I don't agree with certain parts of this post (and I'm an immigrant in the US myself!).
I think the main difference between old and modern migration is the level and speed of assimilation, and the level of the institutional push for it, which is really watered down these days and weakens it.
Think of three of the largest white ancestry groups in the US: Germans, French and Poles. All (especially Poles) differed quite a bit from the WASPy US majority of early 1900s, yet within a generation all of them blended so much with the US natives to the point they've changed their last names to English-sounding ones. Of course, all of these groups were keeping traditions of the old country and elders would continue to speak these languages, and there would be diaspora magazines in these languages, but typically the third generation would only know a few words in the language (simply because institutional America was exclusively English-speaking), have never visited the country of their ancestry (unless as a troop), and if there were any politicians being elected from their ranks, they'd only advertise their ancestry to the community and pose as an all-American candidate otherwise.
Compare it to now, when there really is no strong push for assimilation, at least for the main immigration-source nations. First of all, travel is very easy - you can go back to your country of origin for vacation every summer (as opposed to probably never ever coming back again if you were an immigrant 100 years ago, which pushed you to integrate with Americans). Secondly, if you speak one of the main immigrant languages (Spanish nationwide, but here in SF it's also Cantonese, Russian, Tagalog), you really can never learn English and function almost just fine because all the institutions will accommodate to your needs and you can easily access content in non-English. And language is an extremely important vector of assimilation. And lastly, and I think this is the most important, "diversity" is a virtue now, so it's almost like people do not expect/want you to actually become American and adopt American traditions and customs - the ones conservatives hold dear. Especially in the Democratic Party, being as far removed from the mainstream American culture as possible is a currency now - the squat literally advertises themselves on that angle.
Are you claiming that there is a significant population of *second-generation* immigrants who don't speak English as a first language?! I would be completely astounded if that were true; I think it would have to be a small, isolated group with essentially no contact with mainstream institutions. I mean, I am a second-generation immigrant from a community full of second-generation immigrants, and what's really incredibly difficult is maintaining the ability to speak your parents' language with any competence! The fact that your parents speak it to you and to their friends in front of you is barely relevant; your brain naturally and instinctively declares it unimportant, eliminates it, and remembers English instead. I will be relieved if my future children manage to pick up even "a few words", but I doubt they will.
It wasn't actually my point, though there actually seems to be quite a significant population like that. According to the US Census Bureau's most recent estimates, of 264.2M native-born Americans over the age of 5, 30.5M ( 11.5%) speak language other than English at home (it's not exactly the same as first language but pretty close). Of those 30.5M, the majority speaks Spanish (22.9M), and 1.2M of those Spanish speakers speak English "not well" or "not at all" (the rest speaks it "well" or "very well"). Among speakers of other language, English proficiency is similar, around 303k speak English "not well" or "not at all".
Ah, I see. That's very useful, thanks! I should caveat that I think "speaks a language other than English at home" is actually quite different from "first language isn't English". If I still lived with my parents, I would tell a surveyor that I "speak a language other than English at home"--doesn't mean I don't suck at it. Not sure about age 5 as a cutoff either--when I was 5 my parents were still worrying about whether I'd pick up English properly. Worries about whether I'd forget the alternative completely were yet to come. I think my point is I would guess a lot of those census responses are about children who have so far spent most of their time talking to their parents, but are going to grow up, move out of their parents' house, and become very embarrassed about how much of their old language they've forgotten.
I've seen a few empirical studies of assimilation/integration and, as I recall, they showed that immigrants are assimilating as fast today as they did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They indicated that immigrants assimilate over the course of three generations.
From a Canadian perspective, the question is whether you want newcomers to *assimilate* (adopting the dominant culture) or *integrate* (joining institutions and playing by the rules, without having to give up one's culture). In Canada the goal is *integration*, and we're willing to modify institutions to allow newcomers to join without giving up their culture ("reasonable accommodation"): for example modifying the RCMP uniform to allow turbans, to accommodate Sikhs who wanted to join.
This policy of supporting cultural pluralism (liberal neutrality with respect to culture) has been quite successful in Canada.
On the other hand, pushing for *assimilation* means that newcomers are faced with a choice between giving up their culture and integrating, or keeping their culture and not integrating. For example, new teachers in Quebec are no longer allowed to wear a headscarf. This can discourage integration.
I basically agree. So, I think, would many of the nativists: one of their main concerns is that immigrants won't assimilate to "tolerant values" enough to integrate into American society and positively affect it.
This is complicated, of course, by the fact that people who are opposed to immigration are often the most opposed to "tolerant values" in other parts of American society. For example, the people who were vocally anti-gay-marriage are the ideological compatriots of today's anti-immigrant movement.
What's the "American traditions and customs" you are talking about? Immigrants watch American football, celebrate Thanksgiving, and 2nd generation immigrants speak native-level English.
Yes. Regarding the two-day street, immigration has also changed the tastes in food and sports of plenty of white or native-born Americans (the increasing popularity of thai food and soccer, for example).
Agreed. But I'd put a further emphasis on the diversity and identity politics aspect of this. The very liberal Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam a few years ago did a study of diversity and discovered that it's corrosive. The more racial and ethnic diversity he found in various communities, the more distrustful and dysfunctional they were. And the longer a community was diverse, the worse the problems were. (Interestingly in these diverse circumstances, levels of distrust were elevated not only between ethnic groups but even within them.) The results were so displeasing to Putnam that he refused to publish them in the US.
Yet we are constantly told that diversity is a strength and that if you don't buy into it, you're a bigot or a racist. Assimilation, as you note, is rejected. One seldom hears any contrary opinion. One exception is the liberal CNN host Fareed Zakaria, himself an immigrant, who has gently suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to slow the pace of immigration. He came to this country, he says, not to bring a dose of "diversity" by insisting on accommodating the culture of his old country but because he greatly preferred the things we have historically stood for, principles derived firmly from the depth and sweep of Western Civilization. Good for him.
Does that not explain a lot about America's political divide?
Blue states support immigration and diversity because their wealth comes from people's brains, while red states oppose them because their wealth comes from the land.
I think the divide mostly down to genetics as per heritability studies, and people have over time self-selected into different parts of the country. Liberal types moving to big cities for example.
"but typically the third generation would only know a few words in the language"
This is true of Hispanic immigrants today as well. You also don't have a great grasp of history. There were 1000 German-language newspapers in the US in 1890, some 60 years after mass immigration from Germanic lands began.
That would all make sense if your facts weren’t completely wrong. Second generation immigrants today are just as likely (virtually 100%) to speak English as those of days past.
Not sure I agree. Second generation, even young first generation, learn the language. Older people don't, but that's always been the case. There are Latino (etc) immigrant communities, just as there were Little Italies and Chinatowns generations earlier. And some people stay in those enclaves their whole lives, just as happened to Poles/Germans/etc before. We just don't remember. There have always been some WC immigrants, just like WC native-borns, who never leave their neighbourhoods. But we all watch the same TV and listen to the same music.
But I mostly disagree on the last one. I can't think of any situation where anyone's had success by not adopting the values, culture, etc of the US. We aren't stringent about names, as much. We don't care about religion, as long as "different religion" means foods and days off, not anything deep.
And no, the squaD doesn't advertise themselves on that angle. The right does. They mostly talk about wages, income, job protection, Green New Deal/climate change, jobs, student loans, cop shootings. The ones obsessed with their skin colours and gender is the right. They're the ones who bring it up all the time.
