The genuflection from the tech leaders was absolutely, fundamentally anti-American. If there is one thing, one ideal, that should be at the core of what binds us it is that we bow to no king. We need more elites remembering that (and showing some goddamn spine).
From an outside perspective; I can't help but think that America's rejection of kings (being state power) often came together with too big a veneration of other forms of power, specifically economic and religious, thereby creating (lesser) kings (I guess you could call it an aristocracy) in the form of business and cult leaders (maybe even the supreme court, as judicial power). People, in recent decades, weren't critical enough towards extreme wealth, and the power that generates. Now we can see that power is power, is power; no matter whether it's economic, or religious, or whatever; too much power (correlated to too much money) in the hands of a small elite will eventually go wrong. State power has entirely been co-opted by money (whereas in the past the state was still enough of a counterbalance, for example through much higher taxes, but also other tours de force such as breaking up the robber barons' businesses, or forcing Bell to invest heavily in fundamental research (while handing it a monopoly, admittedly). Even the supreme court has become highly political (with some of them coming at it from a religious basis). Not enough checks and balances in all directions. The only reason the tech leaders genuflected is because they knew it would give them more sovereignty in their own domains (or kingdoms, if you wish). And that's exactly what's happening: crypto kings are given free reigns to scam, techlords are allowed to do as they please in their fiefdoms, etc.
I think there is a very hard reckoning coming for the tech industry, unless we live in the truly dark timeline. A lot of people aren't going to understand what's happening to them.
I really enjoyed this piece Noah and I hope you're right in your optimism. But looking on from Europe - both with our own history and experiences and with an outside view on the US - I worry.
A few general thoughts:
• Reagan’s line is powerful, but it isn’t unique to America anymore. Many European countries have also become hugely more propositional in recent decades. This may be hard to see / feel from the US at times, but it's really a sea change (and there's also a bit more complexity to their historical identity formation, but that's beyond this post).
• I would strongly contest your claim that these types of vertical communities are a new phenomenon. Some good examples of very powerful enduring vertical communities well beyond place and geography are the European aristocracy, religious sects and even religion more generally (from Calvinists to Puritans to world religions), but also Renaissance intellectuals, Enlightenment scientists and many more. All created strong identities that went far beyond geography and often very deliberately tried to distinguish themselves from their immediate surroundings. And that's also why I worry that these ties and imagined vertical communities might actually prove way stronger than you think. The idea of whole nations tied so closely to place formed really strongly in the 18th–20th centuries. It's not certain at all that this will easily and quickly prevail in the coming years over other streams.
• An additional thing that deeply troubles me is how much of the language and concepts first used by the woke movement - “allies,” “heritage,” hierarchies of groups and what they are “due” - is now being copied by the far right. And arguably, they have a way more powerful and terrible way to use and leverage it. That was always the risk and why it was so dangerous for progressives to move into the territory of group-based identity and rights. Now we see that come due and progressive public intellectuals have prepared the ground for these ideas in America.
"An additional thing that deeply troubles is how much of the language and concepts first used by the woke movement - “allies,” “heritage,” hierarchies of groups and what they are “due” - is now being copied by the far right. And arguably, they have a way more powerful and terrible way to use and leverage it."
Yep, that's accurate. Much of the new right wing theory is basically critical theory. Kind of silly that progressives created this nuclear bomb and thought their enemies would never use it.
Indeed. At times, it seemed particularly insane from Europe.
Having some - admittedly extreme - critical race proponents campaign against interracial marriage or relationships, for example, seemed particularly crazy.
The are things that the civil right movement had to campaign for decades to enshrine them as individual rights, built on the fights of its forebears for centuries. And then people with all these rights adopt ideas and language that “keep the race pure” theorists would have been delighted with. Utter lunacy.
Of course their perspective and aim was different, I get that. But at the latest at that point, it should have dawned on people that subordinating individual rights to race-based categories and groups is just a bad idea, full stop.
The far-right, of course, is delighted that this whole way of thinking and speaking has now become very much mainstream in the public debate.
The far left has been obsessed with figuring out which group has been “victimized” and how to condone for that for quite a while now. The far right is now responding with its own theses who has “achieved” more. Both are ultimately arbitrating which group is more “deserving” and why.
And both is light years away from the founding creed of the US and a liberal society.
During the civil rights movement, people were optimistic that the gaps between blacks and whites would soon vanish. But by the 1990s it was clear that wasn’t happening. Academics then leaned on critical theory to explain the gaps, with ideas such as structural racism and white privilege. That opened Pandora’s box to view society as teeming with hidden systems of power and domination.
An example of this thinking used on the right is the Great Replacement, which posits that whites are victims of mass migration and demographic change, imposed on them by a ruling class of globalist elites.
