Texas And Florida Are The Fastest Growing States

 From Axios.com.

We Should Welcome The Immigrants Trump Wants Us To Fear

Donald Trump (and his MAGA cohorts) want you to fear the immigrants coming to this country. They call them "illegal", even though most are legally presenting themselves at the border and asking for admittance. They want you to believe they are dangerous criminals, even though most are just desperate and honest people trying to make a better life for their families.

The truth is far different. There are many jobs that business is unable to fill in this country because Americans don't want those jobs. The immigrants would love to have those low-wage and sometimes dangerous jobs. And as the maps above show, there are many counties in this country with a shrinking population. Immigrants could stabilize those populations and bring a new vitality to those communities.

We actually need these new immigrants!

Consider this editorial from The Washington Post editorial board:

Immigrants slowed demographic decline in more than 1,100 counties from 2020 to 2023, according to census estimates. Their numbers made up more than the entire growth of the population in 131 of them. The demographic reality casts immigration in a different light, not as a burden but as an opportunity: a powerful tool to lift vast swaths of America that prosperity has left behind.

It would require smart policy and political will — neither of which is plentiful in Washington, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) idea of busing migrants to cause political pain in blue jurisdictions could, unwittingly, be put to valuable use: encouraging migrants to rekindle economic development in depopulating cities such as Buffalo, Akron or Detroit, which have struggled to keep up with the economic transformations of the past 30 years.

Adding people might not revive beleaguered towns that have lost their economic rationale, however. If people have moved out, it’s largely because the jobs have gone, too. Still, for legacy industrial cities on the edge of decline, arresting population loss is imperative to avoid entering a downward spiral.

There is a precedent: the refugee resettlement program. Troubled cities in Upstate New York, for instance, have benefited enormously from thousands of refugees who have settled in communities along the Erie Canal; so much so that cities have tried to lure them.

Depopulation is bad for economies. Housing prices tank, local tax revenue collapses, the labor force shrinks, businesses go bust or leave, schools close. “All problems get harder because of population loss,” notes John Lettieri of the Economic Innovation Group. “To a first approximation problems would ease with more people of working age.”

There would be upfront costs. Shuttered schools would need to be refurbished. Local services might be strained, at first. But migrants would provide not only labor — potentially useful for elderly residents, who need help with tasks such as cooking or shopping, left behind in these places.

Migrants would also add to local demand, lifting tax revenue. Many would open small businesses. Given an initial boost — perhaps with state funds, as well as migrants’ savings — they could help build a future for places that, today, don’t seem to have one. As Enrico Moretti of the University of California noted, “For a locality it might not be a bad bet.” And from migrants’ perspectives, legacy cities offer one critical advantage: cheap, available housing.

This is not how migration is playing out today, though. Asylum seekers tend to go to large urban centers with more jobs and populations of similar immigrants, not to sluggish cities in the heartland. They don’t enjoy the supports granted to refugees resettled by the government, which help defray their short-term costs and make them attractive to local jurisdictions. From New York to Denver, where so many migrants have arrived courtesy of Mr. Abbott, mayors tend to perceive them as a fiscal disaster.

Giovanni Peri, who studies the economic impacts of immigration at the University of California at Davis, suggests there might be a way around this challenge even without federal help, taking advantage of the nation’s hot labor market. A state government resettlement plan for asylum seekers might lure businesses into selected communities by guaranteeing a reliable pool of workers. Communities might compete to get into the program. The prospect of a secure job would provide a powerful incentive for the migrants themselves, without the need for federal subsidies distorting the geographical distribution of labor.

For anything like this to work, of course, asylum seekers would need certainty that they can stay and work. A city or a business is unlikely to bet on asylum seekers who a year from now might be found ineligible to remain and forced to leave the country or, most likely, into the undocumented labor force.

But the rewards are worth embracing the challenge. A more expeditious asylum process is necessary, in any event, to deal with a backlog in immigration courts that has mushroomed to 3 million cases. If politicians made even rudimentary changes to the system, and if more localities recognized the opportunity in front of them, all parties — border communities, struggling Rust Belt towns, big cities swamped with asylum seekers — could win.

