"You will never take back your country with weakness."
Donald Trump, Jan. 5, 2021
Whose country is this? What kind of country is this?
This is a single question.
During my lifetime America changed from a White Christian nation into a multi-national nation. In my childhood Black Americans were barred from voting in the American South. There were "women's" jobs: Secretary, nurse, schoolteacher. Meanwhile, America continued attracting immigrants, largely from Latin America and Asia. America became a multi-national, multi-cultural nation.
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| Take Back Your Country |
In 1992 Pat Buchanan shocked the GOP by saying we needed a house-to-house culture war to restore the old America. It was fringe thinking then. Not anymore. Sarah Palin signaled the growing backlash against the changing ideas and the new look of America. The election of Barack Obama accelerated the backlash. A significant number of Americans are demanding we return to an earlier time and notion of America. It is too late to do it with democracy--one person, one vote. There are too many of the "wrong" people here for democracy to reverse America's direction. It requires authoritarianism to take back the country and make America great again.
Herbert Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He lives in Talent, Oregon.
In Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum concentrates primarily on four nations. Two of them, Poland and Hungary, have already forfeited the democracies they adopted after the end of Soviet control. The other two, England and the United States, in her view are headed in the same direction.
Herbert Rothschild, Jr.
At the heart of these cases, Applebaum says, are the questions, how is the nation defined and who gets to define it? One leading definition is the “native folk”—those who lay claim to being the true countrymen—versus “aliens.” The other leading definition is a distinctive history and character and values that anyone residing within the nation’s borders might come to share and embody.
Even though the U.S. has no “native folk” other than American Indians, Applebaum’s questions are as relevant to what the U.S. is now experiencing as they are to the three European nations. People like me may say to those who stigmatize immigrants at our southern border that we are all immigrants, but that observation has no effect. Somehow, groups find ways to think of themselves as native and others as alien.
Prejudice based on national origin, principally by western and northern Europeans against southern and eastern Europeans as well as those from other continents, was at one time a staple of nativist narratives. That bias was built into the landmark Immigration Act of 1924, which practically slammed shut “the golden door.” But the usual way some Americans have deemed others as alien is race.
Where and when I grew up, Blacks were a very large underclass with no power to define America. But the possibility that they would come to have a say was always on the minds of White Southerners. So, they were denied their voices throughout Dixie by disenfranchisement and economic subordination and legal segregation. Northern and midwestern Whites weren’t as alert to the possibility that peoples of color would challenge their monopoly on defining America, so a much smaller percentage of them used to define the U.S. in terms of race. They mostly thought of America in terms of the ideals enshrined in our founding documents and our history as a land of opportunity and global defender of freedom.
But their monopoly has been broken. With Americans of European ancestry rapidly losing majority status, America as a melting pot has been replaced by America as a collection of peoples who proudly own their racial and ethnic identities and their place in U.S. history. That demographic collectivity can only be bound together by a shared character and values. Even a shared history may no longer be an option, because those hitherto suppressed voices are insisting that we revisit, and revise, the narratives on which White Americans have fed.
In sum, all of America is now facing the choice that the pre-Civil Rights South faced—either we will commit to an identity based on character and values and a chastened history of both embodying and betraying that character and those values, or we will impose by force an identity that is White and Christian and elected by God to lead the world in His paths.
9 comments:
Professor Rothschild has presented us with a wake-up call as chilling as a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade dumped on our heads. And yet, this may not be the twilight of democracy. It may turn out to be its birth. Throughout our history, Whites were indoctrinated into the notion that this nation's democracy began around 1776. But from my vantage as an African-American, such racial blindness is almost laughable. In 2022, Americans of Western European ancestry are just now ripping off their blinders. The problems so thoughtfully presented by the Professor is the chorus of “ouches” coming from an arrogant society that has until now lived in the dark. The Whites in apartheid South Africa used to brag, pre-Nelson Mandela, that they were the only functioning democracy in Africa. Of course, as outsiders we could see their delusion. And maybe for the first time we are confronting our own. America segued from slavery to police state for Blacks locked in the inner city. The successes and sacrifices of civil rights leaders are what allowed the more privileged ones like myself to escape many but not all of those police checkpoints. But let’s remember that the Voting Rights Act was only passed in 1965.
