An interesting little piece of American political science was published on Monday. You’ve probably heard about the curious phenomenon of Trump-era Republicans doing unusually well, by the party’s usual standards, amongst Hispanic voters. Trump himself has gained ground in those communities every time he has run for president, and the topic is now a major concern for Democratic strategists.
Some of the attention has focused on the increasing use by Democratic politicians of the trendy academic term “Latinx” as a novel gender-neutral replacement for “Latino” and “Latina,” which seems, anecdotally, to rub socially conservative Latins the wrong way and provoke distrust. The Spanish and Portuguese languages are gendered, for better or worse, and at least some Hispanic people feel “Latinx” has an obvious Anglo-Saxon ring, making the required new terminology seem like just another example of imperial English-language obstreperousness. How much self-harm have Democrats inflicted by talking and sloganeering in an awkward way that signals radicalism and militancy against the hateful “gender binary”?
A new working paper by Amanda Sahar d’Urso of Georgetown and Marcel Roman of Harvard attempts to come up with a scientifically objective answer. They use several different polling datasets to show that, in fact, higher use of “Latinx” drives Latinx voters toward Republicans — and that the effect is strongest among voters who score higher on a scale of “anti-LGBT+”-ness.
It is all very quantitative and thorough, and the data are used to support an elaborate “Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory” of political labels, whereby an ethnic group may react to a new “inclusive” term with suspicion. (Who knew??) The problem with “Latinx,” in this theory, isn’t its ugliness or novelty alone; it’s that the use of the term signals that Hispanic/Latin identity has tumbled downward in an implicit political hierarchy, and fallen behind the esoteric concerns of an overlapping minority, the sexually “non-binary.”
You may doubt this theory, and Lord knows we work hard here at NP Platformed to cultivate proper distrust of social science. But science usually goes wrong when somebody, somewhere, is trying to reach a conclusion that they want to believe. In this case, Profs. d’Urso and Roman are more like dental patients grimly accepting that a bad tooth will have to be yanked. Consider what Prof. Roman wrote in a Twitter thread explaining the details of their paper:
“Amanda and I think we should still be using gender-inclusive language. The problem for Democrats is that segments of the Latino community that are queerphobic and would otherwise support them are less likely to do so if queerness is made salient through inclusive language. Ultimately, the solution to the problem we’ve diagnosed requires thinking beyond electoral politics, e.g. political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities, a very difficult solution for social scientists to develop, evaluate and put into practice.”
In one way, this statement is admirable. As scientists, acting in the spirit of science, the authors acknowledge their own preference for “inclusive” language — while urging the Democratic Party to stick “Latinx” in a sock because it demonstrably achieves the opposite of the intended effect.
The grumbling about the need for “political re-education” of Hispanic Americans is bound to strike any non-leftist as ominous and repulsive, but it’s a leftist-coded way of saying that the gender-inclusive position actually has to be defended with logical arguments and examples and teaching, rather than by inventing new language rules and screaming them into immediate universal use. The political left has fallen out of the habit of persuasion in our century: there is something strangely conservative about a couple of old-school radical scholars quietly urging its re-adoption.
— Colby Cosh