Right-wingers have always operated on the notion of group-based identity, and much more so, because their political movement is actually about excluding those who don't belong to the appropriate groups. Their political brilliance in the 2010s was convincing naive people that the Democrats were the only ones who cared about group identity, and obfuscating the fact that Dems were trying (clumsily) to build a "big tent" politics rather than an exclusionary one that relies on deportations.
I'm not saying that the Dems didn't make this easy for the right. But it's really important to understand that this is not a matter of "the right is suddenly acting like the left" because they're not. They're just opportunistically taking advantage of the left's political moment, and realizing their vision with military-style violence rather than Tweets. (Same thing can be said about the right's politically-adept attempt to own the term "free speech", which immediately turned out to involve censorship and media control, because the right never cared about true free speech.)
There's always been this undercurrent, no question. But in the US in particular it's often been held in check - also on the right - by appeals to individual rights and liberties.
I would even say that historically speaking, it's been one of the great strengths of the US that its more right-wing and conservative coded politics tended to be more liberally (and libertarian) minded than focus too much in group identities and exclusion.
But lately, it has very much been the (far) left that has championed the case for seeing lots of societal developments through the lense of race and group-based identity. There have been many very explicit calls why certain groups should atone while other people should get lots of benefits only by virtue of their group identity.
It's too easy to wish these things away. It's been a strong stream on the left.
So I've decided that the real problem here is that I live on Earth 1, and most of the Substack commentariat lives on Earth 832402. Here on Earth 1, the following things are happening: (1) an authoritarian right-wing government is trying to take control of the Federal government, (2) masked, unidentified Federal troops are roaming the US and arresting people who look like they might not be white, (3) people (some with green cards and visas) are being arrested renditioned to foreign prisons and conflict zones that they don't come from, (4) Federal troops are roaming the peaceful streets of American cities, and more appear to be on the way. Oh yes, (5) the President is trying to reverse clauses of the Constitution via executive order, and the Supreme Court appears to blocking any attempt to constrain him. On Earth 1, whatever constraint the "liberal and libertarian"-minded strains of the Right might have placed on the movement seem to be long gone.
On Earth 1 we also have some kooky Left-wing people. For the most part they have no real formal power at all. Some of them spent the last few years Tweeting and supporting various identity-based causes (on Twitter), causes that are now being systematically crushed by the iron fist of government power. I believe a few Starbucks might have gotten unionized along the way.
I don't know what it's like on Earth 832402. I can only imagine that the Left is ascendant and is doing some genuinely meaningful and horrible things to discriminate against various disapproved-of races. I can't fully visualize this world because it's so different than the Earth that I live in, but I send you my best wishes.
All of what you're writing is correct. And perhaps it would have happened anyway, that's quite likely.
These developments are not the fault of the left nor caused by them and I'm certainly not saying that.
I'm just saying that the language and concepts now used (again) by the far right were in many ways popularized in the last decade or so also by the left - not just far left, but also more progressive voices who also took up lots of the language and causes.
Perhaps that was a irrelevant. But perhaps, championing the case of a liberal society and of individual rights - not pushing group-based narratives - might have helped the Dems in elections and prevented some of the right-wing populist overreach.
It's still the responsibility and shame of right-wing America to have gone so far done the rabbit hole, no question at all. But it's good to ask oneself once in a while what one might do differently strategically to make such outcomes less likely.
I guess the difference is that here on Earth 1, I saw a lot of people fighting like goblins for a liberal society full of individual rights over the last decade. It was pretty inspiring. I'm sorry this didn't happen on Earth 832402.
I'm usually happy to get behind the "people were pretty annoying on Twitter" narrative, because it's true. A specific place I'm happy to disagree with the "the Left is wrong for caring about racial issues" Substack pseudo-consensus is that, during the 2020s, various videos kept coming out of cops behaving like monsters to people of other races. It was pretty upsetting, since cops generally don't behave like that (or get away with it) when white people are involved. But when lots of people protested about it, there was a huge backlash *in favor of unaccountable police murder* and we were informed that being upset about it was "identity-based politics." I tend to think those people are wrong and bad.
Coincidentally (I don't think) we now have even more unaccountable Federal cops roaming the streets doing things to non-white people, and I have a funny feeling it's only a matter of time before they become color blind.
But nobody said that things like the #blacklivematters protests or caring deeply how to improve the safety, rights and living conditions of those who are most disadvantaged isn't the right thing to do - it absolutely is! And everyone who does stand up for is commendable!
That's what the civil rights movement was all about and centuries of fights for a liberal and a caring society.
