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| Quebec. French and proud of it. |
Humans like and are comfortable with their own culture. It is inevitable. It is OK.
Democrats are in denial about this.
Trump could ride the immigration issue to victory, but Democrats could fix this. They could start by looking in a mirror.
Today, a Guest Post by Jim Stodder, who presents a close up look at ethnic pride and preservation, in Montreal, Canada.
Most countries contain within their borders people with an identifiable culture and ethnicity.
Canada has two languages and cultures. The smaller one in number, French Quebec, is fighting to preserve the specialness of their way of life.
America is a country of immigrants. Immigration itself is part of our culture, and we have a tradition of absorbing and integrating new people and cultures--the presumed melting pot. Lumps remain and most Americans like the lumps, like Chinese and Mexican food. Pizza. We elect politicians with last names reflecting a variety of ethnicities.
Two of my own grandparents immigrated to America and spoke Greek and learned some English. My mother spoke fluent Greek at home and English everywhere else. I speak English only. It is the American way.
The is also an American tradition of discomfort with immigration, especially when the change comes rapidly. This is a period of high immigration, primarily from Latin America and Asia.
Democrats are making a profound error. The Democratic candidates for president are acting as if pride in ones own culture and religion by white native born Americans is a new thing. A surprise. Xenophobic. Racist. Morally wrong.
Deplorable.
In fact, it is natural and inevitable. It is how humans are. Humans like their familiar culture and language. Immigration causes social tensions. There is a pace at which people will accept change. Old people die off. Ethnic foods go from "exotic" to commonplace. Children intermarry. The kids speak unaccented English.
Democrats who presume that liking ones own culture is a throwback to Nazi thinking and white racism play into Trump's hands. Democrats are defining as "racist" the feelings a great many Americans feel, and this fuels resentment over "political correctness."
Democrats lack self awareness and should wake up. They fail to notice how deeply and comfortably they themselves are in their own cultural bubble. Educated liberals enjoy their urban centers, their college towns, their NPR, the NY Times and Washington Post. They have their secular Sundays or their liberal churches. They don't understand gun culture. They talk among themselves: isn't Trump just awful! They have their way of life, and they like it.
White people with traditional attidutes are no different. They see Asians dominating the spelling bees, Latinos immigrating from our southern border, they see women wearing a Habib rather than a cross necklace, they need to "press one for English" and they worry about the changes underway. They have their own information bubble of Fox News, their churches. They have their way of life and they like it.
They don't consider themselves racist, nor Nazis. They think of themselves as proud Americans, and that is what Trump calls them, too, so they appreciate him.
Jim Stodder is a college classmate. His Ph.D. is in economics and he teaches in the Department of Administrative Sciences at Boston University. He was a tourist in Montreal and noticed something important and new, that he was greeted by shopkeepers in French and only French.
Here is his comment on that:
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| Stodder |
Jim Stodder reports:
I just spent a week in glorious Montreal at a conference (in English), and abusing local customs (in my very bad French) as I walked about. This prompted some discourdant thoughts on how I respond to English-First in the US, vs. French-First in Quebec.
I noted that the shopkeepers no longer greeted me with "Bonjour - Hi!" as they had a few years ago -- a nice way of indicating they're ready to do business in either tongue. Now it's just 'Bonjour.' Then I found out that a recent law, passed unanimously by the Provincial legislature, prohibited bilingual greetings: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/world/canada/bonjour-hi-quebec.html
Can you imagine if the US tried to prohibit shopkeepers from saying "Good Morning, Buenos Dias?" I would be aghast. Yet my reaction to Franco-supremacy in Quebec is equanimity bordering on approval.
So what if they have to repress English a little to protect their culture and language? It doesn't hurt me, quite the contrary. I enjoy having a great Francophone metropole on my doorstep, and suspect most of my classmates would feel the same.
But what if I were an Anglophone immigrant to Quebec, and wanted my kids educated in English? Or what if I had grown up in Quebec's Jewish community -- part of the city for many generations, giving us so many great writers in English? Maybe I wouldn't feel so great about it then.
This prompted a return to one of my favorite worries -- that the Western Left is blind to popular hostility to immigration, putting it all down to racism. Andrew Sullivan marks this as a huge electoral liability for us:
As Sullivan puts it, Trump has been such a massive failure on stemming immigration that the Dems should be killing him. But we can't because we don't know what we want. I think this Dem paralysis is similar to my ambivalence about French-first in Quebec, although the political valence is reversed: For the US I'm anti-nationalist; for Quebec, I'm vaguely pro-. But isn't that morally inconsistent?
2 comments:
Whew!...where to start?
Missing a word...SOME "Democrats lack self awareness and should wake up"?...This is not a thing in my view, but it is playing into the Regressive frame. While the "basket of deplorables" comment was impolitic, it was refreshingly true. It recognizes a deep and pervasive strain of racism that goes back generations and is proving hard to erase, in a large part because it still can generate profits, now that cotton is picked by machines.
One of the reasons this is so hard to counter and easy to exploit is that it plays into the delusion of "white" (and male) self-esteem and superiority exposed by civil rights progress, thanks to Democrats BTW.
It's inconsistent to state that "we have a tradition...melting pot" and then a few sentences later describe racist attitudes as "traditional"...which? Both?
English only, French only...white only...christian only...racist. Why is this so hard to understand? This is not cultural pride but cultural paranoia and unscrupulous pandering, in Canada of all places.
It's not even remotely immigration or even migrant workers anymore. Even Trump's DHS guy is running around Congress trying to raise awareness and get funding for a refugee crisis that is growing. (I predict he'll be gone soon) At present all the Democratic candidates are shying away from telling it like it is which is a disservice to voters.
There have been English-French cultural wars in Montreal and Quebec (and Canada) for 40 or 50 years or more. Certainly for most of my life. There are problems with a multi-cultural society, and Quebec has proven it over many years. You can't have a government operating in two languages.
There are approximately 330 million people living in the United States. That includes legals and illegals. Hypothetically, if we were to allow 600 million Chinese immigrants to move-into the United States tomorrow, then how long do you thing that the United States would still be the United States, versus becoming another province of China? American culture would be wiped-out, as would the English language. Your entire life would be run in Chinese (no offense to the Chinese). Your American culture and language would be gone. So, in light of that, and seeing that immigration is now uncontrolled, and seeing how immigrants reproduce at a much higher rate than Americans do, then how can anyone blame Americans (of any color) to want to restrict illegal immigration in order to preserve American culture? At a certain point, with uncontrolled immigration, America won't be America anymore. It will become the country of the new majority. Is that what you want? Europe won't be "Europe" in another 30 years, due to all the immigration that has recently occurred. Their cultures will be lost.
This isn't a racial issue. It's a cultural issue. However, people on the other side always use "race" as their issue when they have nothing else to support their positions.
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