World Population Will Be 10 Billion In 2085 - Then Decline

 

The following thought-provoking article is by economist Sara Kodesh in The New York Times: Here is just a part of what she wrote:

Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are born for every two adults. If all people in the United States today lived through their reproductive years and had babies at an average pace, then it would add up to about 1.66 births per woman. In Europe, that number is 1.5; in East Asia, 1.2; in Latin America, 1.9. Any worldwide average of fewer than two children per two adults means our population shrinks and in the long run each new generation is smaller than the one before. If the world’s fertility rate were the same as in the United States today, then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to less than two billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we would continue declining.

What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

Whenever low birthrates get public attention, chances are somebody is concerned about what it means for international competition, immigration or a government’s fiscal challenges over the coming decades as the population ages. But that’s thinking too small. A depopulating world is a big change that we all face together. It’s bigger than geopolitical advantage or government budgets. It’s much bigger than nationalistic worries over which country or culture might manage to eke out a population decline that’s a little bit slower than its neighbors’. . . .

It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.

This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of us. Kicking the can down the road will make choices more difficult for future generations. The economics and politics of a society in which the old outnumber the young will make it even harder to choose policies that support children.

If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control. Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction. . . .

Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation and how to share the burdens of creating each future generation. The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now.

Peak Population In This Century & Then A Big Decline Starts

The following is just part of a thought-provoking article by Dean Spears (University of Texas economist) in The New York Times:

Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are born for every two adults. If all people in the United States today lived through their reproductive years and had babies at an average pace, then it would add up to about 1.66 births per woman. In Europe, that number is 1.5; in East Asia, 1.2; in Latin America, 1.9. Any worldwide average of fewer than two children per two adults means our population shrinks and in the long run each new generation is smaller than the one before. If the world’s fertility rate were the same as in the United States today, then the global population would fall from a peak of around 10 billion to less than two billion about 300 years later, over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we would continue declining.

What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

Whenever low birthrates get public attention, chances are somebody is concerned about what it means for international competition, immigration or a government’s fiscal challenges over the coming decades as the population ages. But that’s thinking too small. A depopulating world is a big change that we all face together. It’s bigger than geopolitical advantage or government budgets. It’s much bigger than nationalistic worries over which country or culture might manage to eke out a population decline that’s a little bit slower than its neighbors’.

Sustained below-replacement fertility will mean tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them and by your standards, too.

Perhaps that loss doesn’t trouble you. It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges. If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100. Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.

This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of us. Kicking the can down the road will make choices more difficult for future generations. The economics and politics of a society in which the old outnumber the young will make it even harder to choose policies that support children.

If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control. Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction. . . .

Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal. Waiting until the population peaks to ask how to respond to depopulation would be as imprudent as waiting until the world starts to run out of fossil fuels to begin responding to climate change.

Humanity needs a compassionate, factual and fair conversation about how to respond to depopulation and how to share the burdens of creating each future generation. The way to have that conversation is to start paying attention now.

The World's Population Has Topped 8 Billion People

 

From the editorial board of The Washington Post:

On Nov. 15, Planet Earth welcomed its eight-billionth living inhabitant, according to an authoritative projection from the United Nations. The figure represents an increase of 1 billion in global population since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998; in 1950, the world’s population was less than a third of what it is now. The U.N.-declared “Day of Eight Billion,” said Secretary General António Guterres, “is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet.”

We agree. Of course, a growing population creates more pressure on the natural environment and man-made infrastructure alike. It is one factor in accelerating climate change. Accentuating the challenges associated with contemporary population growth is the fact that the bulk of it is taking place in economically less-developed countries in Africa and Asia. The United Nations projects that more than half of the 1.7 billion global population increase between now and 2050 will occur in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania, all of which the World Bank deems low- or lower-middle income.

