Illustrations by Lucy Jones

The image isn’t so indelible, really, three years later, but still it made the rounds: an Asian man in a suit and a blue surgical mask kneeling in the Capitol Rotunda on January 7, 2021, picking up by hand debris left by a furious and giddy mob the day before. The man in the photograph is the New Jersey representative Andy Kim, a House Democrat who had not only won a Trump-leaning district in 2018 but convinced his constituency to split the ticket and reelect him two years later. Feted on social media for his janitorial patriotism, Kim described in an interview feeling, as the son of immigrants, both “blessed” to serve the United States and “pained” to see “literally the heart of this country” in such disarray. It was a particularly winsome message for onlookers given to viewing the January 6 riot as a last stand of “white supremacy,” as indeed President-elect Biden himself did: one mob’s attempt to wrest power back from America’s non-whites, who were due, in twenty-five years or so, to compose the country’s majority-minority population. In this view, Kim was not only custodian of the American polity but its inheritor, alongside the nation’s Asian, Latino, and black populace—what the white revanchists yearning for, say, the 80 percent white America of 1980, might refer to as a Great Replacement. This rainbow coalition would fulfill the long-held prophecy of an emergent Democratic majority: an alliance of liberal whites and increasing numbers of voters of color that would ensure a nation voting blue no matter who for the foreseeable future.

One or another version of this thesis has seemed indisputable since the Nineties. Increasing voter turnout among minorities saw them favoring the Democrats by enlarged margins, culminating in Obama’s winning his reelection with a POC vote of record size. Republicans licked their wounds and commissioned an autopsy, euphemized as the Growth & Opportunity Project, which evaluated the reasons for their loss and laid out plans to better reach minorities, women, and LGBTQ voters. But the opportunity for growth appeared much diminished when Trump commandeered the party a few years later, ragging on Obama and various foreign nations as soon as he stepped off his golden escalator to launch his campaign in 2015. “You have a problem with ISIS,” he said. “You have a bigger problem with China.” It should be noted that Trump spoke of loving China in the same speech, or at least his idea of it (if the country was ineluctably foreign, its desire to win at all costs was still relatable) and that the Democrats, also, have champed at the bit for a sinofied Cold War redux. Regardless, an immense and ongoing tradition of white chauvinism began to express itself openly and gleefully in American life, reaching an apotheosis with white supremacists storming the Capitol’s halls for a self-guided tour.

As I watched the Rotunda being cleaned by the Asiatic exemplum of this country’s Democratic future—Kim is expected to win his Senate race in New Jersey this fall—it was easy to think the Republicans had managed to squander their chance of winning over the fastest-growing subset of the electorate. By the time of the riot at the Capitol, we Asian Americans had spent the Trump Administration winning Oscars, climbing bestseller lists, voting in droves, and generally making our voices heard. The message of the Asian-American moment of the past few years could be summarized thusly: after years of voicelessness and invisibility in American public life, and especially in the midst of anti-Asian pandemic hysteria and the violent attacks attending them, it was time for Asian Americans to be seen, heard, and respected. We were becoming too numerous to ignore, our share of the electorate rising exponentially since the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 did away with the restrictive quotas of prior immigration law; there were some twenty-two million of us here already, and there were more to come. As an article from the Pew Research Center put it this past January, the number of Asians in America

has grown by fifteen percent, or about two million eligible voters, in the past four years. That’s faster than the three percent growth rate for all eligible voters during that span and the twelve percent for Hispanic eligible voters.

Anyone anxious about the multicultural future of the Republic should heed the political inclinations of what’s predicted by midcentury to become the largest immigrant group in the country.

If we’re suddenly legion, what we might do with our newfound presence hasn’t always been entirely clear. amid awakening, asian-americans are still taking shape as a political force, ran one New York Times headline in 2021. Indeed, “Asian American” is a difficult category to define, because it denotes a people of more than twenty Asian countries of origin speaking more than one hundred languages. This diversity extends to politics, even if the most famous Asian Americans of late fit comfortably within the liberal rainbow coalition presaging our shared Democratic future—if indeed that thesis holds true. The landmark book on the topic, The Emerging Democratic Majority, was published in 2002 by the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis. Teixeira now argues that the media has “bowdlerized” their initial prognosis. “Demographic change was inevitably shifting the political terrain,” Teixeira told the Times in January 2022, a few months before he would leave the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, for the inveterately right-wing American Enterprise Institute. “It did not make it inevitable that Democrats would benefit.” As the party began catering to overeducated elites living in a liberal cultural bubble, the Democrats, according to Teixeira, lost the white working-class voters they needed to maintain power.

Last August, Teixeira raised alarms that the non-white working class could follow suit, pointing to a Times/Siena poll of the 2024 race. The poll saw the lead Biden (who had not yet withdrawn his candidacy) had among such voters drop thirty-two points, down to sixteen points from forty-eight in 2020. And even that year had had its warning signs: in New York City, precincts with large numbers of Asian residents saw a 20 percent uptick in turnout, with Trump winning the majority of those newcomers’ votes. Similar shifts occurred from Orange County, California, to Chicago to Philadelphia. The rising tally of Asian Republican votes after the 2022 midterms prompted another Times headline: asian americans, shifting right.

