In the May 4 New York Times, columnist Frank Rich asserts that "Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades."

This is technically correct, and for liberals like Rich it is a consummation devoutly to be wished. For liberals assume that all racial and ethnic minorities -- black, Hispanic, Oriental, Native American, what-have-you -- are automatically hostile to the white majority. It follows that, if they ever collectively come to represent a majority of the American population, they will gang up on the whites and put an end to the latter's dominance in our society. Wouldn't that be fun?

We could have a black president, a predominantly Spanish-speaking Congress, a Chinese-American Secretary of State, an Iroquois Speaker of the House and so on. The damned whites could go take a rest somewhere.

It isn't hard to see, in this fantasy, the hostility to white dominance in America that is a quiet component of the liberal worldview. Most liberals detest the value-system that the whites who moved to the New World brought with them, and look forward to the racial and ethnic hodgepodge they assume may someday replace it culturally.

But it is a fantasy, nonetheless. For it rests on that root assumption that all of America's minorities would cheerfully join hands to overthrow white dominance. But would they?

In three to four decades, by far the largest "minority racial or ethnic group" in the country will consist of Hispanics (which the Census Bureau recently reported accounts for a full half of the nation's population growth since 2000). Can we assume that this will automatically make common cause with (say) the black population to overthrow white dominance? We must be careful here, for the Hispanic bloc has several very different components: people who speak Spanish but rightly regard themselves as thoroughly white; people who speak Spanish (or even English) but are indisputably black; and so on. Certainly, the white component of this bloc won't throw in its lot with an antiwhite coalition.

Similarly, Asian-Americans seem at least as likely to identify their interests with those of the whites as with those of the black population. And the blacks, in turn, will not necessarily conclude that they would be better off in an America dominated by a mixed-race coalition than in the white-dominated society we currently have.

In short, the technical end of majority-white dominance in American society will almost certainly not result in dominance by a coalition of racial and ethnic minorities. Each of these will be competing for power and influence in a mixed society in which by far the biggest minority bloc will still be -- you guessed it -- the whites. Their influence is quite likely to continue to be dominant for the foreseeable future.

After all, the whites will be busy playing coalition politics, too. They can, and undoubtedly will, use their influence to recruit allies and defeat opponents among the smaller groups.

Rich and his fellow liberals had better calm down. They are not going to overthrow white dominance in America in "three to four decades," or anything like it.