Mr. Guterres’s use of “celebrate” is appropriate nevertheless; his word choice represents a milestone of sorts itself. Too often in the past, conventional wisdom about population growth has tended to be pessimistic — even apocalyptic. In 1798, British economist Thomas Malthus forecast that an increasing population would soon outstrip, disastrously, nature’s capacity to feed so many people; in 1968, the title of an influential tract spoke of a “population bomb.” And yet here we are: The world’s population has octupled since Malthus’s day, more than doubled since 1968, and living standards around the world have vastly, though unevenly, improved during that time.

For most of human history, the world’s population remained essentially stagnant for the unhappy reason that high death rates offset high birthrates. Demographic expansion occurred once humankind figured out how to raise the productivity of all the new farmers and workers being born and to produce better, more abundant food, health and education — driving death rates down. Pessimists such as Malthus failed to comprehend this process, which has come to be known as the “demographic transition.” It turned out that a scramble for resources among increasing numbers of people would create not only scarcities and conflicts — but also incentives to overcome them through innovation. Britain was one of the first countries to make this transition, followed by many others over the past two centuries. In the ultimate phase, which is now underway in most highly urban, industrialized countries, both birthrates and death rates reach low levels and population stabilizes — or even shrinks.

These are the “achievements” to which the secretary general rightly alluded. There is every reason to hope Africa and South Asia can experience the same demographic transition; another formerly poor and predominantly rural region, Latin America is on its way toward doing so. Richer countries can help through job-creating foreign investment and trade, though, to be sure, governments in the developing world will have to do their part by maintaining transparent governance and the rule of law. Another lesson of demographic history is that, even if South Asian and African economies do develop rapidly, labor-force growth might outstrip employment opportunities. As British demographer Paul Morland has shown, this is the main reason for history’s migrations, and contemporary movements of people suggest it still holds true. Countries such as the United States, whose own birthrates have fallen, should revise and stabilize immigration policy to channel migration to their advantage.

Another reason not to worry about impending population growth: It’s mostly inevitable anyway. As the United Nations’ World Population Prospects report explains: “Two-thirds of the projected increase in global population through 2050 will be driven by the momentum of past growth that is embedded in the youthful age structure of the current population.” Policies directly aimed at reducing fertility could not affect this, the report argues. This analysis comes with an asterisk, though. The United Nations does not formally include education as a factor influencing population growth, but not all demographers agree. Wolfgang Lutz of the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital at the University of Vienna has argued that education — especially of women and girls — can speed the demographic transition to lower fertility rates, by empowering people to pursue careers, make informed use of contraception and delay childbearing. Whereas the United Nations foresees world population hitting 10.4 billion people sometime in the 2080s before plateauing, Mr. Lutz has projected that it could peak just below 10 billion in 2070. In his optimal “rapid development” scenario, the maximum would be 8.7 billion in 2050.

Whoever is right, the end of population expansion is now foreseeable — a moment well within the potential lifespan of the eight-billionth person born on Nov. 15. Instead of population growth and growing birthrates, the fast-approaching new demographic challenge is societal aging. Japan, South Korea and several European countries are already shrinking in population; they will struggle to find enough workers to take care of the elderly and pay into their pension systems. Nowhere will this phenomenon be more consequential than China, whose population of 1.4 billion is on track to cease growing in 2023 and will be surpassed by India’s.

Having boomed economically for four decades thanks in part to an enormous cohort of working-age people, China faces demographic stagnation and, as a result, more difficulty sustaining economic growth. This is traceable in large part to its Communist government’s “one-child” policy, in force between 1980 and 2016, which was an especially simplistic — and, with its coerced abortions and sterilizations, harsh — application of Malthusian thinking. The United Nations expects China to have 100 million fewer people by 2050, a much higher percentage of whom will be elderly than at present. A team from China’s own Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has predicted that China’s population will be less than half of what it is today by the end of the century.

The hope is that the massive challenge of global aging will spur innovation just as the challenges of rising population did in the past. In that sense, it’s a good thing that millions of new people — with their new ideas and fresh energy — are on the way.

World Population Prospects From United Nations Report

 These are some interesting charts from the 2022 World Population Prospects by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. If you would like to read the repost, you can go here.

