Mr. Bundy, weirdly, is onto something here. The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging. And nonwhites are not interested, because a gut-level aversion to the government is almost exclusively a white phenomenon.

Image Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has been in a dispute with the Bureau of Land Management, on Thursday. Credit... David Becker/Getty Images

A 2011 National Journal poll found that 42 percent of white respondents agreed with the statement, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Just 17 percent of blacks, 16 percent of Asians and 25 percent of Hispanics agreed. In 2011 and 2012, the Pew Research Center found that 55 percent of Asian-Americans and fully 75 percent of Hispanic-Americans say they prefer a bigger government providing more services over a smaller one providing fewer services, compared with just 41 percent of the general population.

Conservatives often talk about Republican underperformance with minorities in economic terms: Minority voters with lower incomes tend to see themselves as benefiting from government programs. Or they blame the underperformance on loose-cannon Republican politicians who make offensive statements, as with Representative Don Young, of Alaska, talking about “wetbacks” or Representative Steve King, of Iowa, warning that the Dream Act would give citizenship to drug smugglers with “calves the sizes of cantaloupes.”

Those problems are real, but Republicans’ biggest problem with minorities runs even deeper than economic disparities and racist gaffes. Asian-American voters broke nearly 3-to-1 against Mitt Romney in 2012, even though they have higher median family incomes and higher average educational attainment than whites. Economic prosperity alone will not make racial minorities eager for antigovernment language.

In 2012, when I attended the Republican National Convention, there was one phrase I heard over and over again: “You built it!” Republicans thought this was a clever rejoinder to President Obama’s comments that people should be thankful for the role that government plays in individual success. The comeback was not the blockbuster Republicans thought it would be, because America is not the overwhelmingly white country it once was.