Becoming American-American

Lumps in the stew.

Trump word cloud based on word count in polling interviews

Americans are working through what it means to be a real, regular American.  

American-ness is the perennial subject in America, from the authors of the Constitution through the 2016 election, and today.   The word cloud created by Gallup in September, 2016 reports the centrality of immigration and American-ness to the election.   The populist revolt against elites showed itself most clearly not in an attack on the financial system or globalism generally.  It focused on immigration and foreign trade and foreigners generally. Trump identified immigrants and foreigners as the source of the problem.   It resonated.

Immigrants are different from "regular Americans", i.e. native born whites.    In southern Oregon they are noteworthy because Hispanic ones work longer and harder in difficult agricultural jobs and in low-wage hospitality jobs, i.e. hotel maids.  They are visible.  Local teenagers used to do that work.   They often speak Spanish but not English.   The Asian ones are noticeable because their children excel at school, driven by high parental expectations.  The Chinese or Indian valedictorian is a cliche.

From Facebook group: "Feminists against Islam."

Comments on this blog and elsewhere report negatives: male attitudes toward women.  Sometimes these national and ethnic customs are conflated with religion.  One commenter to this blog ascribes to the religion, Islam, behaviors that reflect rural and traditional attitudes from a Middle East region, not necessarily the religion which encompasses many regions.   But there is overlap in behaviors and a word I hear often at Harvard is "intersectionality".   Poverty is associated with crime is associated with drug use.   Rural-ness is associated with religious fundamentalism is associated with anti-feminist attitudes.     Education is associated with modern views on the role of women is associated with living in a coastal city.   

Zakaria

It fits: some political liberals but cultural conservatives object to the behaviors of rural traditional men from the Middle East, and ascribe their behavior to their religion, not their rural-ness or lack of education or cultural traditionalism.  Therefore urbane, sophisticated Muslims like Fareed Zakaria are swept into the intersection.   But turnabout happens as well:  rural American men oppose policies favored by American feminists and vote for Trump and wouldn't hire a female job applicant because they think Hillary Clinton sneers at them for their tastes in food, country music, and NASCAR.  Is it unfair?  Of course.  It is intersectionality.  People profile others; they are profiled.

[This is sensitive ground so let me state my position clearly.   I think that associating Islam with offensive images and behaviors like the photo above is dangerous and deeply unfair to Islam. But there is a Facebook group with that photo up front.  Similar examples could be cherry picked from Utah polygamists or KKK statements to shame Christians; examples of black criminals could could cherry picked to characterize "the real nature of black men"; verses from the Bible could be cherry picked to show the genocidal nature of the Jewish holy text.  The world is full of ugly examples of bad behavior that can be chosen to represent whole groups.  I consider the effort to do this an example of profiling and prejudice.  I show it here not to validate it, but to document that it exists and that there are prejudiced people who point to bad behavior and generalize them.  It is part of how humans react to one another.  We don't love our neighbors, especially if they seem strange.  It is part of the real world, and therefore a problem to understand and confront .] 

Cultural changes from immigration has the potential to upset some people.  (Mexican and Thai food used to seem strange and foreign in my home town in my youth.) 

I agree that immigration is a matter to be confronted and managed, not avoided.   I consider immigration to be an essential element of the nature of Americanism, and not a dilution of it.  The progressive impulse to favor equality of opportunity pushes cultural liberals and progressives to want to enable immigrants.   People will be drawn to America as long as it is a better place to live than other places.  The progressive challenge is to consider what works to make immigration a positive force. 

One thing that helps is for the government to have credibility that immigration is being handled, that it is under control.   Alcohol and cars are useful but inherently dangerous.  We accept the risks because the culture has rules regarding them.   That would be a model for Democrats.  Enforce rules.

Monday afternoon Timothy Ash, a scholar of international relations, said that every G-8 country had failed miserably to control its borders and therefore was experiencing populist uprisings based on ethnic tensions, except one.  Canada.  Canada, he said, had the priceless advantage of two oceans and the arctic, plus one human element: effective government policy.  Their citizens understand that their policy is to allow significant immigration, but that their immigration laws are effectively enforced.  People in Canada illegally are deported promptly.    The result is that immigration is less controversial in Canada.