U.S. Population Changes Between 2010 And 2020

 

From usafacts.org.

2021 U.S. Population Growth Was Historically Small

The U.S. Census Bureau has released statistics for 2021. Those stats showed the United States growth for the year was estimated to be the slowest percentage growth in the nation's history -- and it marked the first time since 1937 that the country grew by less than a million people.

Why did this happen? It was a mixture of three things. 1. Deaths are up (thanks to COVID-19 and the country's poor reaction to it). 2. Births are down. 3. Immigration is down.

Right-wingers may think this is a good thing, but it's not. With millions of baby boomers retiring, business needs to replace them -- and there's simply not enough people to do that without help from immigration (or a marked increase in the birth rate -- which is not going to happen).

Like it or not, we need more immigration to this country -- not less. And this is especially true of the dirty, dangerous, and low-wage jobs (the jobs most Americans don't want).

We need to stop demonizing immigrants, and provide them a path to become full members of our society.

DOJ Says Texas Redistricting Was Unfair To Minorities

Texas gained enough population between 2010 and 2020 to give it two more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. About 95% of that population gain was due to minorities. Texas Republicans ignored this, and created two more white seats by dividing minority communities and putting them into majority white districts. This was racist and unfair, and the Department of Justice is suing the state to rectify the situation.

Here is part of how Steve Vladeck describes the Texas unfair redistricting at MSNBC.com:

The Justice Department sued Texas on Monday, challenging its newly drawn electoral maps at both the state and congressional levels. At its core, the lawsuit claims that Texas’ new maps discriminate against the state’s “growing minority electorate.” And clearly, they do. The problem with the lawsuit is not its factual premise; it is the significant steps the Supreme Court has taken in the last eight years to make it easier for conservative states to get away with exactly such anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) manipulation.

And although Congress could fix much of the damage the Supreme Court has caused, its efforts to do so remain mired in Senate Democrats’ inability to overcome or eliminate the filibuster. Simply put, the latest front in the battle between the Biden administration and Texas reinforces just how fragile our democracy is becoming — and how directly the Supreme Court is responsible.

Texas fared well in the 2020 census: The second-largest state added 4 million residents between 2010 and last year’s count. Most of that growth came from minority groups, which now constitute a majority of the state’s population. Indeed, the statewide population of “Anglos” (non-Latino white Texans) was responsible for only 5 percent of that growth. Among other things, this population boom netted Texas two new seats in the U.S. House — it will now elect members from 38 districts, second only to California.

When the Texas Legislature met to redraw both the U.S. and state house districts in response to the new data, it adopted maps that, put most charitably, do not reflect the actual sources of population growth. As the Justice Department’s lawsuit explains, the two new congressional seats both have Anglo majorities; a West Texas district with a large Latino population was redrawn to turn a Latino majority into a minority, and minority communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex were, in the Justice Department’s words, “surgically excised” by being attached to different districts with Anglo majorities — some stretching over a hundred miles from Dallas-Fort Worth. And the redrawn lines in the state House are even more, shall we say, aggressive.

The unabashed goal of this gerrymandering was to entrench as large a Republican majority as the Legislature could. The FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker predicts that, with these maps, Republicans would control 24 of the 38 U.S. House seats, or 63 percent of the delegation, and have a good shot at a 25th in a state former President Donald Trump won last year by only 52 percent to 46 percent. That’s achieved by expanding the voting power of non-Latino white voters, who are about 40 percent of the state’s total population but now control 3 of every 5 districts.

As Ari Berman has documented, Latinos, in contrast, make up 39 percent of the population but control only 20 percent of the districts. And only 2 percent of the districts have Black majorities, even though Black Texans are one-eighth of the state’s population. More fundamentally, the maps completely ignore the source of Texas’ explosive population growth, reducing the voting power of the very minority groups who are responsible for virtually all of the state’s gains in size.

Before 2013, Texas’ map would never have made it into force. Texas was a “covered jurisdiction” under the federal Voting Rights Act, meaning changes to its districts would need to get “preclearance” from the federal Justice Department. But in 2013, the Supreme Court, in its 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, neutered the preclearance requirement by invalidating the formula Congress used to decide which jurisdictions it applied to.