For all his patriotic amicability, Andy Kim may not be the sole model for Asian-American politicians to come, despite the white-supremacist ideology allegedly motivating the events of the day prior to his cleanup photo op. We were there on January 6, too, after all, to be seen and heard and respected. A masked man, presumably of Filipino descent, waved a soft-bristled broom known in the Philippines as a walis tambo that was attached to a Captain America shield emblazoned with phrases denouncing the false media, pandemic hoax, and mail–in fraud. Asians in the military were represented by Jia Liu, a Chinese-American U.S. Marine Corps reservist from New York who was later arrested on charges relating to his participation that day and, in a separate case, was convicted of selling fake COVID-19 vaccination cards to fellow reservists. Tam Dinh Pham, an eighteen-year veteran of the Houston Police Department, was sentenced to forty-five days in jail for his role in the riot; upon entering the Capitol, prosecutors claimed, he shouted, “We’re taking the House back!” Pham wept before the judge. “The day I was on the news, my sister in Vietnam called and said the whole village watched me.”

The South Vietnamese flag flew high alongside ensigns for the Confederacy and MAGA and QAnon. Also known as the Heritage and Freedom flag, it is a similar shade of yellow as the Gadsden flag, albeit with three red lines instead of the snake not to be trod on. In a Facebook post, one of its emissaries that day, a Seattle-area real estate broker named Michelle Le, wrote, “The yellow part of the flag represents our skin color as Asian and the three stripes are the three regions of Vietnam: North, Central, and South Vietnam. This flag to me is an anti-Communist flag.” She continued:

It’s a reminder of my roots and heritage. I had lived through Communism and I know the tyranny and the pain it had inflicted on many families. I hope through sharing our stories, it will help people understand more about Communism and protect America . . . God bless America!

What’s the matter, then, with the Little Saigons and Chinatowns? Surely Asian Republicans are voting against their own interests, stumping for a party entranced by white nationalists; perhaps they are victims of disinformation circulated through apps with names like KakaoTalk and WeChat that their monolingual compatriots never use. The confusion is not uncommon. As Thomas Frank observed in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, his 2004 book on (mostly white) conservatives, political wisdom once held that Democrats were “the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and victimized.” Adding minorities to that list is understandable, given the recent tenor of much of the GOP and the complaints of pundits like Tucker Carlson, who argues that Democrats intend to substitute white voters “with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

However bipartisan, this commonplace assumption overlooks intraparty developments. Around 25 percent of white, black, and Hispanic Democrats identified as liberal in the mid-Nineties, roughly the same as one another. As the Brookings Institution’s William A. Galston pointed out recently, the portion of white Democrats who identify as liberal has since risen nearly forty points, while there has been less than half as much growth among black and Hispanic Democrats identifying as such. “Unlike three decades ago,” Galston writes, “the Democrat Party is now a coalition of White Liberals and non-white voters the majority of whom think of themselves as moderate or conservative.” This moderation in the stalwart POC contingent is unwelcome news for Democrats. According to Galston, for instance, 46 percent of Hispanic voters say that the Democrats have strayed too far to the left, while only 41 percent consider the GOP too right-wing. The math suggests a dismaying possibility: these votes may very well swing.

Amid the cottage industry of fretting over fickle moderates and outré conservatives of color (Cubans in Miami, Byron Donalds and Clarence Thomas, et al.), Asian Americans can fall by the wayside. (Biden historically reserved his scolding for black voters, telling them the last presidential go-around that even thinking of voting for Trump meant “you ain’t black.”) Some of this might be chalked up to our statistical newness. The polling Galston cites has no data on historical shifts in the attitudes of Asian voters, but there were only 8.8 million of us in 1994. In the subsequent presidential election, we made up just 1 percent of voters. It’s obviously unlikely that the immigrant millions who have joined the demos—Asian and otherwise—would all obediently vote for Democrats, per Carlson, but the left-liberal incredulity about non-white conservatism (and knee-jerk denial, à la Biden) itself derives from a blind faith in—and misreading of—forecasts like Teixeira’s that fail to consider these various demographics’ histories. Which is to say: it was inevitable that conservatives among us would someday reveal themselves. Besides, many Asian Americans, whether long established or recently immigrated, were already openly conservative.

But the American political memory is short. Teixeira and Judis’s misunderstood salvo in 2002 took its title from Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, which ascribes Richard Nixon’s 1968 election to an unexpected backlash against New Deal liberalism and the civil-rights movement: a “repudiation visited upon the Democratic Party,” Phillips argues, “for its ambitious social programming, and inability to handle the urban and Negro revolutions.” Phillips, who worked as a strategist for Nixon’s campaign, cautions readers that “to the extent that the ethnic and racial overtones of American political behavior and alignment are appreciated, they are often confused or mis-stated. For example,” he continues, “far from being opposed by all non-whites, Richard Nixon was strongly supported by one non-white group—the Chinese.”

Phillips makes no mention of whether these Chinese were as perturbed as white Americans by the Negro problem, the era’s dysphemism for the civil-rights struggle. The Chinese vote was, if resoundingly red, negligible.

However disagreeable, Phillips’s diagnosis of conservative gains remains widely accepted, as summarized by the historian Sean Wilentz in the editor’s introduction to the 2015 edition:

In forthrightly embracing civil rights, the Democratic liberalism of the 1960s and after, fairly or unfairly, left itself vulnerable to the perception that it had turned away from the interests and values of the broad white middle and working classes.

Swap “wokeness” or “identity politics” for “civil rights,” and Wilentz’s words resemble the standard formulation of so many contemporary grievances with the Democratic Party. Sub “Asian-American” for “broad white,” and you have an apt credo for much of Asian-American conservatism and politics more broadly, especially on the issue of education.