There are simply different arguments and streams. And one that's become more prominent - on Twitter, but not only - sought to reach many of these goals by very explicitly, loudly, and clearly making it about race and groups fighting for power against each other.
This has historically always been a view and tactic of far-right movements. Why anyone on the the left would adopt and further it as the main lense to look at society is beyond me.
So the left is absolutely right to care about race issues! And not just about that. Also about LGBTQIA issues, human rights issues, women's rights issues, mental health issues, the environment, the climate, working conditions, the lot of it.
And there's a way to champion these causes and at least aim to get everyone on board (and historically, the left has been great at that!). And there are ways to do it by assigning blame and guilt and trying to assert power.
I think the latter is the way for the left to fall out of favor and structurally favors the right, why it is not a smart move to do. Yet many (by far not all, but many) prominent voices on the left did go down that road and I daresay it did not help in electoral politics.
Which truly is a shame because it threw the country to the wolves, repeatedly. This is *not* the fault of the left (people are responsible for their own choices). But I do wish the left had found ways to appeal more effectively to broader swathes of society instead of adopting a framing that would suit the right so very well.
"That was always the risk and why it was so dangerous for progressives to move into the territory of group-based identity and rights"
1000% agreed here. Identity based politics is poison. It was horrible for Dems to use for years to inflame racial tensions, and now it's horrible when the right does it too.
I can assure you that there is no such thing as a Heritage American. My wife’s relative traced her family to the Mayflower. As god is my witness, she puts her jeans on the same way other women put their jeans on. She leaves her hair in the sink after blow-drying it. She is not some super American. In fact Stephen Miller would probably love to deport her.
She is a recently retired schoolteacher, mostly center-left in her politics, and has no unusual skills or mental acuity that millions of other Americans possess. The idea itself is anti-American. It is repulsive as a matter of fact.
National Populists are attempting to create a special group of Americans that can accrue some mantle of being a more legitimate American. This is nothing different; we’ve seen it before.
The Aryan Nation of Germany attempted this; it ended badly. This, too, will end badly.
I hadn’t heard the phrase “propositional nation” before. But it seems like it is directly intended as an attack on Abraham Lincoln, who said
“our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Apparently these people are trying to prove Lincoln wrong, by saying that no nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (or to any other proposition) can long endure. It really is one of the most explicitly anti-American things I’ve heard!
You might as well add from the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." A sentiment that has (ahem) often been honored in the breach, but even in 1776 the idea was endorsed that there *aren't* distinct categories of humans, some of whom are inherently excluded from The American People.
Also, the historical term is "un-American". That was widely used during the Red Scare. But as someone noted, you can't accuse an ethnic Frenchman of doing something "un-French" because he is, by definition, French. But since the US is a propositional country, an American who talks of "Heritage Americans" *can* be accused of "an un-American abomination".
On this argument, the online right simply don’t have the numbers on their side. They can’t even call the current president a heritage American, nor many of his loyal associates. I would love to know what percent of Americans have majority colonial British ancestry, but I am guessing it can’t be more than 20%.
Great article. The irony is that the ancestors of many Americans were forced to leave Europe for failing to adhere to good old-fashioned European values: like enforced military subscription in the case of grandpa Trump, formally banished after he skipped the country to avoid conscription into the German army and religious conformity in the case of that notorious fifth column, the Mayflower Pilgrims. At least young Donald maintained the family tradition of draft-dodging.
All of this was obviously predictable. All groups but whites were encouraged to advocate for themselves as a race. Mass migration changed the racial demographics of the country. White people were constantly blamed for all disparities between groups. Whiteness was declared a moral evil. Not really shocking that whites would start advocating on their own behalf.
It gets odd though. Yeah, DEI has gone overboard. But the NatCons don't seem to be advocating for white people explicitly. Reading the rants, a lot of them admit that blacks whose ancestors have been in the US for 300 years have to be admitted as Heritage Americans. And of course there are the Native Americans. (I'm sure some fraction of the NatCons really wants to throw out anyone who isn't "white", but that's dangerous to say out loud. It's also ambiguous -- the definition of "white" has been expanded to include a lot of people who weren't "white" in 1900.)
I think an important reframe the Democrats need is to drop an excessive focus on multicuturalism which has become "anti-integration" (tinged with far Lefty favors of America is Bad, Racist Society) and much more integrationist but with a welcoming arms flavor. It's a nuance but more patriotic, positive, American culture celebrating but also open to integration would help in framing.
I know what a Heritage American is. He (it's usually a he) is a loser who can't convince women to date him, thinks living in a white ethnostate will somehow magically solve that problem, and is concocting the concept of "Heritage American" as a way of working backward from that desired outcome.
