Mike Gonzalez, a Senior Fellow of the Heritage Foundation and former Bush administration official, told Breitbart News Sunday that conservatives can reverse the trend of Hispanics’ lopsided support for Democrats by endorsing policies of education choice, family values, and financial freedom.
Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot radio, Gonzalez told Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon that emphasizing core values of community, industry, and independence, conservatives can galvanize the Hispanic vote.
Gonzalez is the author of the new book A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic America. The book examines the impact of Hispanics on politics in America and provides a how-to manual for conservatives to win Hispanic votes and ultimately the American electorate.
Bannon called Gonzales an “upbeat guy, a glass is half-full individual, a get things done type, who says we’re going to take this hill.” Bannon said that Gonzalez laid out a very compelling case that you never hear from the Republican establishment.
Bannon observed A Race for the Future reveals the very disturbing trends within the Hispanic community “about the implosion of the Hispanic family,” a group that Bannon points out “had strong cultural values in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean and has had deep ties with the Catholic Church.”
Gonzalez claims that in the 1970’s affirmative action “minoritized a bunch of immigrants coming into America, including myself and my family.” Gonzalez claims that affirmative action teaches new immigrants “to rely on the benevolence of the federal government for their success.”
The success, says Gonzalez, becomes “contingent on the benevolence of a federal bureaucrat who is in a remote capital.” This is a different type of dependency than a husband depending on his wife, or children depending on their father, Gonzalez argued. “This is a new kind of dependency,” he told Bannon. What this has done has undermined the Hispanic family to the point that the out-of-wedlock birthrate right now is 53% for all Hispanic groups, according to the Center for Disease Control.
Gonzalez stated Heritage has long been a leader in saying, “The biggest antipoverty program that exists is a mommy and a daddy.” Once there is a breakdown in the family and one of the parents are gone, a child is more likely to drop out of school, go to prison, and more likely to fail.
Gonzales says it is necessary for conservatives to understand the problems with the social programs and that liberals who created these policies, probably with good intentions, understand that they made a mistake.