And while I’m on the subject, let me inject a coda here. It may seem that in the coming turbulence, we should shudder at the fact that the White Christians have most of the AR-15s. But no matter. Uncle Sam will do to them what they did to Huey Newton, the Black Panther Party and their ghetto followers of the 1970s. But this time, the feds will drop so much fentanyl (last time it was heroin) into these White rural neighborhoods that its targets will, at least in their last few seconds of life, assume that the white stuff falling on their tongues are snowflakes. But upon further reflection, no, I change my mind. That will not be the modus operandi by which the forces of democracy win this war. Such J-Edgar-Hoover tactics emanated from America’s dark side. However, in the battles to come, our side will have to perfect the use of love. (And you’ll have to figure out how to apply that stratagem for yourselves).
As Mr. Rothschild points out, the only folks native to the U.S. are Native Americans, and their culture proved incompatible with that of European settlers. As a result, our founding documents such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights are the only heritage all Americans have in common. With that foundation, this country has evolved from one that thrived on slavery, slaughtered the natives and was ruled by white landowners to a nation that has, at least in theory, granted equal rights to everyone – “with liberty and justice for all.”
We even elected a Black president, but since that election a major political party has abandoned all pretense of caring about our democratic principles and become a cult devoted to a psychotic wannabe dictator. They don’t even want our history taught in schools, giving it stupid names like “CRT” and claiming it might make white kids too uncomfortable.
The MAGA hatters never spelled out exactly when they considered America great, but it’s become increasingly clear they long for the days before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. It's time we "woke" to the fact that what makes America great is the degree to which all our different races, creeds and cultures can live together in relative peace and harmony. Let's not blow it.
(Second attempt)
"Even though the U.S. has no 'native folk,' except American Indians."
Say what? As usual, American Indians are rudely and arrogantly dismissed as an irrelevant footnote. The disrespect and marginalization never ends.
I stopped reading after that.
On the question of “native:”
I was born in Brooklyn, NY right after World War II. I am Jewish.
Where am I a “native” of? Europe, where my ancestors were persecuted mercilessly for thousands of years? No way.
I was born right here in America. I am just as much of a native of this country as anyone else who was born here.
Or do progressive think that because I am white I am not a native of anywhere?
Ex-hippies like myself have lived a good chunk of our lives believing we were changing the world; after all we ended the Vietnam War with our protests. Now most of us know better. While our nation has transformed itself into a technological juggernaut, it did so at the price of being the World's #1 arms dealer.
We are also seeing that outsourcing to China and elsewhere, "Globalization", is not sustainable in the face of geopolitical immorality, and more to the point, utterly dependent on cheap oil for all those container ships. Moreover, it has exacerbated wealth inequality and destabilized our society, opening the door to the racists (and worse) who have hijacked a major political party.
It seems to me a majority of white supremacists are Boomers. Our younger citizens are victims of a skewed system as well. We may have only a decade or two to see a generational shift towards tolerance, once and for all. Gullible Americans are being conned by a Republican party that panders to racist paranoia and other prejudices to gain power, sooner or later more people will see through the lies, so obvious to anyone who chooses to look.
Herb said:
In sum, all of America is now facing the choice that the pre-Civil Rights South faced—either we will commit to an identity based on character and values and a chastened history of both embodying and betraying that character and those values, or we will impose by force an identity that is White and Christian and elected by God to lead the world in His paths.
It’s too bad that progressives reject MLK’s color blind ideal of judging people by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin.” A significant part of the backlash to their ideas by “native folk” consists of their objection to blaming white people for things they didn’t do in the time before they were born.
A single sentence from King's “I have a dream” speech has been used by people to shun affirmative action, dismiss discussions about white privilege, make claims about "reverse racism" and call for people to "not see race." They pretend that his dream is a reality to rationalize their antipathy toward social justice.
Here is another of King's gems:
“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
“Race conscious” policies are tearing this country apart. If we are going to come together the way that Herb has suggested, it won’t be by discriminating in favor of any race any more than it would be by discriminating against any race.
Speaking of affirmative action, most Americans oppose college admissions based on race, including majorities of minorities.
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