The concerns are comprehensible enough: in the rarefied zero-sum world of elite American education, is the use of lotteries or personality scores for admissions not discriminatory toward Asian students who must be better than best in their efforts—when their efforts have any bearing at all? From this worry—denounced by liberal advocates arguing that such fears only sow division among minority groups—has emerged a movement of agitated parents. “Education is a nonpartisan issue, right?” Ann Hsu asked me when I put the subject to her over the phone. A former Silicon Valley executive (and later the co-founder of a Xinjiang-based yogurt company), Hsu had been a public face of the Chinese-parent-led recall of three San Francisco school-board members in 2022 following the board’s institution of lottery admissions at prestigious Lowell High School. Asian parents were similarly outraged by the social-media posts of another board member, who’d asked why Asian Americans weren’t more vocally protesting Trump. “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” she wrote. “Being a house n****r is still being a n****r.”

Hsu wrote a triumphant op-ed in the New York Post the day following the school-board members’ ouster, titled “Why Asian Americans Like Me Are the Rising New Parental Power.” The recall was an early and shocking victory for those champions of merit and hard work over what they saw as an obscene overemphasis on race. Asian-American proponents of this line of reasoning emphasize—as Wai Wah Chin, the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, wrote in another op-ed for the Post—

testing and excellence, not participation trophies or dumbing down. They value duty, obligation and responsibility, not narcissism, fragility and entitlement. They value study, hard work and delayed gratification.

In this view, Asian-American children are simply culturally—ethnically?—poised to do extraordinarily well in color-blind tests of merit, and shouldn’t be punished for their success. (The implication that other Americans lagged behind was made explicit by Hsu herself after the board recall, when she claimed that black and brown students faced “unstable family environments caused by housing and food insecurity along with a lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning.” Heavily criticized for her comments, she subsequently lost her bid for a seat on the board.) The next year, this point of view found its legal vindication in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

While “parental rights” of this peculiarly Asian-American sort aren’t synonymous with those that right-wingers have demanded as of late, education policy has long served as a gateway into conservatism. Chin, whose op-ed channeled praise for Asian-American diligence into what was ultimately an argument for charter schools, is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that has published a number of policy briefs and essays on Asian-American politics in its magazine, City Journal. Since 2019, the institute has been under the stewardship of Reihan Salam, who became its president after half a decade as executive editor of National Review. (New York magazine hailed him as “Literary Brooklyn’s Favorite Conservative” at the start of his tenure at the latter.) Salam is the outer-borough son of Bangladeshi immigrants and came of age in Rudy Giuliani’s New York. (Giuliani had been advised, of course, by Fred Siegel, another editor at City Journal.) Over tea at a coffee shop tucked away in a corporate lobby near the institute’s Midtown offices, Salam laughed as he described his contrarian appreciation for the Giuliani years. While everyone else in his milieu had hated the mayor, Salam commended him for presiding over both an “incredible, immigrant-driven rejuvenation of the outer boroughs” and “dramatic gains in public safety.” As its name suggests, the Manhattan Institute has always had a city-oriented outlook—unusual, given the wonted liberalism of the urban elite. Under Salam, the institute has emphasized the importance of what he described as the “polyglot melting experience,” such as his at Stuyvesant High School in the mid-Nineties. There, he told me, most everyone was an ethnic American, speaking different languages at home but coming together around the color-blind ideal of test-proven merit. Salam vastly prefers this vision of impartiality to the tribalism of affirmative action and of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), in which racial preferences are made public policy in an institutionalization he views as both intractable and possibly dangerous.

Salam hopes to cultivate at the institute a generation of intellectuals who can speak to the post–Hart–Celler multiethnic politics of the majority-minority nation to come. He worried that in their absence, the effects of racial politics on this country could be “extremely bleak” on the right and the left alike. Salam has marshaled Asian Americans to the institute’s cause, including Chin and Renu Mukherjee, an Indian-American political scientist focused on education and Asian-American politics. But the preeminent critic of the mainstream liberal thesis is inarguably Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the institute. Rufo’s name is synonymous with the right-wing culture wars of the past few years. He became famous for soliciting complaints from citizens aggrieved by identity politics and perceived DEI overreach across the country, setting up a tip line for tales of woke pedagogy gone awry. Rufo openly discusses his strategy to label all liberal and left racial discourse as “critical race theory,” regardless of any pertinence to the original legal theory under such a name. “We put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote on Twitter in 2021. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ ”

What was the endgame of the left’s vision of race relations?, Rufo asked me, on the phone from his home in Washington State. “A racial spoils system,” he proffered, “in which individuals are measured and punished or rewarded on the basis not of their individual accomplishments but of their group identity traits.” He found this incompatible with a nation he sees as guided fundamentally by notions of fairness. “A system of punishments and rewards based on ethnic and racial identity,” he continued, “to me devolves very quickly into a prison-gang society, in which people are recruited into these categories and play a zero-sum game against one another.”

