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nativism
Will the Right’s Anti-Immigrant, Divide-and-Conquer Tactics Work in 2024?
The economically and socially privileged and their political parties have long recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices.
Sep 26, 2024
In recent days, former U.S. President Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.
Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the Know Nothing movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the latter part of the 19th century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants (“the yellow peril”) and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots, and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations.
During the early 20th century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity for moral depravity, feeble-mindedness, and crime, and were polluting the “Nordic race.” As a result, many “old stock” Americans championed changes in immigration law to sharply reduce the number of these allegedly inferior people entering the country. Adopted in legislation during the 1920s, a new, highly discriminatory national origins quota system did, indeed, largely restrict their ability to enter the United States, leaving millions to perish in Europe after the onset of the Nazi terror.
Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the right.
Of course, many Americans, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, welcomed the arrival of people from foreign lands. And, in line with their views, U.S. immigration law was significantly liberalized in 1965.
We should also recognize that the United States was hardly unique in undergoing surges of anti-immigrant nativism. Indeed, over the centuries, recent arrivals in many countries experienced rampant xenophobia—including “Paki-bashing” in Britain and violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany. Recently, in fact, intense opposition to immigration and immigrants provided a key factor behind British public support for Brexit and the startling rise of previously marginal, hyper-nationalist parties in Europe.
What has inspired this hostility to people coming from other lands?
Many individuals, it seems, feel uneasy when confronted with the unfamiliar. Thus, they sometimes find differences in skin color, religion, language, or culture to be disturbing. Although some people can―and often do―find these things a welcome addition to their lives or, at least, interesting, others become uncomfortable. In these circumstances, immigrants are easily added to other disdained minority groups as victims of widespread misinformation, mistrust, and prejudice.
Unfortunately, this unease with human differences provides a ready-made opportunity for political exploitation. As many a demagogue or unscrupulous politician has learned, fear and hatred of the “other” can be effective in stirring up a mob or winning an election.
Although nativism has been mobilized by political parties and movements of varying political persuasions, it has appeared most frequently on the right. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s focused heavily on the supposed glories of their nation and the ostensible biological inferiority of people from other lands. This xenophobia provided a rightwing ideological component in numerous countries, including the United States, where groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the Nazi Party, and the America First movement lauded a mythical “Americanism” and assailed the foreign-born.
More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe’s parties of the far right, such as France’s National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy, and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Trump’s adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.
A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers’ pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning left, had significant popular appeal.
Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices (among them, hostility to immigrants), as this would divide the mass base of the left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide and conquer strategy―a strategy that sometimes worked.
Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it’s hard to say.
Meanwhile, though, it’s worth noting how ironic it is that, in the United States―a nation populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants―anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up by Trump and Vance, has once again come to the forefront of American politics.
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The Dehumanizing Cruelty at the Texas Border Is Part of a Larger GOP Pattern
While investigations should proceed to ensure accountability for those responsible for the horrors near the Rio Grande, we also need to fight against the other fronts of the GOP’s all-out nativist assault on our values.
Jul 25, 2023
Horrific details emerged last week of Texas state troopers deployed by Gov. Greg Abbott denying water to pregnant women and pushing children back into the Rio Grande and the accompanying dangers of deployed razor wire. The barriers are designed to harm and ensnare people seeking asylum in the U.S. Rather than treating it as a vile story that soon fades from the news and our consciousness, we must view the revelations through their larger context.
Unfortunately, it’s just the latest—and a particularly troubling—example of a larger pattern of dehumanizing, dangerous, and politically motivated nativism advanced by Republicans and right wing media. It’s predicated on a false portrayal of immigrants and asylum seekers as threats, invaders, and replacers. And its relentless and accompanying messaging barrage is helping to mainstream dangerous white nationalist conspiracies that are directly linked to real acts of deadly violence.
All of this should be a wake-up call about the consequences of dehumanizing immigrants and should be a focus of real and bipartisan accountability, alongside policy efforts focused on solutions to a broken immigration system. Instead, we expect Republicans to continue in a dangerous, alternate direction.