Whether they're assimilating or not is beside the point, which is that various groups of them tend to view other various groups as suspect, untrustworthy or as oppressors. This is the actual data gathered by someone who spent years studying a wide variety of US communities. I can claim only anecdotal firsthand knowledge of this, but I suspect you can't do any better than that.
I agree with this to certain extent - it was relatively easy for me to adapt to live in the US because of the omnipresence of culture produced in America (movies, TV shows, music). That being said, I think there is a difference or at least a gap between mass culture produced in America (what I've described above) and everyday American culture, e.g. college football or Thanksgiving dinner, and this is the part that's being assimilated way slower now. That is not to say there is no assimilation here whatsoever, but it's just not as complete as with preceding waves of immigration.
I mean, college football and Thanksgiving both kind of suck, so I don't blame immigrants for not assimilating those bits. I just think it's really funny you're harping on those things as being essential to America when a lot of Americans dislike them.
😅😅
I'll take tacos over Thanksgiving and soccer over college football any day. 👍
For those who leave an oppressive religious upbringing, Thanksgiving is not missed at all, with all that interminable praying and dealing with your ignorant family. 👍
Yeah. When you can talk to people from outside your religious group at the touch of a button, and see infinite porn at the touch of a button, it's very hard to maintain the kind of religious communities and values that were possible to maintain in the past. I'll write a whole post about this, but basically, the internet destroys traditionalism because traditionalism was always about geographic isolation.
Hopefully traditional values manifest around technology and art (rather than religion or morality): for example, the fact that the Famicom is superior to PS5; Lawrence of Arabia, Alien, and Star Wars are still better than any Marvel movie that's come out; and the 90s were the best decade for music. 🙃🙃🙃
For anyone interested: "A Thousand Small Sanities" "The Lost History of Liberalism" and Karen Armstrong's "The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism" are all fantastic for understanding the broad strokes of this ancient battle.
The parallels between the Internet and printing press are clear, for example the way they both assist the rise in new religious sects (John Milton would have a lot to say about QAnon and Wokeism if he was writing Paradise Lost today).
Traditional Christianity was about geographic isolation. Traditional Judaism has not been. So what you’re saying sounds like it’s either wrong, or has major exceptions.
I don't know about that. My friends who grew up in Orthodox Judaism always talked about the pressure to either stay in their New York City neighborhood with its Jewish institutions and cultural practices, or to move to Israel. And I found a lot of similarities between their experience and the experience of people who grew up fundamentalist Christian (such as issues regarding gender and race).
I am speaking historically because Noah used the word “always.” Historically, traditional Jews were concentrated in certain areas (as is the case in NYC today), but they were not “isolated.” They interacted with people of other faiths, as they do today.
Eh, Judaism still has very strong in-group preferences. They're used to being a minority. And in any case it's always been a tiny percentage of American faith traditions.
I agree that the effect of the internet is profound, but I think it was commercial culture.... think all the images you have taken in over the last 30 years from TV advertisement about how life should be..... That delivered the death now and isolated what conservative white people consider to be their culture. (BTW, I'm still waiting for them to clearly define what that is.)
The Right's babies have fled their homes for the coasts and become the Left they detest so much. I hate to oversimplify, but this is basically one of the biggest demographic stories that has shaped our modern political landscape over the past several decades.
If the Right were experiencing a population boom due to the fertility gap that's been ongoing for 50-60 years now, we'd be talking about a VERY different set of issues in our culture right now.
But they aren't. Instead, we're talking about the culmination of the Right's babies going hard Left and bolting for the cities: Millennial Atlantans flipped GA in 2020, and urban Millennial Texans look to finish the job there in the next decade as well. The most ascendant Millennial politician is a hard-Leftist inspired by an aging Boomer socialist.
I read somewhere that the shift to the left in the suburbs has less to do with people switching from one political identity to another, but to millenials getting to an age where they are moving to the suburbs to start families. They are, in fact, replacing the boomers, who are quickly downsizing to condos and senior communities.
It also has a lot to do with millenials abandoning organized religion.
I mean, we're talking about a generation where many of them were indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity form childhood by their toxic boomer parents, then forced to suffer the Great Recession, saddled with college loans, unable to find a job, their young peers killed every year by AR-15s, while they look around at a polluted and overheating planet, all while witnessing the rise of authoritarianism and white supremacist groups in the same country they were told defeated Nazism. A rise enabled, by the way, by the very same people constantly raving about Jesus.
This is a generation that's realized it's been had--that the religion was always just a way for the older generation to control them.
It is a very angry generation, and the consequences of that anger and sense of betrayal are going to continue to be felt in American politics for a long time to come.
The irreligiosity is a direct result of the fundamentalists' attempts to outpopulate liberals by raising a generation of fundamentalists like themselves. The problem is, fundamentalism only flourishes in a permissive family environment, not the authoritarian one fundamentalists espouse.
1. 10% is too low. A good 20% is clearly liberal - basically, the West. Another 20% after that is aspiringly liberal - most of Latin America, parts of Africa, parts of Asia. A good 20% is just... the basket case that is India. The other 20% is China. And the last 20% is definitely "conservative".
2. Also, I wasn't talking about the world, I was talking about *America*. Which is ~50/50 at first blush - and yes, it's more complex than that, but YOU try telling the two-party system that.
Yes, I basically agree with those numbers, and it's important to remember that liberal countries like Ireland or Japan tend to bat above their weight, while oppressive, authoritarian countries often bat below theirs. So even if liberals and aspiring liberals are a minority, their influence is still large and their cultures drive innovation.
Decades of policy that widened the wealth gap and made it so if you don't get into top 10 schools starting from kindergarden, you're screwed, probably had something to do with that.
Not sure how true that is. There is a youth movement on the far right (don't know how big) and it's not the usual Young Republican Ben Sasse nerds. It's Nick Fuentes. It's Madison Cawthorn. And all the Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greenes are imitating THEM, now.
With all due respect, ideas have to be debated, discussed and accepted or rejected in the commons. What you call the culture war is the marketplace of ideas.
Instead of whining about how you are being "cancelled" by an imaginary board of directors of the "left", why don't you try debating those ideas, and maybe, trying to figure out why most people are not interested in them?
Complaining about "cancel culture" is just a lazy way of avoiding the actual work of convincing folks that your position has merit, and really only works with like minded people who ALSO don't want to take the time and effort to scrutinize their own ideas to see how they can make them more salient.
Is there much of a difference? Outside MAYBE LDS and a few fundamentalist communities isn't fertility dropping everywhere? Unsure of the evidence it's dropping more on the left.
It's dropping everywhere, but the fundamentalists for whom it's dropping slower or not at all, are the ones who hope that it'll help them outpopulate the left. So it's not so much about it being a leftist phenomenon, but rather a fundamentalist one.
I would say replacement theory already became the driving ideology of the party during Trump's 2016 primary election campaign, with "build the wall" as its slogan. It was understood by all that the idea was to preserve white anglophone American culture by keeping out brown hispanophone Latin Americans.
I think this idea animates the right very powerfully and explains the Republican party's move from conservatism to fascism. An important element of how the fascist Big Lie works is that people already have a powerful motive to parrot it. It's not about tricking or fooling people. It's about inviting them to partake in and espouse the lie, and inviting them to use it as justification for doing what they want. Such as right now the efforts to restrict voting and to increase the scope for partisan tampering with elections.
And on the question of "what's the cure?", I think firstly for the rest of us to face up to how big and intractable the problem is. Our far-right problem is twice or thrice bigger than Europe's. And there's not really any way to satisfy their complaint. Besides immigration their complaint is globalization and the consequent steep drop in the relative value of many kinds of American labor. The isolationist cure they're desperately demanding is deluded, so obviously so that not even the politicians most fervently promising it would deliver more than symbolic gestures. Some legal immigration will continue, higher birth rates among immigrants will continue, willingness to immigrate illegally among people from the brutal gangster states of central America will continue, the cost-advantage of offshore labor will remain.