That is far too narrow and slides into the failed "MAGA are stupid bigots" framing.
Certainly that's a component.
There are also certainly other components that feel the Left is anti-them anti-America and anti-integration (in the sense of acculturation). And they are not wrong for a segment certainly
Changing that brand perception should be key and writing off the reaction to purely Incel Bigotry is going to continue a failed approach (that ironically makes the Incel more attractive as a pitch)
There's a lot I can get on board with as far as being more accommodating to conservative views. The idea that your white (and let's not kid purselves, they mean white people) ancestry entitles you to privileged, superior status is beyond that point.
I call bullshit. Saying "some people deserve a more privileged status on account of their ancestry" is what racism is. EDIT: You can absolutely have non-racist conservative arguments for opposing immigration. The "Heritage American" framing goes way beyond that.
Happiness equals reality minus expectations. I got stuck in a dysfunctional community, my parents didn’t prepare me for the complexity of life, I was sold to build a goods about what I am and I’m not entitled to, politicians recklessly and naively destroyed the social fabric that sustained me, and all of a sudden these immigrants show up and outcompete me for status. Something must be done.
That’s all there is. As long as a group of people either sees immigrants as other, or believe it’s status is lower, it will invent framework after framework after framework to blame someone for their situations. Because that’s what humans do. Maybe it’s a consequence of our brains being wired for zero some thinking, but that’s all there is. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than this, and memes of pioneer wagons or George Washington or tea party or constitution or not constitution are all just kabuki.
We literally watched a cartoon every Saturday morning over our cereal about how the country was a great melting pot. We cannot let these theocratic fascists steal our country and way of life.
1. The recognition that we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted.
2 . That we citizens of that nation, the first in human history to define ourselves at our inception as the one in which 'We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the compassion, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the humor, the wisdom, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much equity and justice as is humanly possible.
3. That if anything is to hold us together as the nation we were designed to be, it is that only in accepting and embracing our diversity can we understand our potential as a nation. Only in accepting our differences can we achieve the new kind unity that we pioneered - that is real the ‘American exceptionalism’.
Before the Civil War, it was common to refer to ourselves as ‘these United States’. Afterwards we began to move toward The United States. Thus Lincoln was right when he told us that our primary goal as Americans was attention and dedication to 'the great task remaining before us’ - that government of (all) the people, by (all) the people, and for (all) the People shall not perish from the earth.
The real problem with so many of us today is that we not only don’t understand that, but that far too many of us are unutterably opposed to it - starting with the orange topped Opposer-in-Chief.
I good friend of mine moved to the UK: and is convinced that the UK is just far less racist than the US. This was based on personal experience, and he lived in Washington, DC. His wife is from China, and all his kids are Asian. So while I am glad your friend did not experience much racism, I cannot accept that this is a universal opinion.
That being said: I am gay, and nobody in my life has ever hurled a slur at me. I have faced hateful people, but they are emphatically a minority. So I 100% agree that things have gotten (much) better here, and we're one of the more accepting nations in the world. I agree that we're a propositional country, and that there is a lot more to us than just being "a people from a particular place" as Vance defines us.
But of course: the answer is NOT that we're 'just' a propositional people: we're both. Americans are a people from a particular place, with a particular culture and a heritage. What makes us DIFFERENT, however, from most is that it's really easy for others to show up and share in living here. Vance SHOULD accept that easily since his wife's family is from India. The fact he can't baffles me.
"I good friend of mine moved to the UK: and is convinced that the UK is just far less racist than the US. This was based on personal experience, and he lived in Washington, DC. His wife is from China, and all his kids are Asian. So while I am glad your friend did not experience much racism, I cannot accept that this is a universal opinion."
Did he note the recent anti-immigrant riots they've had in the UK? Does not look like it's going well, and they certainly look to be cruising for a Farage prime ministership at some point soon.
He moved away many years ago. I do not agree with his assessment fully (he also lives in London which I imagine is different than the UK as a whole) I’m simply pointing out that experiences differ a lot
The genuflection from the tech leaders was absolutely, fundamentally anti-American. If there is one thing, one ideal, that should be at the core of what binds us it is that we bow to no king. We need more elites remembering that (and showing some goddamn spine).
