The Census Bureau expects that within the next 25 years, the United States will become majority-minority: non-Hispanic whites will make up less than 50 percent of the population.

That trend is mostly, but not entirely, a function of the country’s growing Hispanic population. Hispanic Americans tend to have more children than non-Hispanic white Americans, and as white America ages and older Americans die, the composition of the population will change.

It’s already the case that more American babies are non-white than white.

Another looming trend is the aging of America.

By 2050, people over age 65 will make up more of the population. In a new study, the Pew  Research Center asked specifically about those two changes: what will it mean to have a majority of the country made up of racial and ethnic minorities? What will it mean if the over 65 population is larger than the under 18 population.

Republicans were twice as likely to say that a more diverse country would have a somewhat or terrible effect on the country.

No group – including whites – was as likely to have such a pessimistic outlook about the future. As the Democratic Party diversifies rapidly, the GOP is actually less racially and ethnically diverse now than the Democratic Party was during the Clinton administration.

Older and working-class whites are terrified of black and immigrant activism. One national poll asked people who put confederate flags on their houses and trucks in 2020 why they did it.

Almost everyone said it was because of Black Lives Matter. White nationalists and racists have always wet themselves over the specter of Blacks seeking and gaining power.

America has always had struggles with inclusion and race.  It took several hundred years for Americans to end slavery, and that was after the bloodiest war in American history.

But we have never really had a reckoning on race. I think it is here, in the time of BLM and the creation of another civil rights movement, a gift of the Republican Party to a nation seeking its wayt.

Polls also show Trump supporters – 60 percent – would greatly prefer to see European immigrants come to American than those from Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. I think Donald Trump referred to the latter as “shithole” countries.

A recent PRRI poll conducted with the Atlantic asked respondents what it meant to be “truly American.” More than 6 out of 10 Republicans said it meant being of Western European heritage – which is to say, white.

Donald Trump did not create racism in America. He just encouraged it and exploited it and tried to protect many of the people who most violently practice it.

In fact, racism – minority voter suppression and the demonizing of immigrants – has become the GOP’s primary policy as we approach mid-term elections and another presidential election.

The party has accepted the very tense role and brutal challenge of a minority party suppressing and dominating the majority. That is a genuine formula for partisan conflict and worse.

And an inherently immoral position. Good people have a choice, and it has never been racism. And I will never accept the idea that there are more racists than good people in this country.

Can the racist policies work?

I don’t really know, but I don’t think so. The country has changed so much since Reconstruction and the first major shot at serious African-American voter suppression.

The Republicans are not simply persecuting a helpless and powerless minority.

Black Lives Matter is the most powerful social movement in American history. If you thought last summer’s protests were bad, wait and see what happens if millions of African Americans lose the right to vote.

There is furious opposition to these new Republican policies in the Democratic Party, in the judiciary, in almost every single large American City.

If the Republicans are successful in blocking the millions of African-American voters that won the election for Joe Biden, it will be a pyrrhic victory. It will cost them dearly.

This isn’t Poland or the Philippines. America’s urban and minority, and young populations will not sit still for this rolling coup, a brazen effort to turn the clock back and keep the soon-to-be-white minority in power.

You might not remember it if you follow the corporate media, but Trump lost in 2020.

A party that is so widely wedding to his bigotry and incompetence is not moving in the right direction. To everyone’s surprise, Joe Biden is not afraid of Republican Party and its widening efforts to thwart him. Quite the opposite, he is making a bigger Revolution than Trump made and a much more powerful and entrenched one.

No party can govern rationally or successfully in America if dominating the other half is their only coherent policy goal.

The Republicans and the conservative movement once exuded moral authority.

They were stuffy but they seemed to love America and had strong views about economic responsibility, individually and the danger huge and unchecked government posed.

Now, they are the greatest danger to our democracy.

Those ethical values have been blown away by Trumpism, a populist movement driven only by the support of one man, not by a better or any vision for the country.

Suppressing opposition to Trump means a lot more than suppressing Black people. The party is empty of soul and inspiration: all they seem able to do is find new ways and new people to hate.

That is not the right vision for America, not now, not ever.

It means suppressing Democrats, liberals, progressives, African-Americans, most Latinos, the young, suburban women, the urban, the educated, the scientific, the academic,  and increasingly, the corporate CEO culture, which hates chaos a lot more than it hates progressives.

Riots and bungled pandemics are really bad for business.

Corporate America doesn’t care all that much who is in the White House, as long as nobody keeps them from making money.

Recent history suggests the Democratic and Republican parties are all that different from one another when it comes to reigning in big corporations.

Joe Biden seems to have a policy – helping as many people as possible in the most direct and visible way. That has won many more elections than racism in American history.

What exactly are the Republicans offering us but more hate and obstruction, more racism that can’t be hidden or denied?

We do have better angels in our midst, and Biden is reaching out to them.

Trump is a powerful person, but when it comes to politics, he is also unaccountably and dependably stupid. He did everything he could do to throw the election in 2020 apart from setting himself on fire.

He has created one Army of Opposition after another – women, suburbanites, the young, blacks and other people of color, gays and straight.

Trump will be a pest until the rest of his hair falls out of that next. He is not coming back, he will not run for office again. His future outlook is bleaker than his party’s. Once the corporate media gets bored and gives up, he will fade into history: the country’s most obnoxious, hateful historical footnote.

The Republican Party, which desperately needs friends, follows their leader: every time a Senator gives a hateful interview on Fox News, or on the Senate floor,  they just make some more enemies.

The angry old farts who form the core of their constituency don’t ever seem to grow in number, they just die slowly.

Like their King, the Republicans are putting together a giant and seemingly irreversible Enemy Creation Machine. In politics, there is rule number one: you win by getting more votes, not by driving them away.

It seems to me the Republicans are making an epic mistake by embracing these racist politics, by becoming the Hate And Racist Party.

They are fighting reality; they are fighting the future; they are ceding their opponents’ high ground. And if history or compassion is any kind of judge, they are doomed to lose