The public perception is that Rufo’s cohort and audience is lily-white, but his fans and tipsters, he said, have included numerous Asian Americans—those willing to raise a stink, for instance, when elementary school students in Cupertino, California, were made by teachers to rank themselves in the classroom according to their “power and privilege.” Rufo also partially credits Asian-American organizing for his own political awakening, particularly the efforts of the activist group WA Asians for Equality against Initiative 1000, a Washington State measure filed in 2018 that would have instated affirmative action in public education and employment. Rufo described the group’s fight against the referendum, which they likened to the Chinese Exclusion Act, as the eye-opening campaign of a ragtag grassroots organization that fought for color blindness and defeated Democrats who had “laughed” at their efforts. (In doing so, they made common cause with the conservative activist and radio host John Carlson, who had once put forward a ballot measure in 1998 to essentially ban affirmative action by public institutions; Rufo described this collaboration as beautiful, dismissing characterizations of the group’s members as Carlson’s puppets.) While downplaying his assistance to the campaign, Rufo described it as an inspiring and novel cross-pollination of his political and personal experiences. Rufo’s wife is Thai, and he was furious on the phone over the idea of their children’s being doubly disadvantaged in college admissions, not only owing to their whiteness but to their Asianness as well, as they’re subject to what he’s described as the “Asian-American penalty.” Other biracial families, he’s written, “have floated the idea of ‘passing’ their children as white-only on academic registration forms,” though such maneuvers may be unnecessary post–Students for Fair Admissions.

Rufo has appealed to plenty of Asian Americans involved in the movement against affirmative action, with some of the most prominent among them drawing on their heritage to put their own spin on his messages. Antiracism has the insidious ring of Maoist thought, they argue; the woke Red Guards of the current moment are eager to divide society between “the oppressor and the oppressed,” as a Cupertino tipster told Rufo. “Since these identities are inborn characteristics people cannot change, the only way to change it is via violent revolution.” These American Pekingologists are on the lookout for Chinese history repeating itself on American soil, even as they integrate into American conservatism. Kenny Xu was featured in the New York Times in 2019 as a student critiquing Harvard’s admissions policies; he is now the president of an advocacy group called Color Us United, which seeks, as he puts it, to “change the false narrative that America is a racist country.” This year he made a failed bid for North Carolina’s thirteenth congressional district. His 2021 book, An Inconvenient Minority, laid out the case that the left has an agenda against Asian Americans. His next book, School of Woke, compared the oppressed–oppressor binary supposedly taught in American schools with the Cultural Revolution’s Black and Red categories of disfavored and favored social classes. Similar messaging can be found in Critical Race Theory and Woke Culture: America’s Dangerous Repeat of China’s Cultural Revolution (2022), by Yukong Mike Zhao, founder of the Asian American Coalition for Education, which fights for what it describes as “Asian American children’s equal education rights.” In his book, Zhao describes his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, including accompanying his grandparents as they were relocated to a rural village. He compares cancel culture with the Anti-Rightist Campaign and translates the
“” of the proletariat not as “class consciousness” but as “wokeness.” Finally, Zhao pivots, like Rufo, from CRT to gender and sexuality, lamenting how “the radical left glorifies LGBTQ communities, giving them special treatment at the cost of American traditions.” Xu, for his part, draws an even more dire picture still, one of

an army of ideas, businesses, schools, activists, and politicians coalescing around one framework—the Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory dialectic of the oppressor and the oppressed—in order to serve themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The dialectic talk can feel a bit abstracted from politics, as can spotting Marx in every mention of equity. (While some DEI talk has an air of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” few educators seem to advocate for an actual dictatorship of the proletariat.) Although Rufo is widely credited with inspiring a slew of censorious legislation, many saw the GOP’s lack of success during the 2022 midterms as an indictment of the electoral efficacy of his brand. Asian anticommunism, however, has played a very real part in deciding some recent elections.

In 2018, Gustavo Arellano published an “obituary” in the Orlando Sentinel for the Orange County, California, of old, that rock-ribbed redoubt where, per Reagan, “good Republicans go before they die.” A conservative bastion since 1889, when a small group of cities opted to secede from Los Angeles County at the urging of the Ku Klux Klan member and assemblyman Henry W. Head, the land in which Nixon spent his childhood saw cracks in the Republicans’ “Orange Curtain” when Hillary Clinton won the area in 2016. Two years later, Democrats picked up all the county’s House seats, and two years after that, Biden won the region.

According to recent census counts, nearly a quarter of Orange County is Asian. The Vietnamese are the largest subgroup, at almost two hundred thousand, the largest population of Vietnamese people outside Vietnam. Many trace their arrival to the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975. Of the one hundred and thirty thousand refugees who left Saigon, almost 40 percent ended up in California’s Camp Pendleton. Some fifty miles to the north was Orange County. Fecund ground for megachurches like Crystal Cathedral and Saddleback Church, the area was full of parishes and Catholic charities happy to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, who flocked to the cheaper inland cities and began to set up shop. Since then, they’ve built the largest Little Saigon in the United States, with a thriving ecosystem of Vietnamese-language newspapers, radio, online outlets, and Vietnamese businesses in strip malls stretching as far as the eye can see.

Orange County’s preeminent Vietnamese politician is the Republican state senator Janet Nguyen, who came to California with her family as a refugee in 1981. Her interest in politics originated in college, when she took a class at UC Irvine with a local county supervisor. Her parents, who were wary of the government, didn’t understand. “Wait a minute,” she recalls them saying, “we escaped the government—now you want to be one of them?” Apparently so. Nguyen was sworn in as the youngest person ever elected to Orange County’s board of supervisors. Since then, she has served as both the first Vietnamese-American state assembly member and first Vietnamese-American state senator in the entire country. (This fall, Nguyen is running to reclaim her seat on the board of supervisors.)