From an outside perspective; I can't help but think that America's rejection of kings (being state power) often came together with too big a veneration of other forms of power, specifically economic and religious, thereby creating (lesser) kings (I guess you could call it an aristocracy) in the form of business and cult leaders (maybe even the supreme court, as judicial power). People, in recent decades, weren't critical enough towards extreme wealth, and the power that generates. Now we can see that power is power, is power; no matter whether it's economic, or religious, or whatever; too much power (correlated to too much money) in the hands of a small elite will eventually go wrong. State power has entirely been co-opted by money (whereas in the past the state was still enough of a counterbalance, for example through much higher taxes, but also other tours de force such as breaking up the robber barons' businesses, or forcing Bell to invest heavily in fundamental research (while handing it a monopoly, admittedly). Even the supreme court has become highly political (with some of them coming at it from a religious basis). Not enough checks and balances in all directions. The only reason the tech leaders genuflected is because they knew it would give them more sovereignty in their own domains (or kingdoms, if you wish). And that's exactly what's happening: crypto kings are given free reigns to scam, techlords are allowed to do as they please in their fiefdoms, etc.
Perhaps in that way American republicanism was too much like Roman republicanism?
Great point!
Elon Musk skipped (but sent a representative). Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sam Altman did attend.
Not to date myself, but this is starting to seem like Kremlinology!
I think there is a very hard reckoning coming for the tech industry, unless we live in the truly dark timeline. A lot of people aren't going to understand what's happening to them.
LOL. It's also the industry that doesn't go begging to the government for bailout money when things go south.
I really enjoyed this piece Noah and I hope you're right in your optimism. But looking on from Europe - both with our own history and experiences and with an outside view on the US - I worry.
A few general thoughts:
• Reagan’s line is powerful, but it isn’t unique to America anymore. Many European countries have also become hugely more propositional in recent decades. This may be hard to see / feel from the US at times, but it's really a sea change (and there's also a bit more complexity to their historical identity formation, but that's beyond this post).
• I would strongly contest your claim that these types of vertical communities are a new phenomenon. Some good examples of very powerful enduring vertical communities well beyond place and geography are the European aristocracy, religious sects and even religion more generally (from Calvinists to Puritans to world religions), but also Renaissance intellectuals, Enlightenment scientists and many more. All created strong identities that went far beyond geography and often very deliberately tried to distinguish themselves from their immediate surroundings. And that's also why I worry that these ties and imagined vertical communities might actually prove way stronger than you think. The idea of whole nations tied so closely to place formed really strongly in the 18th–20th centuries. It's not certain at all that this will easily and quickly prevail in the coming years over other streams.
• An additional thing that deeply troubles me is how much of the language and concepts first used by the woke movement - “allies,” “heritage,” hierarchies of groups and what they are “due” - is now being copied by the far right. And arguably, they have a way more powerful and terrible way to use and leverage it. That was always the risk and why it was so dangerous for progressives to move into the territory of group-based identity and rights. Now we see that come due and progressive public intellectuals have prepared the ground for these ideas in America.
Would be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
"An additional thing that deeply troubles is how much of the language and concepts first used by the woke movement - “allies,” “heritage,” hierarchies of groups and what they are “due” - is now being copied by the far right. And arguably, they have a way more powerful and terrible way to use and leverage it."
Yep, that's accurate. Much of the new right wing theory is basically critical theory. Kind of silly that progressives created this nuclear bomb and thought their enemies would never use it.
Indeed. At times, it seemed particularly insane from Europe.
Having some - admittedly extreme - critical race proponents campaign against interracial marriage or relationships, for example, seemed particularly crazy.
The are things that the civil right movement had to campaign for decades to enshrine them as individual rights, built on the fights of its forebears for centuries. And then people with all these rights adopt ideas and language that “keep the race pure” theorists would have been delighted with. Utter lunacy.
Of course their perspective and aim was different, I get that. But at the latest at that point, it should have dawned on people that subordinating individual rights to race-based categories and groups is just a bad idea, full stop.
The far-right, of course, is delighted that this whole way of thinking and speaking has now become very much mainstream in the public debate.
The far left has been obsessed with figuring out which group has been “victimized” and how to condone for that for quite a while now. The far right is now responding with its own theses who has “achieved” more. Both are ultimately arbitrating which group is more “deserving” and why.
And both is light years away from the founding creed of the US and a liberal society.
During the civil rights movement, people were optimistic that the gaps between blacks and whites would soon vanish. But by the 1990s it was clear that wasn’t happening. Academics then leaned on critical theory to explain the gaps, with ideas such as structural racism and white privilege. That opened Pandora’s box to view society as teeming with hidden systems of power and domination.
An example of this thinking used on the right is the Great Replacement, which posits that whites are victims of mass migration and demographic change, imposed on them by a ruling class of globalist elites.
That's a fascinating comparison that never occurred to me.
Right-wingers have always operated on the notion of group-based identity, and much more so, because their political movement is actually about excluding those who don't belong to the appropriate groups. Their political brilliance in the 2010s was convincing naive people that the Democrats were the only ones who cared about group identity, and obfuscating the fact that Dems were trying (clumsily) to build a "big tent" politics rather than an exclusionary one that relies on deportations.