So the animus is going to be there for the foreseeable future. Moreover there is now a big commercial industry based on pumping up the animus and selling fear-and-loathing eyeballs to advertisers. And the main thing we have to do is outvote it. Ds need to become the party of disciplined turnout. Ds across the country have to do as well or better as the Georgian Ds did in their Senate run-offs, consistently. We already have most House Rs on the record in favor of stealing an election. This is not a drill.
The smartest thing Biden is doing is pushing for a big federal project to build out rural broadband. That can make a significant difference in the long run.
Great post, Tom. Thank you. It really is simply about being disciplined and outvoting them, and also peeling off as many "Biden Republicans" as possible.
Also, you're exactly right about the rural broadband. Need to provide people in those communities (especially sexual minorities, religious minorities, and other minorities) access to information and a way out.
I'm not sure that "the animus is going to be there for the forseeable future", because much of the Republicans' fear of immigration is instrumental. To be sure, there are plenty of people on the fringe who think of immigrants as unassimilable criminals or worry that their competition for jobs will be inevitably disastrous for native-born Americans, but the reason why a large part of the Republican Party is against high immigration is because they think immigration will reduce their votes. But the racial 'replacement' is likely to continue (cf. the Census Bureau's population projections at https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf#page=7 which predict that over the next few decades white people will decline both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, to only 44.3%), so to survive as a national party, the Republicans will have to find a way to appeal to non-white people, especially Hispanics. When that happens (as it probably will, for the alternative is the Republicans no longer being nationally competitive), the mainstream of the party will give up on racial nativism as harmful to their chances in elections (though this doesn't necessarily mean an end of nativism in general: perhaps they will continue to oppose immigration in similar terms to today while embracing assimilated Hispanic and Asian immigrants, as their predecessors embraced the Irish, Italians, Poles, &c.) & whatever is left of the persistent nativists will be left behind.
Well, CA really could foretell the political future of the US as whole. In which case the national GOP becomes smaller and crazier while the big policy battles become between moderate and left-wing Dems.
Well before all that we have to defeat the serious near-term strategy of Rs to literally rig elections (Trump was absolutely serious about it and most Rs supported him on it). Then gradually the demands of the so-called "base" will make it harder for Rs to win national elections. That already happened, though it was very narrow. But that won't stop the animus. It's not only a fear of being outvoted. It's more fundamentally a fear that their world is changing and distrust of people who seem too different. It's a very different situation from how Ds in this last primary balked at Bernie and consolidated in favor of the electable one. I don't see the Trump electorate doing anything like that anytime soon.
Always fun to hear from yet another smug, arrogant, thoroughly condescending urban communist who hates this country's guts. So rare! Word to the wise: Don't think you will get the guns, but you are welcome to try. We need some practice. LOL
Oh dear. Big man needs to show his big loyalty to his big Fuhrer, so even though I'm an economic conservative and military interventionist whereas big man's big Fuhrer has a big man crush on the Russian dictator and wants to run the American economy like Recep Erdogan, big man is going to denounce me as a communist and threaten me from behind a curtain of anonymity with his big gun. Oh dear oh dear.
On the up side, it doesn't need to be this way. Canadian conservatism is quite pro-immigrant, and has done pretty well electorally among a wide range of immigrant groups in recent years. I know that Canada and the US aren't identical, but hopefully that can be something like a road map for American conservatives who dislike this kind of race-baiting/culture-baiting.
Good piece, Noah. Same thing happening here in India with the majoritarian Hindu nationalists. except ofcourse they hold exponentially more influence and numbers here, sigh
As a practicing Christian with left-of-center politics, I wonder if the church can re-gain some ground by speaking to Millennial and Zoomer "spiritual needs" rather than acting as a cudgel against minority groups we tend to feel affinity towards e.g. transgender children.
I've taken "spiritual but not religious" generational cohorts to mass and had them describe the experience as "more fulfilling than yoga." This is high praise in the LA metro area! Is there a future in the "more meditation less castigation" model of Christianity?
I don't agree with the framing at all. It is true - but beside the real point - which isn't white replacement - it is middle class replacement.
Here is the view from opposite land.
The middle class needs a scapegoat for lower living standards. The reason why it needs a scapegoat is because the information perpetual motion machine some people call the universities aren't delivering the fabled 'good jobs' - what is happening is a rockstar economy in which some illuminated areas of middle class sectors are valorized e.g. Silicon valley while almost everybody else has declining living standards. The reason is three fold - Silicon Valley is automating jobs that process information for a living, the middle class is competing more with world labour markets - think zoom employment vs your local fireman, and there is huge oversupply of competitors in every part of the middle class.
The main source of wage competition for blue collar workers is foreign labour imports - which is why the middle class is preoccupied with racism aka it's a figleaf for a more ignoble aim - any time you have large numbers of people alleging altruistic motivations you have a con.
So this is not about race or even class - it's about the relation between two types of knowledge - formal knowledge and tacit knowledge. The supply and demand is way out of balance. All the framing that suggests race is wrong because although blue collar workers are more overtly bigoted - it's not something that has changed and so can't be used to explain change. For the record - I'm a window cleaner.
Great post, and I definitely think you’re on to something about the internet destroying traditional culture. However, I also think education is destroying conservatism. It’s hard to continue being ideologically rigid in the face of data and theories that contradict your beliefs. A good example of this can be found in the Scopes trial from 1925. It’s hard to continue to deny evolution when you are presented with the evidence. Which is why so many people tried to prevent evolution from being taught in schools.
The wingnut white supremacist version obviously has no future. But replacement and immigration fear can be a powerful conservative message to 'immigrant' voters. I think most people are OK with shutting the door when they are already in. Their biggest fear is not from the existing majority otherwise they probably wouldn't immigrate. Carlson et al can tweak their message to "we are being replaced, and you will be next...".
the Unite the Right marchers in Charlottesville were chanting "Jews will not replace us" not "you will not replace us. this is even stated in the link to the Wikipedia article you provided. yeesh.
FEW SENTENTS KNOW THAT, It is the Nazis who were INSPIRED by the Gita – and Rommel, Goebbel,Himmler (The Posener Speech) and other Nuremberg convicts, claimed that they were akin to Arjuna,following THEIR DUTY to the Fuhrer. Hence,they killed,W/O discrimination as it was their divine duty to their NATION and the FUHRER (as stated in the Gita) !
Do the Jews REALLY believe that 1 of the lost tribes of Israel born of Leah and Jacob came to India and are now in the ruling elite ? Can the Jews gain redemption by allying with Right Wing Hindoos ? Can the Jews use the Hindoos against the Crescent and the Sickle ?
These are the verses in the diaries of the Nazis,and these verses were ALSO QUOTED in the Nuremberg Trials by the Nazis ! THE THEOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF GENOCIDE AND POGROMS !
I present Chapter 18 of the Bhagwad Gita !
When Krishna the Bhagvat was fed up trying to explain to “Arjuna the – why he “needed to exterminate his foes” – this was the “last attempt” in the 18th Chapter of the Gita – the logic is as under :
Lumen Naturale 1 – There are “5 precedents to sense-perception and action”
18.14 The locus as also the agent, the different kinds of organs, the many and distinct activities, and, the “divine is here the fifth”.
