charby has a good point. If the composition of America in 2008 or 2012 was as it was in 1980, we would be in President Romney's second term.
Politics is downstream from culture and culture is downstream from genetics. People build a culture that suits them and their environment.
We have been admitting a craptonload of folks from places with much more socialist/authoritarian/centralized gov'ts and then we don't beat them over the head and intimidate them into buying into our culture. We ought not be surprised if they act like folks who built up a more centralized society when they get here.
Also, centralized decision-making is more or less attractive given a population's genetics & culture/time-preference.
If you agree with these:
1. The more intelligent a person is, the more likely they will craft a better solution to the problems that beset them than some central gov't bureaucrat 1000 miles away.
2. The longer a person's time preference, the more likely they will craft a better solution to the problems that beset them than some central gov't bureaucrat 1000 miles away.
You are stuck with these:
3. The less intelligent a person is, the less likely they will craft a better solution to the problems that beset them than some central gov't bureaucrat 1000 miles away.
4. The shorter a person's time preference, the less likely they will craft a better solution to the problems that beset them than some central gov't bureaucrat 1000 miles away.
Folks with less intelligence and shorter time preferences benefit from being told what to do. Anyone who has raised a child understands this. Left to themselves, their lives are "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Also, less intelligent folk are less able to even contemplate long term effects. Courses of actions that benefit them in the short term (vote for the racialist who will hire lots his kind into "phoney baloney gov't jobs") are those that will get their support. Even if it is a recipe for bankruptcy in the long term. The "long term" doesn't exist for them.
Ben Franklin and the other Founders set up a gov't that maximized liberty and prosperity for yeomen with a particular anglo-saxon protestant culture (and those willing to internalize this culture). This is a sub-optimal arrangement for others, even others as closely related as those in southern europe, given their history and arrangements. We ought not be surprised to see it rejected by newcomers with zero blood connections, zero cultural connections, and who have their resentments stoked by the multi-cultist progressives.
For my own part, I would have little problem imposing a regime of liberty by force, no matter the squawking. That's how it has been done everywhere liberty has sprouted: liberty wrested by force. That is my patrimony and I am little inclined to see it destroyed by those unable to appreciate it. This, too, is a sentiment growing in the face of centralizing power and culture. We will see who prevails. If history is any guide, sell liberty short.
"They have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy."
----Grand Inquisitor in "The Brothers Karamazov"
"Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free."
----Edmund Burke
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
----LP Hartley