I'm not saying that the Dems didn't make this easy for the right. But it's really important to understand that this is not a matter of "the right is suddenly acting like the left" because they're not. They're just opportunistically taking advantage of the left's political moment, and realizing their vision with military-style violence rather than Tweets. (Same thing can be said about the right's politically-adept attempt to own the term "free speech", which immediately turned out to involve censorship and media control, because the right never cared about true free speech.)
Well, yes and no.
There's always been this undercurrent, no question. But in the US in particular it's often been held in check - also on the right - by appeals to individual rights and liberties.
I would even say that historically speaking, it's been one of the great strengths of the US that its more right-wing and conservative coded politics tended to be more liberally (and libertarian) minded than focus too much in group identities and exclusion.
But lately, it has very much been the (far) left that has championed the case for seeing lots of societal developments through the lense of race and group-based identity. There have been many very explicit calls why certain groups should atone while other people should get lots of benefits only by virtue of their group identity.
It's too easy to wish these things away. It's been a strong stream on the left.
So I've decided that the real problem here is that I live on Earth 1, and most of the Substack commentariat lives on Earth 832402. Here on Earth 1, the following things are happening: (1) an authoritarian right-wing government is trying to take control of the Federal government, (2) masked, unidentified Federal troops are roaming the US and arresting people who look like they might not be white, (3) people (some with green cards and visas) are being arrested renditioned to foreign prisons and conflict zones that they don't come from, (4) Federal troops are roaming the peaceful streets of American cities, and more appear to be on the way. Oh yes, (5) the President is trying to reverse clauses of the Constitution via executive order, and the Supreme Court appears to blocking any attempt to constrain him. On Earth 1, whatever constraint the "liberal and libertarian"-minded strains of the Right might have placed on the movement seem to be long gone.
On Earth 1 we also have some kooky Left-wing people. For the most part they have no real formal power at all. Some of them spent the last few years Tweeting and supporting various identity-based causes (on Twitter), causes that are now being systematically crushed by the iron fist of government power. I believe a few Starbucks might have gotten unionized along the way.
I don't know what it's like on Earth 832402. I can only imagine that the Left is ascendant and is doing some genuinely meaningful and horrible things to discriminate against various disapproved-of races. I can't fully visualize this world because it's so different than the Earth that I live in, but I send you my best wishes.
All of what you're writing is correct. And perhaps it would have happened anyway, that's quite likely.
These developments are not the fault of the left nor caused by them and I'm certainly not saying that.
I'm just saying that the language and concepts now used (again) by the far right were in many ways popularized in the last decade or so also by the left - not just far left, but also more progressive voices who also took up lots of the language and causes.
Perhaps that was a irrelevant. But perhaps, championing the case of a liberal society and of individual rights - not pushing group-based narratives - might have helped the Dems in elections and prevented some of the right-wing populist overreach.
It's still the responsibility and shame of right-wing America to have gone so far done the rabbit hole, no question at all. But it's good to ask oneself once in a while what one might do differently strategically to make such outcomes less likely.
I guess the difference is that here on Earth 1, I saw a lot of people fighting like goblins for a liberal society full of individual rights over the last decade. It was pretty inspiring. I'm sorry this didn't happen on Earth 832402.
I'm usually happy to get behind the "people were pretty annoying on Twitter" narrative, because it's true. A specific place I'm happy to disagree with the "the Left is wrong for caring about racial issues" Substack pseudo-consensus is that, during the 2020s, various videos kept coming out of cops behaving like monsters to people of other races. It was pretty upsetting, since cops generally don't behave like that (or get away with it) when white people are involved. But when lots of people protested about it, there was a huge backlash *in favor of unaccountable police murder* and we were informed that being upset about it was "identity-based politics." I tend to think those people are wrong and bad.
Coincidentally (I don't think) we now have even more unaccountable Federal cops roaming the streets doing things to non-white people, and I have a funny feeling it's only a matter of time before they become color blind.
Absolutely.
But nobody said that things like the #blacklivematters protests or caring deeply how to improve the safety, rights and living conditions of those who are most disadvantaged isn't the right thing to do - it absolutely is! And everyone who does stand up for is commendable!
That's what the civil rights movement was all about and centuries of fights for a liberal and a caring society.
There are simply different arguments and streams. And one that's become more prominent - on Twitter, but not only - sought to reach many of these goals by very explicitly, loudly, and clearly making it about race and groups fighting for power against each other.
This has historically always been a view and tactic of far-right movements. Why anyone on the the left would adopt and further it as the main lense to look at society is beyond me.