EXPLANATION – THE POINT IS THAT UNLIKE ISLAM WHERE A MAN IS LIABLE FOR HIS ACTIONS – HERE – THE GITA STATES THAT THERE IS NO CONCEPT OF VOLITION OR CHOICE – AS ALL THAT,A SO CALLED HUMAN DOES,IS BASED ON THE EXTERNAL IMPULSE OF PERCEPTION,OR A DIVINE INSTRUCTION. Hence, there is no such thing as SENTIENCE,and HUMANS are no more than ROBOTS.
Lumen Naturale 2 – There “5 are causes of all action” and are “independent of the mind and body dualism” of Descartes and “also the Soul “!
मूल श्लोकः शरीरवाङ्मनोभिर्यत्कर्म प्रारभते नरः। न्याय्यं वा विपरीतं वा पञ्चैते तस्य हेतवः।।18.15।।
18.15 For whatever action a man undertakes by his body, speech and mind, whether right or wrong,i.e., enjoined or forbidden by the Sastras, “the following five”, are its causes:
EXPLANATION – HERE THE POINT TO NOTE IS THAT,EVERY ACTION HAS A CAUSE.EVERY GENOCIDE HAD ITS WARRANT WRITTEN,IN A PRIOR OR A PRIOI CAUSE.ALSO,EVEN A THJOUGHT IN THE MIND HAS ITS ORIGIN IN 5 CAUSES ! HENCE,THERE IS NO ORIGINAL THOUGHT OR FREE ACTION – AND THE SAME APPLIES TO THE NAZI GENOCIDE
Lumen Naturale 3 – 18.16 But the fool who supposes, because of his immature judgment, that it is his own Self alone that acts, he perverts the truth and does not see rightly.
तत्रैवं सति कर्तारमात्मानं केवलं तु यः।
पश्यत्यकृतबुद्धित्वान्न स पश्यति दुर्मतिः।।18.16।।
EXPLANATION – TO EVEN THINK (LET ALONE REPENT) THAT A MAN IS THE “CAUSE” OF HIS ACTIONS OR IS “RESPONSIBLE” FOR THE SAME – IS FOOLISH.This RHYMES with the Jesus Complex – that Jesus died for the SINS OF HUMANITY – as the SINS of HUMANITY were the actions of GOD,and so,GOD SACRIFICED HIS SON,for the SINS OF HUMANIY (and the suffering of HUMANITY).BUT THE SINS AND SUFFERINGS CONTINUE ! It is a fact that EITHER Jesus came to India or Hindoo Godmen were in Babylon and Jerusalem – at the time of Jesus !
In essence,the Nazi theory is that the Jew Genocide was ordained,and is reposited in the Book of Isaiah,and the Curse on the lineage of Solomon.So Himmler posited that HIS ACTIONS were the actions of the 5TH ELEMENT – WHICH IS THE DIVINE.
Lumen Naturale 4– Hence,you can “kill,murder and rape” – provided it is done with “no ego and no feelings “- for it is the “Act of the Divine” ! Just like the Nazis ! “Heil Krishna,the Bhagwat “!
यस्य नाहंकृतो भावो बुद्धिर्यस्य न लिप्यते।
हत्वापि स इमाँल्लोकान्न हन्ति न निबध्यते।।18.17।।
18.17 He who has not the “feeling of egoism”, whose intellect is not tainted, he does not kill, nor does he become bound-“even by killing these creatures” !
EXPLANATION – KILL WITHOUT MERCY,WITHOUT REMORSE,WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION, WITHOUT EMOTION, WITHOUT EGO,WITHOUT INTELLECTUAL TAINT (means that there is no need to defend the actions) …
IF YOU FOLLOW THE ABOVE SOP, YOU ARE KILLING – BUT YOU ARE “NOT” AND YOU ARE “NOT BOUND”, WHICH MEANS THAT,YOU ARE “NOT LIABLE”,AS THE ACTIONS ARE DUE TO,THE “5TH ELEMENT”.
LASTLY,YOU ARE NOT KILLING HUMANS – BUT “CREATURES” AS THEY HAVE NO SOUL OR CONSCIENCE – AS THEIR THOUGHT,SPEECH AND ACTIONS,ARE DUE TO THE 5TH ELEMENT – AND IT IS THE 5TH ELEMENT, WHICH WILL DECIDE,WHEN AND HOW THESE CREATURES,WILL DIE OR BE KILLED !
IS THIS A MANUAL FOR GENOCIDE ? DO THESE VERSES EXIST IN THE TORAH OR THE TALMUD OR NUMBERS or DEUTERONOMY ? dindooohindoo
WHAT ARE THE JEWS THINKING ? IS THERE A WORD ABOUT ON THE VIRTUES OF HINDOOSTHAN BY MAIMONIDES OR ANY OTHER RABBI ?
Tellingly, you omit the Democratic side of this. Ruy Teixera of the Center for American Progress has for years openly advocated for white replacement. So it's not just an irrational or even racist fear but an actual Democratic policy of racial replacement propounded again and again. It marches ahead under the banner of generating a "coalition of the ascendant" in which the "ascendant" are specifically defined as people of color in alliance with the oligarchy.
Also tellingly, you omit the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the seminal event that made Teixera's project possible with an enormous and unprecedented flood of immigrants from parts of the world that hadn't previously contributed much to the national makeup. You give the impression that there was just this agentless, organic flow of migrants, a perfectly natural development that any reasonable person should have passively accepted.
Meanwhile, various studies of white resistance start from the premise that it's some kind of mysterious malady or just outright racism since there couldn't possibly be any kind of rational cause. The fact that in most of the years since Hart-Celler Americans who pleaded in poll after poll for less immigration were ignored by their supposed representatives in Congress is not even a matter worthy of mention.
I don't agree with certain parts of this post (and I'm an immigrant in the US myself!).
I think the main difference between old and modern migration is the level and speed of assimilation, and the level of the institutional push for it, which is really watered down these days and weakens it.
Think of three of the largest white ancestry groups in the US: Germans, French and Poles. All (especially Poles) differed quite a bit from the WASPy US majority of early 1900s, yet within a generation all of them blended so much with the US natives to the point they've changed their last names to English-sounding ones. Of course, all of these groups were keeping traditions of the old country and elders would continue to speak these languages, and there would be diaspora magazines in these languages, but typically the third generation would only know a few words in the language (simply because institutional America was exclusively English-speaking), have never visited the country of their ancestry (unless as a troop), and if there were any politicians being elected from their ranks, they'd only advertise their ancestry to the community and pose as an all-American candidate otherwise.
Compare it to now, when there really is no strong push for assimilation, at least for the main immigration-source nations. First of all, travel is very easy - you can go back to your country of origin for vacation every summer (as opposed to probably never ever coming back again if you were an immigrant 100 years ago, which pushed you to integrate with Americans). Secondly, if you speak one of the main immigrant languages (Spanish nationwide, but here in SF it's also Cantonese, Russian, Tagalog), you really can never learn English and function almost just fine because all the institutions will accommodate to your needs and you can easily access content in non-English. And language is an extremely important vector of assimilation. And lastly, and I think this is the most important, "diversity" is a virtue now, so it's almost like people do not expect/want you to actually become American and adopt American traditions and customs - the ones conservatives hold dear. Especially in the Democratic Party, being as far removed from the mainstream American culture as possible is a currency now - the squat literally advertises themselves on that angle.
