English 102 Jim Roth’s Website
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What
Will America Look Like in 2050? In 35 years’ time -- time enough
for several presidents, more than a few changes in the control of Congress,
and a few dozen new seasons of "House of Cards" -- America
will look different. Not entirely different of course, but, as we've noted in
the past, its demographics will have shifted enough to be noticeable. And
with the release of new
projections from Pew Research tracking how religious beliefs
are expected to evolve, we now have a fuller picture of how America will have
changed by the time today's toddlers are stalking Capitol Hill. Even if we
don't necessarily know what it will mean for American politics. Let's start with the shift in America's religious
attitudes, according to Pew. In brief summary, more Americans will identify
as being "unaffiliated" with any organized religion. This doesn't
necessarily mean that they will be atheistic or agnostic; it simply
includes the wide body of people who don't categorize their belief systems
into an existing religious practice. People who are spiritual in a broad
sense are included, but Wiccans, for example, aren't.
Otherwise, the country's religious beliefs don't change
much; it will still be largely Christian. (Globally, Pew predicts, the number
of Muslims will nearly match the number of Christians -- and those who are
unaffiliated will decline as a percentage of the world's population.) Let's also loop in two demographic trends that we already
knew. Earlier this week, we looked at state-by-state
estimates of the over-65 population by 2040. The national
picture is the same over the long-term: A big increase in the number of
elderly Americans, surging to become nearly the most populous segment of
society.
There are a few reasons for this. One is that Americans
have been living longer, meaning that the demarcation of 65 as
"old" is more distant from the average life expectancy. Another is
that today's so-called Millennials
are 2050's 65-plussers. (The most common age in America last year was22.) Then, there's the shift in America's racial and ethnic
makeup. The Census Bureau recognizes Hispanics as a distinct ethnicity as
opposed to a race, so we've broken out non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and other
racial identities below, including Hispanics as a separate category. And that
category is expected to grow quickly.
All of those figures are raw population counts. The
changes are perhaps easier to see when shown as comparative percentages.
As anyone interested in politics knows, that boom in the
size of the Hispanic population has driven a lot of debate over the past
three years. Republicans are struggling with two conflicting interests:
Developing a solution on immigration that will satisfy the concerns of the
Hispanic population, a potential future voting bloc, while note turning
off older white voters, the heart of their current support base. (And if
you're skeptical that measures undertaken now could affect voting patterns in
35 years, ask an historian to tell you about what happened to the South after
the Johnson administration.) That said, it's impossible to know with any certainty what
the shift above means for 2050 politics. A drop in the density of the white
and Christian votes seems like bad news for Republicans, while an increase in
older voters seems like good news. But for two reasons, a long-term
projection like that doesn't tell us much. First, older voters weren't always so Republican and so
likely to vote. And again, today's Millennials -- the people who helped bring
Obama to the White House -- will be those older voters. Last year, the
Times looked at
how birth year affects politics -- and the politics of an age range change as
generations move into and out of it. But second, as the Republican effort to figure out
immigration makes clear, parties change, too. Neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats will maintain their existing positions ad infinitum;
for all of our frequent skepticism about the limits of the two-party system,
the parties do evolve (slowly) in response to the shifting electorate. Once
upon a time, Democrats defended slavery. They no longer do. In 35 years'
time, who knows what positions each party will hold. What we can assume, however, is that both parties will
hold positions that include consideration of the non-religious, people of
color and the elderly. (Social Security may be the one party policy that will
survive ad infinitum.) American politics has always evolved,
because America has always evolved. And now we have something of a sense of
what it will look like. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Bump, Philip. “What Will America Look Like in 2050?” Washington Post. 4 April 2015. Web. 4
April 2015. |