The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders.
While investigations should proceed to ensure accountability for those responsible for the horrors near the Rio Grande, we also need to fight against the other fronts of the GOP’s all-out nativist assault on our values and its dangerous implications for our country. This includes House Republicans’ effort to pursue a sham impeachment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—an effort that will hurtle forward this week when Secretary Mayorkas testifies before the House Judiciary Committee in the latest installment of right-wing alternate reality TV.
Keep in mind, domestic extremists—predominantly right-wing extremists—pose the greatest lethal terrorism threat to the U.S. per our government’s own assessments. Yet Republicans are intent to impeach the leader tasked with protecting our homeland, while basing their supposed case on immigration falsehoods, using many of the same talking points as the domestic extremists themselves.
This is impeachment over policy differences, and the GOP’s refusal to admit that their apocalyptic predictions about the end of Title 42 got it exactly backwards. Border encounter numbers have plummeted since the overdue end of Title 42, including because of new legal pathways announced by the Biden administration that alleviate border pressures and provide alternatives to the trek to the border.
Yet instead of acknowledging these facts, Republicans are suing to block these legal pathways while proceeding with their pre-baked attacks on Secretary Mayorkas as if their predictions got it right. None of the Republican alternative approaches would advance real solutions or move us closer to the full-scale modernization our immigration system needs—or even greater management and control—but the GOP keeps blocking anything like solutions.
The GOP prefers chaos and obstruction, designed to keep a sense of crisis involving non-white immigrants in the headlines and portraying “us” as under siege from threatening invaders. It’s dangerous, and it’s motivated by keeping the GOP base animated and inflamed. In reality, their latest impeachment push continues a political attack that GOP and right-wing leaders started long before President Joe Biden was even in office, when they blamed candidate Biden’s immigration policies for a rise in border encounters occurring during the Trump presidency.
It's all independent from the facts, moves us farther from the solutions we need, and opens the door to dangerous violence and dehumanizing treatment of immigrants by amplifying dangerous white nationalist conspiracies about “invasions” and an effort to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. In the 118th Congress alone, tracking by America’s Voice has revealed that 33 Republican Members of Congress have employed the “invasion” conspiracy, including GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee that Secretary Mayorkas will testify before.
From the horrific revelations emanating from Texas to the renewed sham impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, we need to fight against the dehumanization of immigrants and the normalization of extremism in all its forms.
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Trump, His Virus, and the Dark Age of Unreason
He's the latest in a long line of American demagogues but has come closest to the White House. That makes him the most dangerous of them all.
Jun 16, 2016
There's a virus infecting our politics and right now it's flourishing with a scarlet heat. It feeds on fear, paranoia and bigotry. All that was required for it to spread was a timely opportunity -- and an opportunist with no scruples.
There have been stretches of history when this virus lay dormant. Sometimes, it would flare up here and there, then fade away after a brief but fierce burst of fever. At other moments, it has spread with the speed of a firestorm, a pandemic consuming everything in its path, sucking away the oxygen of democracy and freedom.
Today its carrier is Donald Trump, but others came before him: narcissistic demagogues who lie and distort in pursuit of power and self-promotion. Bullies all, swaggering across the landscape with fistfuls of false promises, smears, innuendo and hatred for others, spite and spittle for anyone of a different race, faith, gender or nationality.
In America, the virus has taken many forms: "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, the South Carolina governor and senator who led vigilante terror attacks with a gang called the Red Shirts and praised the efficiency of lynch mobs; radio's charismatic Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic, pro-Fascist Catholic priest who reached an audience of up to 30 million with his attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal; Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who vilified ethnic minorities and deplored the "mongrelization" of the white race; Louisiana's corrupt and dictatorial Huey Long, who promised to make "Every Man a King." And of course, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate who vowed, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Note that many of these men leavened their gospel of hate and their lust for power with populism -- giving the people hospitals, schools and highways. Father Coughlin spoke up for organized labor. Both he and Huey Long campaigned for the redistribution of wealth. Tillman even sponsored the first national campaign-finance reform law, the Tillman Act, in 1907, banning corporate contributions to federal candidates.