Are you claiming that there is a significant population of *second-generation* immigrants who don't speak English as a first language?! I would be completely astounded if that were true; I think it would have to be a small, isolated group with essentially no contact with mainstream institutions. I mean, I am a second-generation immigrant from a community full of second-generation immigrants, and what's really incredibly difficult is maintaining the ability to speak your parents' language with any competence! The fact that your parents speak it to you and to their friends in front of you is barely relevant; your brain naturally and instinctively declares it unimportant, eliminates it, and remembers English instead. I will be relieved if my future children manage to pick up even "a few words", but I doubt they will.
It wasn't actually my point, though there actually seems to be quite a significant population like that. According to the US Census Bureau's most recent estimates, of 264.2M native-born Americans over the age of 5, 30.5M ( 11.5%) speak language other than English at home (it's not exactly the same as first language but pretty close). Of those 30.5M, the majority speaks Spanish (22.9M), and 1.2M of those Spanish speakers speak English "not well" or "not at all" (the rest speaks it "well" or "very well"). Among speakers of other language, English proficiency is similar, around 303k speak English "not well" or "not at all".
You are conflating “speak Spanish at home” with “speak English natively” much to your own detriment.
The numbers he's throwing around also show the opposite of what he's trying to argue.
Ah, I see. That's very useful, thanks! I should caveat that I think "speaks a language other than English at home" is actually quite different from "first language isn't English". If I still lived with my parents, I would tell a surveyor that I "speak a language other than English at home"--doesn't mean I don't suck at it. Not sure about age 5 as a cutoff either--when I was 5 my parents were still worrying about whether I'd pick up English properly. Worries about whether I'd forget the alternative completely were yet to come. I think my point is I would guess a lot of those census responses are about children who have so far spent most of their time talking to their parents, but are going to grow up, move out of their parents' house, and become very embarrassed about how much of their old language they've forgotten.
Are you sure this is correct?
I've seen a few empirical studies of assimilation/integration and, as I recall, they showed that immigrants are assimilating as fast today as they did in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They indicated that immigrants assimilate over the course of three generations.
From a Canadian perspective, the question is whether you want newcomers to *assimilate* (adopting the dominant culture) or *integrate* (joining institutions and playing by the rules, without having to give up one's culture). In Canada the goal is *integration*, and we're willing to modify institutions to allow newcomers to join without giving up their culture ("reasonable accommodation"): for example modifying the RCMP uniform to allow turbans, to accommodate Sikhs who wanted to join.
This policy of supporting cultural pluralism (liberal neutrality with respect to culture) has been quite successful in Canada.
On the other hand, pushing for *assimilation* means that newcomers are faced with a choice between giving up their culture and integrating, or keeping their culture and not integrating. For example, new teachers in Quebec are no longer allowed to wear a headscarf. This can discourage integration.
Joseph Heath on liberal neutrality (which arose in response to the 16th-century wars of religion) and multiculturalism: https://web.archive.org/web/20051031060708/http://www.myschool-monecole.gc.ca/Research/publications/pdfs/manion2003_e.pdf
I basically agree. So, I think, would many of the nativists: one of their main concerns is that immigrants won't assimilate to "tolerant values" enough to integrate into American society and positively affect it.
This is complicated, of course, by the fact that people who are opposed to immigration are often the most opposed to "tolerant values" in other parts of American society. For example, the people who were vocally anti-gay-marriage are the ideological compatriots of today's anti-immigrant movement.
What's the "American traditions and customs" you are talking about? Immigrants watch American football, celebrate Thanksgiving, and 2nd generation immigrants speak native-level English.
American Chinese dishes doesn't exist in China; NY cheesecake, bagels were brought by the Jews. I'd say assimilation is a two-way street. It has been.
Yes. Regarding the two-day street, immigration has also changed the tastes in food and sports of plenty of white or native-born Americans (the increasing popularity of thai food and soccer, for example).
Agreed. But I'd put a further emphasis on the diversity and identity politics aspect of this. The very liberal Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam a few years ago did a study of diversity and discovered that it's corrosive. The more racial and ethnic diversity he found in various communities, the more distrustful and dysfunctional they were. And the longer a community was diverse, the worse the problems were. (Interestingly in these diverse circumstances, levels of distrust were elevated not only between ethnic groups but even within them.) The results were so displeasing to Putnam that he refused to publish them in the US.
Yet we are constantly told that diversity is a strength and that if you don't buy into it, you're a bigot or a racist. Assimilation, as you note, is rejected. One seldom hears any contrary opinion. One exception is the liberal CNN host Fareed Zakaria, himself an immigrant, who has gently suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to slow the pace of immigration. He came to this country, he says, not to bring a dose of "diversity" by insisting on accommodating the culture of his old country but because he greatly preferred the things we have historically stood for, principles derived firmly from the depth and sweep of Western Civilization. Good for him.
FWIW David Frum has also advocated for sharply less immigration.
"Working in tech, it's really hard to convince me diversity is universally not a strength."
Real representative sample you got there.
Does that not explain a lot about America's political divide?
Blue states support immigration and diversity because their wealth comes from people's brains, while red states oppose them because their wealth comes from the land.
To some degree perhaps. On the other hand doctors have completely different politics depending on their specialization even though their wealth is all brain: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/upshot/your-surgeon-is-probably-a-republican-your-psychiatrist-probably-a-democrat.html
I think the divide mostly down to genetics as per heritability studies, and people have over time self-selected into different parts of the country. Liberal types moving to big cities for example.
"but typically the third generation would only know a few words in the language"
This is true of Hispanic immigrants today as well. You also don't have a great grasp of history. There were 1000 German-language newspapers in the US in 1890, some 60 years after mass immigration from Germanic lands began.
That would all make sense if your facts weren’t completely wrong. Second generation immigrants today are just as likely (virtually 100%) to speak English as those of days past.
Not sure I agree. Second generation, even young first generation, learn the language. Older people don't, but that's always been the case. There are Latino (etc) immigrant communities, just as there were Little Italies and Chinatowns generations earlier. And some people stay in those enclaves their whole lives, just as happened to Poles/Germans/etc before. We just don't remember. There have always been some WC immigrants, just like WC native-borns, who never leave their neighbourhoods. But we all watch the same TV and listen to the same music.
But I mostly disagree on the last one. I can't think of any situation where anyone's had success by not adopting the values, culture, etc of the US. We aren't stringent about names, as much. We don't care about religion, as long as "different religion" means foods and days off, not anything deep.
And no, the squaD doesn't advertise themselves on that angle. The right does. They mostly talk about wages, income, job protection, Green New Deal/climate change, jobs, student loans, cop shootings. The ones obsessed with their skin colours and gender is the right. They're the ones who bring it up all the time.
You're wrong. Immigrants are assimilating the same way they always have, and you're grasping at straws.
Whether they're assimilating or not is beside the point, which is that various groups of them tend to view other various groups as suspect, untrustworthy or as oppressors. This is the actual data gathered by someone who spent years studying a wide variety of US communities. I can claim only anecdotal firsthand knowledge of this, but I suspect you can't do any better than that.
I agree with this to certain extent - it was relatively easy for me to adapt to live in the US because of the omnipresence of culture produced in America (movies, TV shows, music). That being said, I think there is a difference or at least a gap between mass culture produced in America (what I've described above) and everyday American culture, e.g. college football or Thanksgiving dinner, and this is the part that's being assimilated way slower now. That is not to say there is no assimilation here whatsoever, but it's just not as complete as with preceding waves of immigration.
I mean, college football and Thanksgiving both kind of suck, so I don't blame immigrants for not assimilating those bits. I just think it's really funny you're harping on those things as being essential to America when a lot of Americans dislike them.