Nguyen’s office in Huntington Beach sits above a pair of Japanese restaurants named Sushi on Fire and Shabu on Fire several blocks from the pier. From the office you can’t quite see the beach itself, which was hosting the U.S. Open of Surfing when I met with the state senator last August. When she first ran for county supervisor, she recalled, her opponent took her to task for not speaking Vietnamese fluently (she can, in fact) and for being married to a white man. In a retort that Nguyen suggested had won her the election, she said she wasn’t running for county supervisor in Vietnam. Wouldn’t the Vietnamese of Orange County want someone as American as her to fight for them?

Fight for them she has, working diligently for the community’s support. When I visited her again in September of last year, her staff was exhausted, having spent the previous week helping Vietnamese seniors, many with little to no English, apply to the Orange County Section 8 voucher program’s waiting list, which had opened for the first time in twelve years. The month before, Nguyen had gathered a number of Vietnamese constituents to speak with me. Sitting around a conference table flanked by both the American and the South Vietnamese flags, they were excited to talk about Nguyen’s aggressive stance toward the government they had fled. Phat Bui, the chair of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California and current Garden Grove mayoral candidate, praised Nguyen’s opposition to Orange County–Vietnam sister-city relationships, in his view an untenable prospect so long as “in Vietnam there is no humanity, no freedom.” (In 2014, Nguyen spoke out against a proposed relationship between Irvine and the southern Vietnamese city of Nha Trang, citing the “blanket human rights violations” committed by the Vietnamese government.) Nguyen has written op-eds in the local paper denouncing the Vietnamese government for its subpar human-rights record, calling for the American government to “take the steps necessary to foster change in Vietnam.”

In 2017, the California State Senate commemorated the life of the late left-wing activist and lawmaker Tom Hayden. Hayden, lead author of the Port Huron Statement and a member of the Chicago Seven, generally refused to condemn Communism. He made several trips to North Vietnam during the war, co-writing a book about his experiences, The Other Side, in 1966, and starring in a documentary, Introduction to the Enemy, eight years later with his then wife, Jane Fonda. Days after the memorial in 2017, Nguyen attempted to denounce Hayden on the Senate floor. “I recognize today in memory of the millions of Vietnamese and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died seeking freedom and democracy,” Nguyen said, before her mic was cut off and she was forcibly removed from the chambers. “I was so amazed by that,” a Vietnamese immigrant named Lan, who lived in Huntington Beach, said to me during the constituent meeting. She had never seen a politician, she continued, who was willing to do such a thing for the community.

Anticommunism like Nguyen’s has gone over quite well as of late in Orange County, such that Arellano’s obituary for the region now reads as premature. The year 2020 saw Little Saigon swing toward Trump—more so than “virtually any urban neighborhood in the country save for the Hasidic Jewish precincts of Williamsburg,” as the conservative pollster Patrick Ruffini writes in Party of the People, his 2023 book arguing that the GOP is successfully making a play for non-white voters. Ruffini recounts how a Korean-American Republican strategist named Sam Oh had studied the GOP’s collapse in southern California and found that it had failed miserably to reach out to minorities and independents, losing the latter group by fifty points in 2018. Oh saw growth opportunities in those demographics, which he capitalized on via targeted Vietnamese-language mailers, phone banking, and text messaging. In 2020, Oh’s approach paid dividends for Trump and helped Young Kim and Michelle Steel, two long-shot Korean-American GOP candidates, flip two House districts back to the Republicans.

Oh, Ruffini writes, noticed increasing anxieties over China and its Communist Party in conversations with southern California Vietnamese speakers. Back at Nguyen’s office, Lan, as if to corroborate Oh’s claims, interrupted the proceedings to hold forth against what she saw as the indoctrination happening in schools, whose teachers “totally believe in socialism—socialism and communism.” The threat, she went on, was present as much at home as abroad—though her home country attracted more of her ire than China. She’d noticed recently that “the communists from Vietnam, they are trying to invade our community. People just ignore it . . . but it’s happening in front of our eyes.” The Communist Party of Vietnam was quietly buying real estate, Bui added. “There’s nothing we can do about it. But they are doing more than that,” he said. “They are trying to spy on us so they know exactly who is doing what.” He alleged that Vietnam denied visas to Vietnamese Americans who were vocal in protesting the country’s human-rights abuses. (For her part, Nguyen attributed much of this worry to her community’s shock at seeing Vietnamese nationals—some of whom might have ties to the government, as citizens of any nation might to their own—buy property in Orange County after accruing sufficient wealth in a nation many Vietnamese Americans know only as impoverished and war-torn.)

Such unease characterized Steel’s reelection campaign in 2022, during which she red-baited her Taiwanese-American opponent, a former management consultant and Navy Reserve officer named Jay Chen. Steel released Vietnamese-language flyers with doctored images of Chen teaching The Communist Manifesto to children and television ads depicting him as a puppet of China: “A socialist comrade,” says an actor in CCP military greens of Steel’s opponent, “who even supported Bernie Sanders for supreme leader!” Steel won by nearly 5 percent, demonstrating the political potency of Asian-on-Asian Communist smears. Of the Asian-American conservatives I spoke to, very few expressed concerns about the anti-China rhetoric of politicians like Trump or Steel—they were Americans, after all, not Chinese citizens. (Recent polling has shown that around two fifths of Chinese Americans view China favorably, a figure that is still higher than the 14 percent of other Asian Americans who do.) If often covetous of Chinese education—in another Post op-ed, Wai Wah Chin used last year’s Chinese spy-balloon debacle to chastise American schools for falling behind those in the People’s Republic—they have taken the side of the United States in this latest great-power competition, confident that their compatriots can distinguish between China’s government and Americans of Chinese (or Vietnamese, Korean, etc.) descent—even as ideological comrades like Steel and Trump don’t mind blurring the lines.

