According to Cynthia Tucker (along with many others) the current powerful backlash to the policies of Barack Obama, the shorthand for which is the Tea Party Movement, is motivated at a deep level by that most familiar of charges:
Summer of discontent: Backlash to the browning of America
WASHINGTON — What a weird summer!
Average Americans, normally sober-minded citizens, came undone over exaggerated threats and imagined enemies; rallied here by the thousands to “restore honor;” and denounced mosques, minority rights and the 14th Amendment — all the while demanding strict adherence to the U.S. Constitution.
This is a tempestuous and irrational time, an era of economic gloom, eroding living standards and deep fears about the future. But economic uncertainty alone cannot account for this summer’s strange currents. The runaway inflation and deep recession of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s didn’t produce a similar season of civic craziness.
Our long, hot summer needed another ingredient to induce a fever-like madness in the national psyche: demographic change. Over the last year and a half, many Americans have begun to see a deeper message in President Obama’s inauguration — the end of the white majority. For some, especially those who are middle-aged and older, it’s a jarring and unwelcome message.
Before you assume that I’m stereotyping all of the president’s critics as racists, let me be clear: I’m not. Many voters have legitimate criticisms of the Obama’s policies. I’ m talking about something more subtle and yet more profound: a fear of minority status. (Actually, by the year 2050, demographers expect that whites will be a “plurality,” the largest easily- identified ethnic group.)
Ms. Tucker is (partially/superficially) correct.
However, while she is correct in the most schematic delineation of the response to fundamental demographic change, her point is really only the beginning of an explanation. Just as in past eras of demographic change people responded with anxiety and resentment (against Jews, the Irish, German, et al) so, too, are many people responding to Hispanic, Black, and Muslim immigration with anxiety. (NB: I am omitting Asian immigration because there is almost no focus on the "dangers" of Asian immigration today, except for those Asians who are coming here from Muslim countries.) There are a fundamental differences between the two waves of immigration that makes all the difference.
In the past, immigrants came to America from their failing cultures and explicitly were determined to become Americans. Assimilation involved the newcomers making all kinds of cultural adjustments so as to become part of the greater American "tribe." Assimilation was never without friction but the bulk of the adjustment was assumed to be necessarily on the part of the newcomer. Anyone could, with various degrees of difficulty, become an American, a member of a tribe based on a set of ideas upon which the nation was founded. Since most new Americans were fleeing failed societies and/or failed economies (with the immigrant the final arbiter of what it meant to have left a failed society) the tendency was to hold on to the old world within the family but tolerate and understand that each succeeding generation would be more and more Americanized until they eventually became indistinguishable from the greater tribe of which they were now members.
This model has been broken. Whatever the reasons for individuals to immigrate to America from their failed societies, in America today the designated spokesmen of various immigrant groups are determinedly anti-assimilationist. This is an unintended consequence (perhaps) of our determination to redress past injustices by introducing a racially based spoils system, ie affirmative action. The end result has been that if one could claim membership in a "minority" one could gain all sorts of advantages for oneself. (Without the definition of a minority deserving of redress being restricted to descendants of American slaves, anyone who belonged to an ethnic group that was failing in America could find support for affirmative action in the bureaucracy; after all, affirmative action allows bureaucrats to dispense the spoils, hence increasing their power.)
The toxic brew of affirmative action, anti-assimilationist leadership (self appointed and then blessed by the very bureaucracy that gained from such tribalism) and failing minority culture brought over and maintained from he home country has led to a sense that the current iteration of immigrants are determined, in league with those who are overtly determined on the Left, to change America rather than adapt to America.
This is at core not racial. After all, the Mediterranean Italian immigrants of the last century were every bit as dark as the Arab immigrants from the Middle east. The difference is that the Italian immigrants were determined to become Americans and their leadership was determined to do the same. Today, to take the Arabs as an example, their leadership, groups like CAIR, have as part of their ideological foundation, the overt (though usually ignored by our media and government) goal of changing America into a (failed) Arab/Muslim country. This is the reason the traditional distrust of immigrants has become something more profound and problematic. As long as those who speak for the new immigrants are alternately disingenuous and subversive, and the government apparatus offers them legitimacy, the bulk of those who consider themselves part of the American tribe, tracing our belief system back to the Founding Fathers, will increasingly feel threatened.
The same dynamic is at play with La Raza, an explicitly racialist group that purports to speak for Hispanic immigrants.
If American Mexicans want America to be more like Mexico and Arab Americans want America to be more like Saudi Arabia or Syria or Palestine, why would anyone expect the average American to aspire to such a status? America has succeeded because we have surrendered our attachments to our old, failed culture. New immigrants exclaiming their desire to import their failed, tribal cultures here, do not fill us with confidence.
NB: Please note that though my focus here has been on immigrants, the same dynamic is at work with the American Black community. The Black spokesmen we see everyday are partisans of a failing culture; Black America has all of the extant social pathologies in immoderate abundance. "Importing" that culture to the American heartland would be a disaster. The emphasis on traditional values in the Tea Party is a rejection of American ghetto culture, not a rejection of Black Americans. The problem is that those who are held out as spokesmen of the Black community are race hustlers who maintain their power and influence by encouraging a tribal response from their cohort.
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