😅😅
I'll take tacos over Thanksgiving and soccer over college football any day. 👍
For those who leave an oppressive religious upbringing, Thanksgiving is not missed at all, with all that interminable praying and dealing with your ignorant family. 👍
Halloween is the superior fall holiday BY FAR.
Um, Thanksgiving weekend has been a big shopping period for many decades.
Young people are replacing old people. Kids these days. Same as it ever was.
A very balanced piece. Only thing I can think that the Right has going for them is the low fertility rate on the Left.
Well, yeah, but it won't stop the internet from destroying the old culture. Happening all over the world...
Is there anywhere in the US where fertility isn't dropping? I'm tempted to say for the world as well.
Destroying the old culture?
Yeah. When you can talk to people from outside your religious group at the touch of a button, and see infinite porn at the touch of a button, it's very hard to maintain the kind of religious communities and values that were possible to maintain in the past. I'll write a whole post about this, but basically, the internet destroys traditionalism because traditionalism was always about geographic isolation.
Ah, interesting. Is this the modern version of "the printing press weakened the Catholic Church"?
I feel like there are some other factors there like wanting to preserve your culture, etc.
Trad personalities will always be with us, me thinks. Many people don't react well to change.
Yes. Traditional values will re-manifest in some other form...
Hopefully traditional values manifest around technology and art (rather than religion or morality): for example, the fact that the Famicom is superior to PS5; Lawrence of Arabia, Alien, and Star Wars are still better than any Marvel movie that's come out; and the 90s were the best decade for music. 🙃🙃🙃
For anyone interested: "A Thousand Small Sanities" "The Lost History of Liberalism" and Karen Armstrong's "The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism" are all fantastic for understanding the broad strokes of this ancient battle.
The parallels between the Internet and printing press are clear, for example the way they both assist the rise in new religious sects (John Milton would have a lot to say about QAnon and Wokeism if he was writing Paradise Lost today).
Traditional Christianity was about geographic isolation. Traditional Judaism has not been. So what you’re saying sounds like it’s either wrong, or has major exceptions.
I don't know about that. My friends who grew up in Orthodox Judaism always talked about the pressure to either stay in their New York City neighborhood with its Jewish institutions and cultural practices, or to move to Israel. And I found a lot of similarities between their experience and the experience of people who grew up fundamentalist Christian (such as issues regarding gender and race).
I am speaking historically because Noah used the word “always.” Historically, traditional Jews were concentrated in certain areas (as is the case in NYC today), but they were not “isolated.” They interacted with people of other faiths, as they do today.
Eh, Judaism still has very strong in-group preferences. They're used to being a minority. And in any case it's always been a tiny percentage of American faith traditions.
I agree that the effect of the internet is profound, but I think it was commercial culture.... think all the images you have taken in over the last 30 years from TV advertisement about how life should be..... That delivered the death now and isolated what conservative white people consider to be their culture. (BTW, I'm still waiting for them to clearly define what that is.)
It goes both ways. You can now talk to white nationalists at the touch of a button.
This is a canard. A wag.
The Right's babies have fled their homes for the coasts and become the Left they detest so much. I hate to oversimplify, but this is basically one of the biggest demographic stories that has shaped our modern political landscape over the past several decades.
If the Right were experiencing a population boom due to the fertility gap that's been ongoing for 50-60 years now, we'd be talking about a VERY different set of issues in our culture right now.
But they aren't. Instead, we're talking about the culmination of the Right's babies going hard Left and bolting for the cities: Millennial Atlantans flipped GA in 2020, and urban Millennial Texans look to finish the job there in the next decade as well. The most ascendant Millennial politician is a hard-Leftist inspired by an aging Boomer socialist.
I read somewhere that the shift to the left in the suburbs has less to do with people switching from one political identity to another, but to millenials getting to an age where they are moving to the suburbs to start families. They are, in fact, replacing the boomers, who are quickly downsizing to condos and senior communities.
This feels right. Millennials who are lucky enough to have the means are buying in the burbs and settling down.
The shift is just happening very slowly thanks to that little income disparity chasm between the boomers and everyone else.
It also has a lot to do with millenials abandoning organized religion.
I mean, we're talking about a generation where many of them were indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity form childhood by their toxic boomer parents, then forced to suffer the Great Recession, saddled with college loans, unable to find a job, their young peers killed every year by AR-15s, while they look around at a polluted and overheating planet, all while witnessing the rise of authoritarianism and white supremacist groups in the same country they were told defeated Nazism. A rise enabled, by the way, by the very same people constantly raving about Jesus.
This is a generation that's realized it's been had--that the religion was always just a way for the older generation to control them.
It is a very angry generation, and the consequences of that anger and sense of betrayal are going to continue to be felt in American politics for a long time to come.
The irreligiosity is a direct result of the fundamentalists' attempts to outpopulate liberals by raising a generation of fundamentalists like themselves. The problem is, fundamentalism only flourishes in a permissive family environment, not the authoritarian one fundamentalists espouse.
Well, how much of the world would you describe as liberal? 10%? I hate to break it to you but Liberals are in the extreme minority.
1. 10% is too low. A good 20% is clearly liberal - basically, the West. Another 20% after that is aspiringly liberal - most of Latin America, parts of Africa, parts of Asia. A good 20% is just... the basket case that is India. The other 20% is China. And the last 20% is definitely "conservative".
2. Also, I wasn't talking about the world, I was talking about *America*. Which is ~50/50 at first blush - and yes, it's more complex than that, but YOU try telling the two-party system that.
Yes, I basically agree with those numbers, and it's important to remember that liberal countries like Ireland or Japan tend to bat above their weight, while oppressive, authoritarian countries often bat below theirs. So even if liberals and aspiring liberals are a minority, their influence is still large and their cultures drive innovation.
Agreed. Not sure why Robert thought he was winning by pointing at the scoreboard on that one.
What gives you that impression? Because an elderly self-described Social Democrat Jew from Vermont did pretty well in the heartland.
And it's not even close. Millennials and Zoomers are an 80-20 Left split.
Decades of policy that widened the wealth gap and made it so if you don't get into top 10 schools starting from kindergarden, you're screwed, probably had something to do with that.
Not sure how true that is. There is a youth movement on the far right (don't know how big) and it's not the usual Young Republican Ben Sasse nerds. It's Nick Fuentes. It's Madison Cawthorn. And all the Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greenes are imitating THEM, now.
And they're the same "youth movement" that has only managed to win 20% of their own age cohort. They're failing, not rising.
With all due respect, ideas have to be debated, discussed and accepted or rejected in the commons. What you call the culture war is the marketplace of ideas.
Instead of whining about how you are being "cancelled" by an imaginary board of directors of the "left", why don't you try debating those ideas, and maybe, trying to figure out why most people are not interested in them?
Complaining about "cancel culture" is just a lazy way of avoiding the actual work of convincing folks that your position has merit, and really only works with like minded people who ALSO don't want to take the time and effort to scrutinize their own ideas to see how they can make them more salient.
Is there much of a difference? Outside MAYBE LDS and a few fundamentalist communities isn't fertility dropping everywhere? Unsure of the evidence it's dropping more on the left.
It's dropping everywhere, but the fundamentalists for whom it's dropping slower or not at all, are the ones who hope that it'll help them outpopulate the left. So it's not so much about it being a leftist phenomenon, but rather a fundamentalist one.
This is legitimately terrifying.
Why?
Because these kind of social trends are usually followed by violence on a mass scale.
is "these kind of social trends" immigration? if so, did it in the past in the us?
I would say replacement theory already became the driving ideology of the party during Trump's 2016 primary election campaign, with "build the wall" as its slogan. It was understood by all that the idea was to preserve white anglophone American culture by keeping out brown hispanophone Latin Americans.