This runs counter to the standard narrative of Trump’s China-bashing since his arrival on the scene in 2015. As the story usually goes, taking shots at the country leads to attacks on its diaspora (and those confused for members thereof), a connection that only intensified with COVID’s arrival. A spate of spectacular violence coincided with the protests over George Floyd’s murder, and activists and nonprofit groups entertained the idea that anti-Asian aggression stemmed from the same white supremacy cited by the millions taking to the streets at the time. Sensitive to historical black–Asian tensions, many were eager to cite a study showing that the majority of hate crimes against Asians were committed by white people—though, by most accounts, hate crimes against Asians go woefully underreported, owing in part to a lack of understanding, among law enforcement and the general public alike, of what constitutes a hate crime. Moreover, some of the most horrific attacks against Asians in recent memory have not been charged as hate crimes—e.g., the fatal stabbing of Christina Yuan Lee in her apartment in New York’s Chinatown in 2022 by Assamad Nash. (Nash was, however, still sentenced to thirty years to life in prison for Lee’s murder.)

But if some progressives tended to view anti-Asian violence as a Gordian knot tying together disparate factors and events, from white supremacy and the hollowing out of our mental-health infrastructure to Trump’s theories about Wuhan, it has not been so complicated for a significant portion of their brethren. For the latter group, it’s the violence, stupid—especially violence as committed by black and brown men, often those who are homeless and mentally ill. As such, this cohort feels that white supremacy can be a confusing emphasis if not willful misdirection.

Combined with a growing perception of generalized disorder in American cities, this fear of imminent violence has led to a distaste in many Asian communities for the various progressive district attorneys that have won elections across the country—and who are now frequently being challenged. More than two thirds of registered Asian-American voters in San Francisco favored the recall of Chesa Boudin, and New York City’s Asian voters have turned out in record numbers for politicians such as Curtis Sliwa and Lee Zeldin who variously promised law and order in the wake of the Floyd protests and the repeal of cashless bail. Relatively unscathed so far has been Larry Krasner, the former public defender elected to the DA’s office in Philadelphia in 2017 and the only progressive prosecutor of the group to have a gripping, prestige-TV docuseries made about him. Krasner, responsible for the poorest big city in America, has been the repeated target of David Oh, the first Asian American elected to Philadelphia’s city council and its most recent Republican mayoral candidate.

Oh is a case study in the difficulties that an Asian-American conservative might face in his political career, especially in a city that, unlike the Vietnamese bastions of Garden Grove and Westminster in Orange County, is less than 10 percent Asian. Oh has long-standing ties in Philadelphia: he still lives on the block in Southwest Philly where he grew up as the son of the pastor of the city’s first Korean church. After a stint in the city DA’s office, Oh joined the Army National Guard, serving as a second lieutenant in the 20th Special Forces Group; his unit was activated in 1991 for Operation Desert Storm, but the war ended before his deployment overseas. Afterward, he returned to practicing law.

Lacking support from Philly’s somewhat sclerotic GOP both then and now, Oh ran multiple times before capturing a council seat in 2011. On the way, he made plenty of powerful enemies, who in their attacks seized on irregularities in Oh’s record. Of note, for instance, was his being reportedly questioned three times by police in the Nineties regarding his penchant for brandishing a gun in his neighborhood (and eventually being charged for firing into the air at what turned out to be an undercover police squad). Oh’s military service also came under scrutiny, with particular contention over his claim to Green Beret service in campaign materials. In 2011, a group of veterans calling itself the Philadelphia Independent Veterans Association rallied across from City Hall to criticize Oh. Meanwhile, Oh became a target of John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, who headed an electricians’ union local and was a political kingmaker until his recent conviction on bribery and wire-fraud charges. A PAC with strong ties to Dougherty sent campaign mailers declaring Oh a reckless vigilante unfit for public office.

Nonetheless, Oh cobbled together a coalition from various politically marginalized groups—e.g., Asian small-business owners, the city’s sizable Ukrainian population (he introduced a resolution in support of a no-fly zone in Ukraine), and families separated by Child Protective Services. His campaign schedule reflected his wide reach. On a Saturday leading into the mayoral election, I met him at a fish-fry prayer breakfast for pastors and politicians hosted by a black church in Lansdowne, just west of Philly’s southwestern border. (Ever the pastor’s son, Oh gamely gave a sermon tinged with a Republican’s skepticism of the government, declaring there to be nothing “that is going to save the city of Philadelphia other than God Almighty.”) Afterward we drove to the opposite end of Philadelphia, swinging by an outpost of the military-themed barbecue chain Mission BBQ to attend a one-hundredth birthday party for a black veteran of the Battle of the Bulge along with his family and a contingent from Warriors’ Watch Riders, a kind of veterans’ motorcycle club. We then hopped over to NetCost, a nearby supermarket frequented by Russians and Eastern Europeans, where Oh mingled for an hour and a half over up-tempo Slavic techno in a parking lot that was sparse but for the locals parking their cars and returning shopping carts. I tapped out before Oh left for an event for veteran therapy dogs; he also planned to attend a gathering of Haitian pastors that evening.

