White Pride.
Democrats are shocked at new "America First" Caucus. They shouldn't be.
The idea of White Pride is changing.
Do not--Do. Not.--dismiss this as just a handful of Republicans: Reps. Marjory Taylor Green and Paul Gosar are starting an "America First Caucus" in the House of Representatives, and they might as well go ahead and call it the You Will Not Replace Us Caucus or get real honest and call it the White Supremacist Caucus, because the introductory description of the group's purpose, as reported by Punchbowl News, is breathtaking.
Click: Policy Platform
The America First Caucus created for itself a logo and manifesto. They are ready to be taken seriously as a group that will "follow in President Trump's footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation."
The liberal-oriented media appears shocked. Fox News is silent, sorting things out. The AFC echoes what host Tucker Carlson advocates, but Fox wants its audience to be the bigger tent of Republicans than just Carlson, and Republicans are divided. The AFC is a problem for the Republican Party. House leader Kevin McCarthy recognizes that this shrinks the GOP tent. He condemned the AFC.
America is built on the idea that we are all created equal and success is earned through honest, hard work. It isn't built on identity, race, or religion. The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln & the party of more opportunity for all Americans--not nativist dog whistles.
White identity politics should not surprise anyone. It has always been around, and the current political environment creates ambiguity in the meaning of White-ness, and White Pride. The AFC is slipping into that ambiguity-hole. When racial identity is widely understood and agreed to be an essential part of one's being, then White people want to get in on it, openly and proudly, as the AFC is doing.
Formerly and traditionally, White people were the overwhelming demographic and cultural majority in America. White identity and pride were closely associated with maintenance of "White Supremacy," and the oppression of other races. That understanding was well founded. Slavery was a racial hierarchy, and Jim Crow laws perpetuated it. Indian lands were taken; Chinese immigrants were exploited and excluded; race mixing was forbidden. Spokespeople for racial hierarchy were ample throughout the 1960s. George Wallace spoke at his Alabama gubernatorial inauguration:
Wallace, 1963
Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us, and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.
Then racism went underground. In "polite company" and political speech it went to code. The word "urban" and "bad neighborhoods" took on special meanings.
Plus, there was the whole Hitler/America First problem for the idea of White Pride. It had bad historical baggage, some mixture of Nazi race theory, anti-Semitism, Jim Crow, skin-head hooliganism, and the KKK. A majority of Americans knew they were against that.
Critical Race Theory shined a new, harsher spotlight on that baggage. To be White was to be, by definition, an oppressor--a beneficiary and perpetrator of a power hierarchy based on race.
Ideas create counter-ideas. In the context of Black identity, Native American identity, Asian identity, Jewish identity, feminine identity, LGBTQ identity, all validated as special, with their own parades and banners and caucuses within the Democratic Party, is there any wonder that White Pride identity would emerge? The America First Caucus represents the shift in the thinking of some Americans about what White Pride means. Replacement theory understands White Pride to be defensive. If White people are oppressed, becoming outnumbered, and losing the culture war, then spokespeople for White Pride are responding by trying to protect themselves, not oppress others. They are trying out being more explicit. They openly praise "Anglo-Saxon" people, governance, and architecture. They link that ethnic identity to opposition to citizenship by birth, criticism of post-1965 immigrants, ending mail balloting, attacks on trade, foreign interventions, and globalism. It isn't just American nationalism. It is American nationalism for White people because it is
our country. 
Early Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel cartoon
Republicans are at a crossroads over identity. Some of the policies the AFC promotes are popular, especially with Republicans. Americans don't like foreign wars or foreign aid or competition from cheap foreign labor. There are a lot of climate change skeptics, immigration opponents, and people who make their living from fossil fuel, which are in the AFC platform. The America First Caucus wants openly to associate those ideas with Whiteness, making the GOP the White people's Party, with policies to keep America majority-White before it's too late.
McCarthy sees a different Republican Party and a different message tone. He recognizes that race works better as an issue if Republicans tread softly. Let Democrats hang themselves with their talk of racial particularity. It is a turn-off for lots of Americans. Republicans should be the party that dog-whistles so softly people don't need to acknowledge it. The GOP can be a bigger, more open tent than the AFC advocates. Besides, Republicans are waking up to the fact that after a generation those immigrants of color start voting Republican.
And McCarthy is from California. He sees the future.
4 comments:
Fox News won’t stay on the sideline as too many of their followers are in the racist camp. I hope this moves the issue forward so that republicans can be clearer as to who they are. At some point you can’t hide and you need to be who you are. No more pretending. Remember Willie Horton?
Nationalism has different meanings depending on the person hearing or using those words. White nationalism is American and it's been with us from the beginning. Whether stated out loud as it is now or spoken in code words implying "the other". Originalist will recognize the slaves and "Indians" or women were clearly not part of the American government. Minorities were often landless people or recent European immigrants. Pushing back the boundaries of America we pushed into Spanish and Indian lands and claiming it as ours. The equality and justice enshrined in the Constitution was not meant for those people. Add to the mix recent immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, you have a very difficult situation where nationalists feel they have lost their country and some say we must take it back by force of arms. A short drive around my home you will find storefronts with signs not in English but in Russian, Spanish, Thai, Korean and Arabic. You will also find people dressing as they did in the native countries. Against all this you'll find demonstrations almost daily against the treatment of immigrants and tactics of ICE. With selective hearing and reading you can find strong support for both points of view. I believe this is healthy but uncomfortable. And my discomfort tells me I may be part of the problem.
Not much more to be said except to note the irony of this following 410 arrests in the Jan. 6 white supremacist riot, with the likelihood of more to come.
Talk about doubling down...but I digress.
What's a bit curious to me is the emerging information of a conspiracy preceding the attack on the Capital, but nothing since. Have they gone underground or has the movement been effectively broken?
Was that it? As a revolution it was pretty inept. I imagine the insurrectionists believed "Q" and thought Trump would ride in behind them with the 101st Airborne. Now that "Q" has been exposed as a 20 something "in his bedroom" has that taken the steam out of "The Storm"?
Immigrants converting to Republican is probably not a long term trend, as the party's embrace of white supremacism becomes its main feature. Conservatism as a governing philosophy is dead as a doornail, having been exposed as a ruse to consolidate political and economic power for a wealthy minority. Republicans have been successful at attaching it to misguided patriotism, which could explain the puzzle of a new citizen's xenophobia.
At any rate, AFC is nothing more than a fundraising scam, but it's my guess it will cost Greene her seat next year.
For decades, the left has been pushing tribal consciousness among minorities while simultaneously discouraging tribal consciousness among white people. Common sense tells us it doesn’t work that way. When you encourage tribalism, it affects everyone.
Among white people, it is only guilty liberals who are willing to experience tribal abuse without becoming tribal themselves. This is a small minority of white people. An enormous backlash to wokeness is coming.
I have always advocated against the encouragement of tribal consciousness in any direction, for any group. The encouragement of tribalism is no way to bring a country together.
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