I think this idea animates the right very powerfully and explains the Republican party's move from conservatism to fascism. An important element of how the fascist Big Lie works is that people already have a powerful motive to parrot it. It's not about tricking or fooling people. It's about inviting them to partake in and espouse the lie, and inviting them to use it as justification for doing what they want. Such as right now the efforts to restrict voting and to increase the scope for partisan tampering with elections.
And on the question of "what's the cure?", I think firstly for the rest of us to face up to how big and intractable the problem is. Our far-right problem is twice or thrice bigger than Europe's. And there's not really any way to satisfy their complaint. Besides immigration their complaint is globalization and the consequent steep drop in the relative value of many kinds of American labor. The isolationist cure they're desperately demanding is deluded, so obviously so that not even the politicians most fervently promising it would deliver more than symbolic gestures. Some legal immigration will continue, higher birth rates among immigrants will continue, willingness to immigrate illegally among people from the brutal gangster states of central America will continue, the cost-advantage of offshore labor will remain.
So the animus is going to be there for the foreseeable future. Moreover there is now a big commercial industry based on pumping up the animus and selling fear-and-loathing eyeballs to advertisers. And the main thing we have to do is outvote it. Ds need to become the party of disciplined turnout. Ds across the country have to do as well or better as the Georgian Ds did in their Senate run-offs, consistently. We already have most House Rs on the record in favor of stealing an election. This is not a drill.
The smartest thing Biden is doing is pushing for a big federal project to build out rural broadband. That can make a significant difference in the long run.
Great post, Tom. Thank you. It really is simply about being disciplined and outvoting them, and also peeling off as many "Biden Republicans" as possible.
Also, you're exactly right about the rural broadband. Need to provide people in those communities (especially sexual minorities, religious minorities, and other minorities) access to information and a way out.
A way out to your big city ghettos?
What makes cities a ghetto, out of curiosity?
I'm not sure that "the animus is going to be there for the forseeable future", because much of the Republicans' fear of immigration is instrumental. To be sure, there are plenty of people on the fringe who think of immigrants as unassimilable criminals or worry that their competition for jobs will be inevitably disastrous for native-born Americans, but the reason why a large part of the Republican Party is against high immigration is because they think immigration will reduce their votes. But the racial 'replacement' is likely to continue (cf. the Census Bureau's population projections at https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf#page=7 which predict that over the next few decades white people will decline both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, to only 44.3%), so to survive as a national party, the Republicans will have to find a way to appeal to non-white people, especially Hispanics. When that happens (as it probably will, for the alternative is the Republicans no longer being nationally competitive), the mainstream of the party will give up on racial nativism as harmful to their chances in elections (though this doesn't necessarily mean an end of nativism in general: perhaps they will continue to oppose immigration in similar terms to today while embracing assimilated Hispanic and Asian immigrants, as their predecessors embraced the Irish, Italians, Poles, &c.) & whatever is left of the persistent nativists will be left behind.
Well, CA really could foretell the political future of the US as whole. In which case the national GOP becomes smaller and crazier while the big policy battles become between moderate and left-wing Dems.
Well before all that we have to defeat the serious near-term strategy of Rs to literally rig elections (Trump was absolutely serious about it and most Rs supported him on it). Then gradually the demands of the so-called "base" will make it harder for Rs to win national elections. That already happened, though it was very narrow. But that won't stop the animus. It's not only a fear of being outvoted. It's more fundamentally a fear that their world is changing and distrust of people who seem too different. It's a very different situation from how Ds in this last primary balked at Bernie and consolidated in favor of the electable one. I don't see the Trump electorate doing anything like that anytime soon.
Thanks for this, communist! LOL
Always fun to hear from yet another smug, arrogant, thoroughly condescending urban communist who hates this country's guts. So rare! Word to the wise: Don't think you will get the guns, but you are welcome to try. We need some practice. LOL
Oh dear. Big man needs to show his big loyalty to his big Fuhrer, so even though I'm an economic conservative and military interventionist whereas big man's big Fuhrer has a big man crush on the Russian dictator and wants to run the American economy like Recep Erdogan, big man is going to denounce me as a communist and threaten me from behind a curtain of anonymity with his big gun. Oh dear oh dear.
Thanks for the wisdom, communist! LOL
It's responses like this that makes me think you're a bot. Can you break that down? What exactly came across as smug?
Either or a bot or someone with major compensation issues.
More of a parrot. I doubt he knows what communism is. Probably has never heard of the Ukraine famine.
If you ever want to start a fight with a Russian, bring up Ukraine and the famine. Instant fireworks. 😱😱😱
And a good shot, in case you or your friends decide to break in. LOL
On the up side, it doesn't need to be this way. Canadian conservatism is quite pro-immigrant, and has done pretty well electorally among a wide range of immigrant groups in recent years. I know that Canada and the US aren't identical, but hopefully that can be something like a road map for American conservatives who dislike this kind of race-baiting/culture-baiting.
Agreed, but Canada has a *very* different immigration system.
Good piece, Noah. Same thing happening here in India with the majoritarian Hindu nationalists. except ofcourse they hold exponentially more influence and numbers here, sigh
As a practicing Christian with left-of-center politics, I wonder if the church can re-gain some ground by speaking to Millennial and Zoomer "spiritual needs" rather than acting as a cudgel against minority groups we tend to feel affinity towards e.g. transgender children.
I've taken "spiritual but not religious" generational cohorts to mass and had them describe the experience as "more fulfilling than yoga." This is high praise in the LA metro area! Is there a future in the "more meditation less castigation" model of Christianity?
"future-oriented conservative movement"
That's not a thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure that makes as much semantic sense as "square circle" or "dry water"
I don't agree with the framing at all. It is true - but beside the real point - which isn't white replacement - it is middle class replacement.
Here is the view from opposite land.
The middle class needs a scapegoat for lower living standards. The reason why it needs a scapegoat is because the information perpetual motion machine some people call the universities aren't delivering the fabled 'good jobs' - what is happening is a rockstar economy in which some illuminated areas of middle class sectors are valorized e.g. Silicon valley while almost everybody else has declining living standards. The reason is three fold - Silicon Valley is automating jobs that process information for a living, the middle class is competing more with world labour markets - think zoom employment vs your local fireman, and there is huge oversupply of competitors in every part of the middle class.
The main source of wage competition for blue collar workers is foreign labour imports - which is why the middle class is preoccupied with racism aka it's a figleaf for a more ignoble aim - any time you have large numbers of people alleging altruistic motivations you have a con.
So this is not about race or even class - it's about the relation between two types of knowledge - formal knowledge and tacit knowledge. The supply and demand is way out of balance. All the framing that suggests race is wrong because although blue collar workers are more overtly bigoted - it's not something that has changed and so can't be used to explain change. For the record - I'm a window cleaner.
Great post, and I definitely think you’re on to something about the internet destroying traditional culture. However, I also think education is destroying conservatism. It’s hard to continue being ideologically rigid in the face of data and theories that contradict your beliefs. A good example of this can be found in the Scopes trial from 1925. It’s hard to continue to deny evolution when you are presented with the evidence. Which is why so many people tried to prevent evolution from being taught in schools.
Yes, many people lose their faith in college for this reason.
Awesome piece. It led me to read Flight 93. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to better understand the left/right divide.