Immigration enforcement is not the enemy of immigrants.  It is an essential element of its continuation and success.

I received a useful comment from Herb Rothschild, a retired professor of English Literature, a peace activist, and a political observer, living in Talent, Oregon.  He grew up in New Orleans and had a front row seat on the Jim Crow south and its transition during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s.  The "melting pot", he writes below, was really a WASP pot.  Immigrants could theoretically wash themselves clean and become regular Americans, "white."  Black Americans, native born for seven generations, could not.  They were separate.  There is no melting pot for them.  

He observes that ethnic politics is not always self destructive for the ethnic minority.  It worked in big eastern cities with concentrated groups of first, second, and third generation immigrants.  Hillary Clinton's campaign was consistent with that tradition, and she emphasized identity and difference,  and indeed it won in the big cities.  In 2016 it wasn't enough.

Guest Comment by Herb Rothschild, Jr.

Herb Rothschild

"The subject matter of the September 18th blog is both fascinating and complex, one with a very long history in America. I'm sorry you headed it with a very simplistic either/or challenge to Democrats, because I don't think adoption of single payer is contingent on rejection (or soft-pedalling) of multi-culturalism. Canada adopted single payer, and it has a very diverse population, one that, like ours, was always built on immigration.

I wouldn't dwell on that criticism were it not symptomatic of how difficult it is to derive from so complex a subject good advice to Democrats on how they should shape their public self-presentation. 
"What Trump successfully tapped into is the Know-Nothing strain of U.S. politics that goes back well into the 19th century. It has had varying electoral force over the years, but overall it hasn't prevailed, and I think that, in the crude form it assumed in his campaign, it has little future. 

Acceptance of the need to appeal to discrete ethnic voting blocs was the norm in big city, such as Chicago and New York and Newark. When the matter gets projected onto the nation as a whole, what we see is that areas where there hasn't been a lot of 0th & 21st century immigration (the Deep South minus Florida and more rural parts of the Midwest and Mountain states) tend to vote Republican, whereas those that have--the west and east coasts and big Midwestern cities like Chicago--are blue or purple. Interestingly, Texas has been experiencing lots of immigration and a growing cultural diversity--Houston is the most diverse city in the nation. I predict that by 2024 Texas will be a purple state, and by 2030 blue. If we don't change the electoral college system, when that happens the Republicans cannot elect a President.

There are other really interesting points in your blog that don't fit easily into the framework of electoral politics. One in particular attracted me--the semi-rejection of the expectation that immigrants melt into the pot as soon as they can. What we became aware of as far back as the 60s is that the melting pot was really a WASP pot in which every other ethnicity was supposed to wash itself. Rejection of the demand that people melt was a rejection of WASP cultural hegemony. High time! 

Does this mean it's unreasonable to expect immigrants to learn English ASAP. Of course not. My guess is that they learn it at least as fast as earlier waves of immigrants, not because public policy requires it, but for practical reasons. But learning English doesn't mean becoming mono-lingual or ashamed of one's own culture. In southwest Louisiana years ago, the public schools tried to eradicate French culture and language, just as the Indian boarding schools tried to eradicate Native American culture. Surely such practice was parochial, arrogant, and deleterious to a healthy society. Surely we don't wish to reinstate such public practices.

Then, there is the very difficult issue connected with cultural practices one finds abhorrent, usually having to do with treatment of females--e.g. honor killings, female genital mutilation, child brides. If careful discrimination is exercised, I see no reason why we cannot find agreement on rejecting by law such practices. By careful discrimination, what I mean is being alert to the difference between principled and prejudiced decisions. I wouldn't want the US to emulate France by outlawing the burkha. Note that France never outlawed similar garb by Roman Catholic nuns.

Finally, you make the connection between multi-culturalism and globalism of the economy. I think that connection may be valid in terms of people's awareness, but I think it is wrong to suggest that one cannot be "nativist" enough to reject the inequalities of the current structure of global economics without being "nativist" culturally. Bernie Sanders agreed with Trump that trade agreements like the TPP were unjust (and he really cared about it), but he didn't share Trump's chauvinism. After all, it isn't just US workers who are screwed by the elites that control the global economy. The appeal to justice isn't a parochial one."