Everyone I spoke with on this trip had similar complaints about the city, all of which seemed to stem from Krasner’s supposed laxness on crime: the open-air drug market in Kensington, the looting that had occurred in Center City during the summer of 2020, the nearly decade-long spike in homicides that had rocked the city even before urban crime had become a topic in vogue nationally. They approved of Oh’s law-and-order emphasis; he had almost been murdered himself outside his home in Kingsessing while unloading his car one Wednesday night in 2017. Wielding a blade, the attacker demanded Oh’s keys and belongings. Oh managed to survive what he described as an eight-to-ten-minute scuffle, during which, by his account, he was lunged at more than ten times with a five-inch weapon that the police never found, resulting in a perforated diaphragm. Hence, perhaps, his dismissal of Stop Asian Hate types. “When someone says, Go back to China, COVID—yeah, they cry,” he told me in 2022, his voice slightly scornful. “Yeah, it’s shocking. But if you’re living in the hood, you’re told to get your motherfucking ching-chong ass to China every day. It doesn’t have anything to do with Donald Trump or COVID. So when people start crying about this, there’s a disconnect. Nobody shot you. Nobody stabbed you. Nobody told you you’re a motherfucking ching chong. Somebody said something because you sneezed. And you’re saying that’s Asian hate?”

Oh has long advocated for the city’s Asian population in these terms. When fellow council member Cindy Bass attempted to ban bulletproof plexiglass from the city’s stop-and-go stores—those corner store–bar hybrids frequently run by Asian proprietors in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods—Oh was there at the rallies, next to people bearing signs reading asian life matter and = rights = protections over the image of a bloodstained bullet hole. After a teenage Asian girl was beaten up by a group of black teens on the subway in 2021, Oh went on local conservative talk radio and demanded more cops in metro stations while also declaring that there “is and has been a vilification of Asian and Pacific Americans in Philadelphia,” and what he would later describe to me as a “Black Lives Matter perspective” on Asian history that held that Asians “were never discriminated against.”

Oh, however, had already been outflanked to the right by his Democratic opponent, a fellow former council member named Cherelle Parker. Philadelphia is both a gentrifying city and one that has grown more violent, with homicides in the city more than doubling from 246 in 2013 to 562 in 2021. (This year has seen a drastic drop in homicides, however.) A long and violent summer in 2022 included the worst mass shooting in Philadelphia in seven years and an incident in which two cops were struck by stray bullets just before the city’s Fourth of July celebration. That evening, then-mayor Jim Kenney held a forlorn press conference. “We live in America, and we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everyone they can carry a gun wherever they want—it’s like Dodge City,” he said, a number of police officers staring mutely behind him. Parker, the majority leader of the city council at the time, and the council president, Darrell Clarke, flirted publicly over the following week with reinstating stop-and-frisk—“in a constitutionally enacted way,” Clarke made sure to add. The practice had been curtailed in Philadelphia after a federal lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that stop-and-frisk had targeted primarily people of color without legal justification (or results, its stops ending with few arrests or gun seizures).

Oh rejected the idea outright as unconstitutional. He was not alone in his disbelief. The trial balloon was shot down by both the mayor and other council members, twelve of whom had joined Clarke and Parker in writing a letter to Kenney regarding police reform in June 2020. “Philadelphia can’t breathe,” the letter began, before rejecting the mayor’s proposed $14 million increase of the police budget and proposing reforms ranging from independent police oversight to the “explicit prohibition of sitting or kneeling on a person’s neck, face, or head.” Oh hadn’t signed the letter, which he saw as grandstanding. He wasn’t necessarily against cutting the police budget, he told me. “I’m against just signing a meaningless letter saying we’re going to defund the police because that’s the flavor of the day that makes the Inquirer and radio stations happy.” He was skeptical of the city council’s ability to justify the allocation of funds, alluding to the shell game of city government. If one were to veto this particular increase, it was his opinion that the mayor and police commissioner would find the $14 million elsewhere, likely from services that the council and its constituents would not want to see cut. “They just imagine what you’re cutting is some racist white guy sitting there drinking beer, but you’re not necessarily cutting that. You don’t know what you’re cutting.” That Oh could hold law-and-order sentiments while resisting the implementation of stop-and-frisk comes perhaps as a surprise. But from New York to Los Angeles, even the Democratic Party has proved more than capable of self-identifying as both progressive and pro-police. Identity politics with an admixture of cop-love is a winning formula in this country’s bluest cities—even the one that reelected Larry Krasner in 2021.

Last November, David Oh performed better than any Republican mayoral candidate had in twenty years, and still only managed to secure about 25 percent of the vote. His chances had always been slim. Philadelphia hasn’t had a GOP mayor in seventy years. That Oh became a council member was itself the result of a kind of affirmative action; the city stipulates that at least two of the seven at-large seats on the city council must be held by members of minority parties. This has typically benefited Republicans, until the Working Families Party’s recent victories, including claiming the seat Oh vacated during his mayoral bid. It is also probable that Oh did not monopolize the city’s Asian votes. Philadelphia has elected a fair number of noteworthy Asian Democrats, among them the former council member and mayoral candidate Helen Gym and the state senator Nikil Saval. Even if the bowdlerized Teixeira and Judis demographics-are-destiny thesis is false, there’s nonetheless no guarantee that the emerging majority of this particular minority will be Republican.

