily intermarried with people of immigrant origin.
And so almost every single American is touched somehow by a journey to this country, and
that is something that is remarkably unifying.
Secondly, we have a really high rate of intermarriage and mixed ethnic ethnicity, mixed religion,
children being born right?
Now, in fact, actually, the rate of mixed race people has grown by 300 percent, that's
three fold over just the last 10 years, which is blurring the boundaries between people
that can otherwise be used to divide us.
And so we also have a very strong civic idea of what it is to be an American.
And so these are all advantages, I think, in crafting that new American story that other
places simply don't have that rich history and heritage of immigration that continues
into the future.
And so in many ways, America is not one static thing, and it's, you know, it's a fool's errand
to try to create something monolithic.
It's just not who we are.
We're an evolving place where an idea where a country that is constantly in motion, always
under construction.
And I think that our common story really comes through in our common struggle and the idea
that everyone wants to dream.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the the the reality that race and ethnicity are also just on a very
practical level, increasingly blurry due to what you're talking about.
That's an interesting factor as well.
The book is out next wee