So the left is absolutely right to care about race issues! And not just about that. Also about LGBTQIA issues, human rights issues, women's rights issues, mental health issues, the environment, the climate, working conditions, the lot of it.
And there's a way to champion these causes and at least aim to get everyone on board (and historically, the left has been great at that!). And there are ways to do it by assigning blame and guilt and trying to assert power.
I think the latter is the way for the left to fall out of favor and structurally favors the right, why it is not a smart move to do. Yet many (by far not all, but many) prominent voices on the left did go down that road and I daresay it did not help in electoral politics.
Which truly is a shame because it threw the country to the wolves, repeatedly. This is *not* the fault of the left (people are responsible for their own choices). But I do wish the left had found ways to appeal more effectively to broader swathes of society instead of adopting a framing that would suit the right so very well.
That's just it.
"That was always the risk and why it was so dangerous for progressives to move into the territory of group-based identity and rights"
1000% agreed here. Identity based politics is poison. It was horrible for Dems to use for years to inflame racial tensions, and now it's horrible when the right does it too.
Noah
I can assure you that there is no such thing as a Heritage American. My wife’s relative traced her family to the Mayflower. As god is my witness, she puts her jeans on the same way other women put their jeans on. She leaves her hair in the sink after blow-drying it. She is not some super American. In fact Stephen Miller would probably love to deport her.
She is a recently retired schoolteacher, mostly center-left in her politics, and has no unusual skills or mental acuity that millions of other Americans possess. The idea itself is anti-American. It is repulsive as a matter of fact.
National Populists are attempting to create a special group of Americans that can accrue some mantle of being a more legitimate American. This is nothing different; we’ve seen it before.
The Aryan Nation of Germany attempted this; it ended badly. This, too, will end badly.
Indeed.
I hadn’t heard the phrase “propositional nation” before. But it seems like it is directly intended as an attack on Abraham Lincoln, who said
“our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Apparently these people are trying to prove Lincoln wrong, by saying that no nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (or to any other proposition) can long endure. It really is one of the most explicitly anti-American things I’ve heard!
You might as well add from the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." A sentiment that has (ahem) often been honored in the breach, but even in 1776 the idea was endorsed that there *aren't* distinct categories of humans, some of whom are inherently excluded from The American People.
Also, the historical term is "un-American". That was widely used during the Red Scare. But as someone noted, you can't accuse an ethnic Frenchman of doing something "un-French" because he is, by definition, French. But since the US is a propositional country, an American who talks of "Heritage Americans" *can* be accused of "an un-American abomination".
On this argument, the online right simply don’t have the numbers on their side. They can’t even call the current president a heritage American, nor many of his loyal associates. I would love to know what percent of Americans have majority colonial British ancestry, but I am guessing it can’t be more than 20%.
Bret Devereaux (an actual professional historian) chews through this in "My Country Isn’t a Nation" https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/ Indeed, the percentage is low.
Great article. The irony is that the ancestors of many Americans were forced to leave Europe for failing to adhere to good old-fashioned European values: like enforced military subscription in the case of grandpa Trump, formally banished after he skipped the country to avoid conscription into the German army and religious conformity in the case of that notorious fifth column, the Mayflower Pilgrims. At least young Donald maintained the family tradition of draft-dodging.
I believe Dr. Seuss described this phenomenon perfectly. See "Star Bellied Sneetches." It's a shame these Natcons didn't learn that as children.
All of this was obviously predictable. All groups but whites were encouraged to advocate for themselves as a race. Mass migration changed the racial demographics of the country. White people were constantly blamed for all disparities between groups. Whiteness was declared a moral evil. Not really shocking that whites would start advocating on their own behalf.
It gets odd though. Yeah, DEI has gone overboard. But the NatCons don't seem to be advocating for white people explicitly. Reading the rants, a lot of them admit that blacks whose ancestors have been in the US for 300 years have to be admitted as Heritage Americans. And of course there are the Native Americans. (I'm sure some fraction of the NatCons really wants to throw out anyone who isn't "white", but that's dangerous to say out loud. It's also ambiguous -- the definition of "white" has been expanded to include a lot of people who weren't "white" in 1900.)
I think an important reframe the Democrats need is to drop an excessive focus on multicuturalism which has become "anti-integration" (tinged with far Lefty favors of America is Bad, Racist Society) and much more integrationist but with a welcoming arms flavor. It's a nuance but more patriotic, positive, American culture celebrating but also open to integration would help in framing.
Not to mention it would help the Democrats get a *lot* more votes.
I know what a Heritage American is. He (it's usually a he) is a loser who can't convince women to date him, thinks living in a white ethnostate will somehow magically solve that problem, and is concocting the concept of "Heritage American" as a way of working backward from that desired outcome.
