building BRICS of a new world's order

With the white population shrinking, the black-Hispanic-Asian coalition that powered Obama’s victory has the potential to set a new, more progressive American agenda

If Barack Obama’s election as America’s 44th President in 2008 was historic, as surely it was, with him becoming the nation’s first black head of state, his re-election marks an epochal transition in the political and electoral landscape of the United States. Demography indeed became destiny on November 6, 2012. America’s receding white electoral majority continued giving way to a new majority-minority ascendance. The historical significance of this transition and its implications for the future of America and the world should not be underestimated.

Overall, the white American population, in a mirror image of its European counterpart, is both ageing and shrinking. This is really what amounts to notions of ‘the decline of the west’ amid the ‘rise of the rest.’ The last census found that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 per cent of all births in the U.S. while minorities — blacks, Hispanics, Asians and those of mixed race — accounted for 50.4 per cent of all births. This represented a majority for the first time in the country’s history. According to the U.S. Census, in the first decade of the new millennium, the Asian-American population rose 43.3 per cent, the African-American population 12.3 per cent, the Latino community 43 per cent — and the white population just 5.7 per cent.

 As a harbinger of things to come, this is where the new majority-minority underpinnings of the Obama presidency bear close watching as a sort of an ‘American BRICS’ of emerging non-white minorities setting what, over time, will be a new American agenda. For, herein resides the potential for a much less jingoistic and militarist foreign policy constituency.

After all, there are already burgeoning kinship ties binding this new American demographic with BRICS and other emerging economies in the world at large. As ‘White America’ fades into the sunset, metaphorically, a convergence of the American ‘BRICS within’ with the emerging ‘BRICS without’ may hold the keys to the future global order.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-rise-of-americas-brics/article4088218.ece?homepage=true