There’s a great ongoing series at Open Left which makes a data-driven analysis of voting patterns for all sorts of demographic groups to argue that overall, the GOP is in serious trouble over the long term. The ethnic demographic trends are pretty devastating by themselves, though a demographic trend is like the climate, not the weather – it’s a long term global aggregate, but short-term local fluctuations can (and will) appear. As the authors note, “If Obama loses the White House in 2012 with 49% of the vote, this would still be consistent with the trends of the last 30 years.”

What intrigues me howver is the religious demographic data. One of the pieces in the series noted that White Evangeliical Christians (WECs) have influence far beyond their numbers, which should be of concern to muslims since there’s a strong correlation with WEC political resurgence and American wars upon muslim soil. Still, the influence of the WECs is diminishing, not only because of the resurgence of moderate liberalism in the wake of conservatisms’ governing failures, but again due to simple demographic inevitability – as a proportion of the electorate, Christians are declining, whites are declining, and both groups are trending towards Democrats anyway. The WEC vote is a subset at the intersection of the White and the Christian vote and remains solidly opposed to Obama, liberalism, et al but is is essentially under siege. The WEC core is also the center of mass for knee-jerk Islamophobia (ex. the muslim smear), so this is on the whole a positive trend for muslim-Americans, something to keep in mind as we navigate these dark times of suspicion and distrust against us.

The analysis of the muslim vote however is the key – demonstrating just how volatile it can be over successive Presidential cycles, and how responsive it is to foreign policy as a whole:

The Muslim community showed very strong support for Democrats this year, and among Arab Muslims at least, a dramatic increasingly Democratic trend. The poll of Muslim voters was completed by randomly selecting names from a list of Muslim voters, so there could be a bias to it depending on how the list was generated. However, the results are in agreement with the Muslim subsample in the poll of Arab Americans, and the Bangladeshi and Pakistani subsamples in the Asian American poll. Another demographic slice of the Muslim American community, African Americans, is also strongly Democratic. The recent development of Muslim American political behavior has been described as occurring in three stages: first, debating whether to participate in elections at all prior to 2000; second, whether to increase political power by voting as a block prior to 2004; and third, a less organized but perhaps more involved participation prior to the 2008 elections. It has been a dramatic ten years, from the seeming betrayal by George Bush, who had strong Muslim support in 2000, to the 2008 campaigns where the Muslim label was used as a rhetorical bludgeon (a ploy which may have backfired), to the election of a man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and has family ties to Islam.

This is a good position to be in. The “three stages” should suggest to Obama and any Democratic successors that the muslim vote is not a reliably liberal bloc like the African American vote or the Jewish vote, but one that is responsive to policy decisions. Really, REALLY responsive! A good analogy would be the Cuban-American vote, which wields great influence because of its location in Uber Swing State Florida.

The question of whether there should even be a muslim bloc is an ongoing debate; I’ve been arguing for years that muslims need to maintain their political independence. My friend Ali Eteraz argued in the Guardian back in 2007 for a “muslim Left” which would serve as a counter to the so-called “Falwell muslims” (who are more a problem in Europe than in the US, but as the shootings at Fort Hood demonstrate, are something US muslims will increasingly have to face repercussions of). Ali lays out the general guidelines for such a political philosophy:

This Muslim left should [espouse] the following basic ideas, without being limited to them:

• separation of mosque and state;

• opposition to tyranny (even if the tyrant has liberal values);

• affirmance of republicanism or democracy;

• an ability to coherently demonstrate that the Muslim right represents merely one interpretation of Islam;

• a commitment to free speech and eagerness to defeat the Muslim right in the marketplace of ideas;

• commitment to religious individualism and opposition to left-collectivism, specifically Marxism;

• opposition to economic protectionism;

• opposing any and all calls for a “council of religious experts” that can oversee legislation (even if those experts are liberals); and

• affirming international law.

Muslim leftists will – it is a must – have to be able to articulate all of these in Islamic terms, in order to persuade the people who need to be convinced, ie Muslims. This means that a Muslim leftist will, naturally, also have facility in the Muslim traditions. The real-world paucity of individuals with such dual facility is indicative of how far behind Muslim leftism is currently.

The pragmatic problem here however is that there’s no such concensus on any of these issues within the muslim community. Part of this is because of the lingering obsession with the “Ummah” which as I keep arguing is a concept with no genuine utility apart from symbolic resonance. For muslim americans to act as a political bloc, we would need to identify issues of relevance to ourselves as Americans, not according to policies which have really very little impact upon our daily lives (such as Israel and Palestine). We still have not, as a community, had that conversation about what we really want or care about (though the attack at Fort Hood have clarified some of our concerns). Most of our concrete political interests (like civil rights, health care reform, etc) are general ones that aren’t specific to our muslim identity, which is why it is tempting to throw our lot in with the left, but I caution heavily against making such an alliance too rigidly. The GOP may be the most intense locus of Islamophobia now, but it’s worth remembering that the Democrats have their xenophobes too, as the Dubai Ports World incident clearly showed. Further, the Left is overtly hostile to spiritual faith – the “Falwell Leftists” among them are implacably opposed to hijab, for example. Ironically the term “muslim Left” obfuscates these differences, leading outsiders to assume it is “centered on Western political liberalism” only clad in muslim garb.

This complexity of muslim issues and diversity is what led my friend Shahed, editor of altmuslim.com, to argue that there should not be any muslim bloc at all. While I agreed with his assertion that muslim voters are simply not going to embrace any political platform in lockstep, I had to take issue with his solution that we abandon the idea of a political identity altogether. The data from the Open Leftf analysis is clear, that there are core issues upon whihch the muslim community does on the whole respond to. Rather than try and create a framework as Ali proposes for social engineering that vote, or as Shahed proposes to simply throw that vote’s potential power away, I think we need to start thinking about what broad principles and general issues we can agree on, and seek to harness that influence as so many other ethnic and religious groups before us have done. In doing so we better not just ourselves but our country as a whole.