The Silent Transformation of the US

The conventions of both U.S. political parties are ending, formalizing the foreseen candidacies. In the Republican one, the speech of someone belonging to an African-American minority (14 percent of the country), like Condoleezza Rice, has had a profound impact, like the one that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, from a Hispanic minority (15 percent of U.S. citizens), has had in the Democratic one.

The Democrats were compelled to reinsert God into their party’s platform, due to the political cost implied by excluding it.

That makes us remember that, for the first time in the history of the country, both vice presidential candidates, Republican Paul Ryan and Democrat Joe Biden, are Catholics — a religion professed by only one in every four Americans.

This fact is strengthened by observing that the current Democratic candidate, President Barack Obama, belongs to the African-American minority, and the Republican one, Mitt Romney, belongs to the Mormon cult, which isn’t included in the Protestant religions. This is the first time that someone from that cult is a candidate for the presidency.

The really significant fact is, then, that none of the members of either ticket belong to that half of the American population commonly referred to as WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), who have traditionally taken control of the political power and economy of the country.

It’s sufficient to remember that in the two and a half century existence of the country, only two out of the 45 presidents didn’t belong to that group: Kennedy and Obama. The former was the only non-Protestant, and the latter is the first non-white president.

This situation is really exceptional. This just happened to occur at the moment when the leader of the majority in the Senate, Harry Reid, is also a Mormon, like Romney, and the leader of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, is Catholic — like the two vice presidential candidates.

This is to say that the leadership of both houses of Congress is also in the hands of legislators who don’t belong to the 51.3 percent of WASP Americans.

Two weeks ago, Sonia Sotomayor, a prominent American justice of Hispanic origin and Catholic belief, visited Argentina. She is one of the two members of the Supreme Court who have been appointed during Obama’s term. The other is also a woman, Elena Kagan, of Jewish faith.

It seems as though it is the president’s progressive ideology that led him to choose two non-WASP women — to introduce new criteria of social openness, in terms of minorities and religion, to the Supreme Court.

But it is not, because the U.S. Supreme Court, composed of nine members, is now comprised of six Catholics and three Jews. Again, as shown by the integration of the two presidential tickets and the leadership of both houses of the legislature, there is no WASP in the dome of the judiciary.

It is telling that, of the three government branches which, according to this analysis, are comprised of 15 people, not even one of them belongs to the category known as WASP. Two months away from the U.S. elections, the country is experiencing rapid social change, even faster and more intense than what was being manifested with regard to ideology, economy and politics.