Although the court’s analysis focused on the claim that the formula was outdated (and therefore was unduly harsh to jurisdictions that no longer had demonstrated patterns of discrimination), as the Justice Department lawsuit points out, “in every redistricting cycle since 1970, courts have found that one or more of Texas’s statewide redistricting plans violated the United States Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.”. . .

The Biden administration’s new suit against Texas may be a bellwether. If the Voting Rights Act can no longer prevent a state that gained seats in Congress almost entirely because of minority population growth from redistricting to reduce the voting power of those minority groups, it will be a powerful testament to how much the Supreme Court has denuded that landmark civil rights statute.

That the case has to be filed at all shows how imperative it is for Congress to fix it, even if eliminating the filibuster is the only way to accomplish such reform. So long as these maps remain in effect, they will provide only further evidence of the fragility of our democracy — and how increasingly unrepresentative our “representatives” are.

Texas Gerrymandered To Create 2 New White GOP Districts

When the 2020 census was released, it was announced that the Texas population had grown enough to give the state two new congressional districts.

About 95% of that population growth was among minority populations (Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, etc.). A reasonable person would assume that since the growth was among minorities, the two new districts would be minority districts.

But Texas Republicans are neither rational nor fair. They did some serious gerrymandering, and gave the state two new districts that are predominately white.

That means that of the 38 districts, about 62% are predominately white -- even though whites only make up about 40% of the state population.

This was nothing less than an attack on racial and ethnic voters -- trying to minimize their electoral power in the state.

Here is part of how Dean Obeidallah describes this racist gerrymandering at MSNBC.com:

Texas has seen first-hand the connection between the state’s changing demographics and voting results. In 2012, presidential nominee Mitt Romney won the Lone Star state by nearly 16 pointsover Barack Obama. In 2016, Donald Trump won, but only by 9 points. Come the 2020 election, Trump’s victory in Texas was barely over 5 percent. You don’t need to have a Ph.D. in mathematics to get that these numbers put Texas Democrats closer to winning statewide elections for the first time since 1994. (The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976.)

The brutal truth is that the reason Texas and other GOP statesenacted 33 laws in 19 states since January to make it harder to vote was never about Trump’s “big lie.” It was about Trump’s “big loss.” Republicans are freaking out that people who don’t look like most of them could soon be in charge. Consequently, they're apparently using any means to preserve that power. 

The Texas GOP drafted the new voting districts to “shrink the number of districts in which eligible Hispanic and Black voters can realistically sway election outcomes,” as The Texas Tribune noted. By way of “elaborately manipulated lines to create district boundaries,” they reduced from eight to seven the districts that are majority Latino and reduced the districts where Black residents make up the majority of voters from one to zero.

In a central Texas House district in Bell County that had been trending blue (Black and Hispanic populations were nearly equal to the white population there), the district was redesigned into a doughnut-like configuration that effectively “segregated” the Black and Hispanic communities to dilute their political strength.

In the suburbs of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which also has been trending blue in recent years, the party redesigned two congressional districts, creating two new majority white districts designed to more easily elect Republicans to both congressional seats. . . .

The reason the party can be so brazen in its efforts to suppress the vote of people of color is because this is the state's first redistricting since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013 by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court in the infamous Shelby County v. Holderdecision. Ten years ago, the Texas GOP would’ve needed “pre-clearance” before these new voting maps could go into effect — same for its voter suppression measures. But with that key part of the VRA gutted — and with a 6-to-3 Republican majority on the Supreme Court — the GOP is going full throttle in its efforts to maintain white supremacy.

Most Not Worried About Decreasing % Of Whites In U.S.

The charts above are from the Pew Research Center. They surveyed 10,221 adults nationwide between July 8th and 18th, and the survey had a 1.5 point margin of error.

The percentage of whites in the United States has been decreasing for several decades now, and for the first time, the number of whites actually decreased in the last decade.