The wingnut white supremacist version obviously has no future. But replacement and immigration fear can be a powerful conservative message to 'immigrant' voters. I think most people are OK with shutting the door when they are already in. Their biggest fear is not from the existing majority otherwise they probably wouldn't immigrate. Carlson et al can tweak their message to "we are being replaced, and you will be next...".
the Unite the Right marchers in Charlottesville were chanting "Jews will not replace us" not "you will not replace us. this is even stated in the link to the Wikipedia article you provided. yeesh.
Speaking of Nazis
FEW SENTENTS KNOW THAT, It is the Nazis who were INSPIRED by the Gita – and Rommel, Goebbel,Himmler (The Posener Speech) and other Nuremberg convicts, claimed that they were akin to Arjuna,following THEIR DUTY to the Fuhrer. Hence,they killed,W/O discrimination as it was their divine duty to their NATION and the FUHRER (as stated in the Gita) !
Do the Jews REALLY believe that 1 of the lost tribes of Israel born of Leah and Jacob came to India and are now in the ruling elite ? Can the Jews gain redemption by allying with Right Wing Hindoos ? Can the Jews use the Hindoos against the Crescent and the Sickle ?
These are the verses in the diaries of the Nazis,and these verses were ALSO QUOTED in the Nuremberg Trials by the Nazis ! THE THEOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF GENOCIDE AND POGROMS !
I present Chapter 18 of the Bhagwad Gita !
When Krishna the Bhagvat was fed up trying to explain to “Arjuna the – why he “needed to exterminate his foes” – this was the “last attempt” in the 18th Chapter of the Gita – the logic is as under :
Lumen Naturale 1 – There are “5 precedents to sense-perception and action”
अधिष्ठानं तथा कर्ता करणं च पृथग्विधम्।
विविधाश्च पृथक्चेष्टा दैवं चैवात्र पञ्चमम्।।18.14।।
18.14 The locus as also the agent, the different kinds of organs, the many and distinct activities, and, the “divine is here the fifth”.
EXPLANATION – THE POINT IS THAT UNLIKE ISLAM WHERE A MAN IS LIABLE FOR HIS ACTIONS – HERE – THE GITA STATES THAT THERE IS NO CONCEPT OF VOLITION OR CHOICE – AS ALL THAT,A SO CALLED HUMAN DOES,IS BASED ON THE EXTERNAL IMPULSE OF PERCEPTION,OR A DIVINE INSTRUCTION. Hence, there is no such thing as SENTIENCE,and HUMANS are no more than ROBOTS.
Lumen Naturale 2 – There “5 are causes of all action” and are “independent of the mind and body dualism” of Descartes and “also the Soul “!
मूल श्लोकः शरीरवाङ्मनोभिर्यत्कर्म प्रारभते नरः। न्याय्यं वा विपरीतं वा पञ्चैते तस्य हेतवः।।18.15।।
18.15 For whatever action a man undertakes by his body, speech and mind, whether right or wrong,i.e., enjoined or forbidden by the Sastras, “the following five”, are its causes:
EXPLANATION – HERE THE POINT TO NOTE IS THAT,EVERY ACTION HAS A CAUSE.EVERY GENOCIDE HAD ITS WARRANT WRITTEN,IN A PRIOR OR A PRIOI CAUSE.ALSO,EVEN A THJOUGHT IN THE MIND HAS ITS ORIGIN IN 5 CAUSES ! HENCE,THERE IS NO ORIGINAL THOUGHT OR FREE ACTION – AND THE SAME APPLIES TO THE NAZI GENOCIDE
Lumen Naturale 3 – 18.16 But the fool who supposes, because of his immature judgment, that it is his own Self alone that acts, he perverts the truth and does not see rightly.
तत्रैवं सति कर्तारमात्मानं केवलं तु यः।
पश्यत्यकृतबुद्धित्वान्न स पश्यति दुर्मतिः।।18.16।।
EXPLANATION – TO EVEN THINK (LET ALONE REPENT) THAT A MAN IS THE “CAUSE” OF HIS ACTIONS OR IS “RESPONSIBLE” FOR THE SAME – IS FOOLISH.This RHYMES with the Jesus Complex – that Jesus died for the SINS OF HUMANITY – as the SINS of HUMANITY were the actions of GOD,and so,GOD SACRIFICED HIS SON,for the SINS OF HUMANIY (and the suffering of HUMANITY).BUT THE SINS AND SUFFERINGS CONTINUE ! It is a fact that EITHER Jesus came to India or Hindoo Godmen were in Babylon and Jerusalem – at the time of Jesus !
In essence,the Nazi theory is that the Jew Genocide was ordained,and is reposited in the Book of Isaiah,and the Curse on the lineage of Solomon.So Himmler posited that HIS ACTIONS were the actions of the 5TH ELEMENT – WHICH IS THE DIVINE.
Lumen Naturale 4– Hence,you can “kill,murder and rape” – provided it is done with “no ego and no feelings “- for it is the “Act of the Divine” ! Just like the Nazis ! “Heil Krishna,the Bhagwat “!
यस्य नाहंकृतो भावो बुद्धिर्यस्य न लिप्यते।
हत्वापि स इमाँल्लोकान्न हन्ति न निबध्यते।।18.17।।
18.17 He who has not the “feeling of egoism”, whose intellect is not tainted, he does not kill, nor does he become bound-“even by killing these creatures” !
EXPLANATION – KILL WITHOUT MERCY,WITHOUT REMORSE,WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION, WITHOUT EMOTION, WITHOUT EGO,WITHOUT INTELLECTUAL TAINT (means that there is no need to defend the actions) …
IF YOU FOLLOW THE ABOVE SOP, YOU ARE KILLING – BUT YOU ARE “NOT” AND YOU ARE “NOT BOUND”, WHICH MEANS THAT,YOU ARE “NOT LIABLE”,AS THE ACTIONS ARE DUE TO,THE “5TH ELEMENT”.
LASTLY,YOU ARE NOT KILLING HUMANS – BUT “CREATURES” AS THEY HAVE NO SOUL OR CONSCIENCE – AS THEIR THOUGHT,SPEECH AND ACTIONS,ARE DUE TO THE 5TH ELEMENT – AND IT IS THE 5TH ELEMENT, WHICH WILL DECIDE,WHEN AND HOW THESE CREATURES,WILL DIE OR BE KILLED !
IS THIS A MANUAL FOR GENOCIDE ? DO THESE VERSES EXIST IN THE TORAH OR THE TALMUD OR NUMBERS or DEUTERONOMY ? dindooohindoo
WHAT ARE THE JEWS THINKING ? IS THERE A WORD ABOUT ON THE VIRTUES OF HINDOOSTHAN BY MAIMONIDES OR ANY OTHER RABBI ?
IDEAS COME FROM THE STRANGEST OF PLACES
Tellingly, you omit the Democratic side of this. Ruy Teixera of the Center for American Progress has for years openly advocated for white replacement. So it's not just an irrational or even racist fear but an actual Democratic policy of racial replacement propounded again and again. It marches ahead under the banner of generating a "coalition of the ascendant" in which the "ascendant" are specifically defined as people of color in alliance with the oligarchy.
Also tellingly, you omit the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the seminal event that made Teixera's project possible with an enormous and unprecedented flood of immigrants from parts of the world that hadn't previously contributed much to the national makeup. You give the impression that there was just this agentless, organic flow of migrants, a perfectly natural development that any reasonable person should have passively accepted.
Meanwhile, various studies of white resistance start from the premise that it's some kind of mysterious malady or just outright racism since there couldn't possibly be any kind of rational cause. The fact that in most of the years since Hart-Celler Americans who pleaded in poll after poll for less immigration were ignored by their supposed representatives in Congress is not even a matter worthy of mention.