That is far too narrow and slides into the failed "MAGA are stupid bigots" framing.
Certainly that's a component.
There are also certainly other components that feel the Left is anti-them anti-America and anti-integration (in the sense of acculturation). And they are not wrong for a segment certainly
Changing that brand perception should be key and writing off the reaction to purely Incel Bigotry is going to continue a failed approach (that ironically makes the Incel more attractive as a pitch)
There's a lot I can get on board with as far as being more accommodating to conservative views. The idea that your white (and let's not kid purselves, they mean white people) ancestry entitles you to privileged, superior status is beyond that point.
And .... back to Wokey Woke condenscenation and collapsing everything into racism.
I call bullshit. Saying "some people deserve a more privileged status on account of their ancestry" is what racism is. EDIT: You can absolutely have non-racist conservative arguments for opposing immigration. The "Heritage American" framing goes way beyond that.
Happiness equals reality minus expectations. I got stuck in a dysfunctional community, my parents didn’t prepare me for the complexity of life, I was sold to build a goods about what I am and I’m not entitled to, politicians recklessly and naively destroyed the social fabric that sustained me, and all of a sudden these immigrants show up and outcompete me for status. Something must be done.
That’s all there is. As long as a group of people either sees immigrants as other, or believe it’s status is lower, it will invent framework after framework after framework to blame someone for their situations. Because that’s what humans do. Maybe it’s a consequence of our brains being wired for zero some thinking, but that’s all there is. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than this, and memes of pioneer wagons or George Washington or tea party or constitution or not constitution are all just kabuki.
Though the phrase is written "sold a bill of goods".
We literally watched a cartoon every Saturday morning over our cereal about how the country was a great melting pot. We cannot let these theocratic fascists steal our country and way of life.
Which cartoon are you referring to? A curious non-American asking.
It’s very 1970’s but I loved all of these as a kid https://youtu.be/IQ28jC6zG9k?si=0rBSHyzff1wCMsaV
So Trump whose mother was an immigrant, and who married 2/3 immigrants and whose father's parents were immigrant is not a real American. Good to know.
I’d suggest three criteria for any American.
1. The recognition that we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted.
2 . That we citizens of that nation, the first in human history to define ourselves at our inception as the one in which 'We the People’ might together find just enough of the courage, the honesty, the compassion, the understanding, the tolerance, the humility, the humor, the wisdom, and the sheer common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up with as much equity and justice as is humanly possible.
3. That if anything is to hold us together as the nation we were designed to be, it is that only in accepting and embracing our diversity can we understand our potential as a nation. Only in accepting our differences can we achieve the new kind unity that we pioneered - that is real the ‘American exceptionalism’.
Before the Civil War, it was common to refer to ourselves as ‘these United States’. Afterwards we began to move toward The United States. Thus Lincoln was right when he told us that our primary goal as Americans was attention and dedication to 'the great task remaining before us’ - that government of (all) the people, by (all) the people, and for (all) the People shall not perish from the earth.
The real problem with so many of us today is that we not only don’t understand that, but that far too many of us are unutterably opposed to it - starting with the orange topped Opposer-in-Chief.
I good friend of mine moved to the UK: and is convinced that the UK is just far less racist than the US. This was based on personal experience, and he lived in Washington, DC. His wife is from China, and all his kids are Asian. So while I am glad your friend did not experience much racism, I cannot accept that this is a universal opinion.
That being said: I am gay, and nobody in my life has ever hurled a slur at me. I have faced hateful people, but they are emphatically a minority. So I 100% agree that things have gotten (much) better here, and we're one of the more accepting nations in the world. I agree that we're a propositional country, and that there is a lot more to us than just being "a people from a particular place" as Vance defines us.
But of course: the answer is NOT that we're 'just' a propositional people: we're both. Americans are a people from a particular place, with a particular culture and a heritage. What makes us DIFFERENT, however, from most is that it's really easy for others to show up and share in living here. Vance SHOULD accept that easily since his wife's family is from India. The fact he can't baffles me.
"I good friend of mine moved to the UK: and is convinced that the UK is just far less racist than the US. This was based on personal experience, and he lived in Washington, DC. His wife is from China, and all his kids are Asian. So while I am glad your friend did not experience much racism, I cannot accept that this is a universal opinion."
Did he note the recent anti-immigrant riots they've had in the UK? Does not look like it's going well, and they certainly look to be cruising for a Farage prime ministership at some point soon.
He moved away many years ago. I do not agree with his assessment fully (he also lives in London which I imagine is different than the UK as a whole) I’m simply pointing out that experiences differ a lot
Many European countries don't do "blood and soil" anymore.