Does this have Americans worried? Not according to this poll. About 76% said it was not a bad thing (15% saying it was a good thing and 61% saying it was neither good nor bad). And that includes 73% of whites (11% saying it was a good thing and 62% saying it was neither good not bad).

The Population Is Changing And The GOP Can't Accept That

According to the 2020 census, the United States is more diverse today than it has ever been. The white population has shrunk once again, and in fact, all of the nation's growth was among its non-white inhabitants. This is scaring Republicans, whose party is mostly white and whose policies are anti-minority and racist. They could just change their policies to be more inclusive, but they have chosen a different path -- to suppress the votes of non-whites and gerrymander districts to hold on to power. If those methods work for them, it won't be for very long. The demographic changes being seen in the population is not going to go away, and by mid-century whites will no longer be a majority. Sadly though, their party has been taken over by the racists and bigots, so they will just continue to pursue white privileges -- and this will only hurt their party in the future.

Here's how Jennifer Rubin describes the situation in The Washington Post:

The 2020 Census shows that while Whites remain the largest ethnicity group in the United States, the demographic decreased by 8.6 percent over the past decade. Those identifying as multiracial, by contrast, grew by a stunning 276 percent. Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations all grew at a rapid rate, too. Now, the country is nearly 19 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black and 6 percent Asian American.

The country grew at a slower pace than in any decade since the Depression. It is also aging. Nearly all the growth took place in urban centers (up nearly 9 percent) as rural populations shrank. The Hill reports: “Fewer than half of the 3,143 counties in the United States added population over the last decade, the new census data shows. The share of Americans who live in nonmetropolitan rural areas dropped by 2.8 percentage points, the Bureau said Thursday.”

The results speak to a truism that millions of Republicans would like to ignore: America is never static. It is — and has always been — in a state of flux, whether it comes to race, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), the divide between native-born and immigrant, or the geographic spread of the population (e.g., the Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early 20th century or the rise of the Sun Belt population over the last few decades). Indeed, that is the essence of America — a country not defined by racial or religious identity.

That reality has, of course, freaked out a significant share of White Christians who do not see “their America” as predominate. It was never “theirs” to begin with, and the assumption that something is amiss if White Christians are not in charge is the essence of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. It is also fundamentally un-American; our country is defined, as President Biden rightly says, by an “idea.”

It is easy, then, to understand why a political party based increasingly on its appeal to White Christians has adopted so many anti-American traits. The sanctity of elections has given way to a sentiment that violence is sometimes necessary (for Whites to retain power). The decline in their numbers has led to worship of totalitarian thugs around the world and disdain for a free society. The desperation for a make-believe world of yesteryear has led tens of millions down the rabbit hole of right-wing media propaganda, where their worst fears and darkest impulses are amplified.

Less remarked upon, but equally important, is that the growth of urban areas (generally more productive, more tolerant and more diverse) leaves rural Whites increasingly at odds with the national ethos. The latter are also poorer, sicker, less educated and have shorter life-spans than their metropolitan counterparts.

A rational, pro-democracy party would recognize it needs a broader base of support and move to adjust its policies to appeal to a more diverse, more secular and more urban America. That’s not the GOP game plan.

The GOP is so dependent on the right-wing media generator of White angst and resentment, and so fearful they will lose their grip among Whites, that they have chosen instead to try to hold back the demographic and cultural tide washing over them. They resort to voter suppression, assault objective reality, disdain majority rule and weaponize apolitical institutions, such as the courts or the Justice Department. Moreover, given their White, wealthy donor base, they can offer only rhetorical populism while pursuing plutocratic economic policies (going so far as to refuse to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce tax laws).

There is no single solution to solve the growing urban-rural divide. However, unless and until Americans in rural areas demand responsible governance, embrace the true “idea” of America and reject the temptation of racism and authoritarianism, little will change.

In the meantime, urban Americans, who constitute a greater share of the population than ever before, will lose patience with anti-democratic techniques (e.g., the filibuster, voter suppression) designed to give rural Whites disproportionate power. Demography may not be destiny, but it brings the weaknesses of American democracy into focus.