Painfully aware of this, Asian-American conservatives often plead for their community’s allegiance (it’s time for asian americans to ditch radical democrats once and for all, wrote Wai Wah Chin in the Daily Caller ahead of the 2022 midterms) while chiding them for being Democrats in the first place. There’s no ready metaphor for the deprogramming they seek, no “escaping the plantation,” as the right-wing commentator Candace Owens puts her demand that her fellow black Americans stage a “Blexit,” or “Black Exit,” from the Democratic Party.

There is a frequent invocation of the Jews by right-wing Asian commentators, with conservatives from both groups bewildered by the liberal tendencies of their demographic as a whole. The Berkeley Law professor John Yoo likes to quip that “Asians live like Mormons and vote like Puerto Ricans,” in a spin on the old Milton Himmelfarb formulation. (In the original, Jews vote like Boricuas but “earn like Episcopalians.”) Yoo might be the longest-tenured consistently prominent Asian-American conservative in the country. After attending Harvard and Yale Law, Yoo clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, with whom he maintains a friendly relationship. (Thomas, according to Yoo, is fascinated by Asian immigrants, seeing in them the kind of bootstrapping self-reliance he cherishes in the black community.) Since then, Yoo has served in every branch of government, most notably working for the Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush Administration, in which he wrote the infamous “torture memos” authorizing interrogation techniques like waterboarding at the onset of the war on terror.

A Korean-American son of Pennsylvania like Oh, Yoo grew up in the city’s western suburbs, where we met for coffee. He described wanting, after the Democrats reached new heights with Asian-American voters in 2012, to write a book inspired by Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals? Yoo’s proposed title: Why Are Asians So Dumb? He put the project on hold when Trump became president, he said, publishing instead Defender in Chief, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers would have approved of Trump’s use of presidential power.

Asian Americans are the most socially conservative Americans, in Yoo’s estimation, given to high rates of small-business ownership and church attendance and low rates of divorce. Disproportionately urban, they are the most harmed, he claimed, by inner-city crime, and should therefore be in favor of tough-on-crime policing. Why weren’t they voting for their interests, then? And why, given said interests, weren’t we seeing a wave of conservative Andy Kims sweeping the nation and taking the reins of power? There might simply be a charm deficit, Yoo speculated. None of the Asian-American politicians do particularly well on their personality scores: “They’re very ‘I’m a good manager,’ ” he said, laughing. “I haven’t seen a charismatic Asian elected politician ever in the United States,” he continued, though he noted that they are common in our countries of origin. Despite their running for the Republican presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley didn’t talk enough about being Asian to qualify, in his view. Kamala Harris went unmentioned, stuck at the time in the purgatory of veep-dom and not yet the Democratic nominee (and possible first Asian-American president).

Yet there was hope that, in the near future, we would come to our senses. Yoo predicted a fiscal crisis in the next decade, one wherein Social Security would run out of money. Would fiscally cautious Asians be eager to have a government mired even further in debt? He also foresaw the fading of Thomas Frank’s ABC’s of adulthood, as they applied to American race relations. “The Howard Zinn account of America’s sins,” as he put it, didn’t strike a chord with the post-1965 generations, most of whom had chosen to immigrate to this country, often in flight from unstable political regimes.

The question remains: How can the Republican Party take advantage of this? “Asian Americans need to wise up and end our blind loyalty to the Democratic Party,” wrote Yoo in the Los Angeles Times in 2018; the republican party needs asian voters, ran a headline for a follow-up in National Review he co-wrote in 2019. The GOP touted its investment in minority outreach ahead of the 2022 elections, opening community centers throughout the country in key districts (including Orange County), but most of the Asian-American conservatives I spoke to had had few interactions with the party. For each Michelle Steel, winning on the efforts of an establishment hand like Sam Oh, is a Lester Chang, the New York state representative who beat a thirty-six-year Democratic incumbent despite a relative lack of interest or support from Brooklyn Republicans.

Foreign interventionists, fiscal conservatives, and the social right formed the three legs of the Gipper’s Stool, as pundits used to describe the Reaganite core of the GOP. With anticommunists, merit obsessives, and law-and-order defenders, the tripartite structure of Asian-American conservatism should make for easy integration. As the number of Asians in this country grows, so too should the total number of Asian right-wing voters. That’s barring some monolithic turn left, of course, or Republicans making voting more difficult (Asian Americans love voting by mail), or their gerrymandering us out of the equation, on the assumption that we are and will remain Tucker Carlson’s obedient Third Worlders.

While winning bigger prizes in the liberal urban bastions where most of us live will require a much larger red wave, not to mention a much broader coalition, Asian-American conservatives are growing bolder. “Don’t be afraid to lose,” David Oh told his supporters during his concession speech. “Be afraid not to try.” Many are leaving behind their fears, to the applause of beleaguered big-city Republicans. Some in the party may be looking forward to a Great Replacement of a different kind. A record number of Asian Republicans are running for the statehouse in New York City next month. “The Asian citizens are stepping up,” said the Queens GOP chair. “They are injecting life into the Republican Party.” The sentiment was echoed by conservatives in San Francisco, where a San Francisco Standard headline in March cast Chinese Americans as the “last hope” of the city’s Republican Party. Small, shaky steps, perhaps, but given that more than 60 percent of Asian voters backed Biden in 2020, progress nonetheless for the conservatives among us—a minority of a minority’s gains only likely to mount.