But their populism was tinged with poison -- a pernicious nativism that called for building walls to keep out people and ideas they didn't like.
Which brings us back to Trump and the hotheaded, ego-swollen provocateur he most resembles: Joseph McCarthy, US senator from Wisconsin -- until now perhaps our most destructive demagogue. In the 1950s, this madman terrorized and divided the nation with false or grossly exaggerated tales of treason and subversion -- stirring the witches' brew of anti-Communist hysteria with lies and manufactured accusations that ruined innocent people and their families. "I have here in my hand a list," he would claim -- a list of supposed Reds in the State Department or the military. No one knew whose names were there, nor would he say, but it was enough to shatter lives and careers.
In the end, McCarthy was brought down. A brave journalist called him out on the same television airwaves that helped the senator become a powerful, national sensation. It was Edward R. Murrow, and at the end of an episode exposing McCarthy on his CBS series See It Now, Murrow said:
"It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
There also was the brave and moral lawyer Joseph Welch, acting as chief counsel to the US Army after it was targeted for one of McCarthy's inquisitions. When McCarthy smeared one of his young associates, Welch responded in full view of the TV and newsreel cameras during hearings in the Senate. "You've done enough," Welch said. "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?... If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further."
It was a devastating moment. Finally, McCarthy's fellow senators -- including a handful of brave Republicans -- turned on him, putting an end to the reign of terror. It was 1954. A motion to censure McCarthy passed 67-22, and the junior senator from Wisconsin was finished. He soon disappeared from the front pages and, three years later, was dead.
Here's something McCarthy said that could have come straight out of the Trump playbook: "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled." Sounds just like The Donald, right? Interestingly, you can draw a direct line from McCarthy to Trump -- two degrees of separation. In a Venn diagram of this pair, the place where the two circles overlap, the person they share in common is a fellow named Roy Cohn.
Cohn was chief counsel to McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the same one Welch went up against. Cohn was McCarthy's henchman, a master of dark deeds and dirty tricks. When McCarthy fell, Cohn bounced back to his hometown of New York and became a prominent Manhattan wheeler-dealer, a fixer representing real estate moguls and mob bosses -- anyone with the bankroll to afford him. He worked for Trump's father, Fred, beating back federal prosecution of the property developer, and several years later would do the same for Donald. "If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent," Trump told a magazine reporter in 1979, "you get Roy." To another writer he said, "Roy was brutal but he was a very loyal guy."
Cohn introduced Trump to his McCarthy-like methods of strong-arm manipulation and to the political sleaze meister Roger Stone, another dirty trickster and unofficial adviser to Trump who just this week suggested that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was a disloyal American who may be a spy for Saudi Arabia, a "terrorist agent."
Cohn also introduced Trump to the man who is now his campaign chair, Paul Manafort, the political consultant and lobbyist who without a moral qualm in the world has made a fortune representing dictators -- even when their interests flew in the face of human rights or official US policy.
So the ghost of Joseph McCarthy lives on in Donald Trump as he accuses President Obama of treason, slanders women, mocks people with disabilities and impugns every politician or journalist who dares call him out for the liar and bamboozler he is. The ghosts of all the past American demagogues live on in him as well, although none of them have ever been so dangerous -- none have come as close to the grand prize of the White House.
Because even a pathological liar occasionally speaks the truth, Trump has given voice to many who feel they've gotten a raw deal from establishment politics, who see both parties as corporate pawns, who believe they have been cheated by a system that produces enormous profits from the labor of working men and women that are gobbled up by the 1 percent at the top. But again, Trump's brand of populism comes with venomous race-baiting that spews forth the red-hot lies of a forked and wicked tongue.
We can hope for journalists with the courage and integrity of an Edward R. Murrow to challenge this would-be tyrant, to put the truth to every lie and publicly shame the devil for his outrages. We can hope for the likes of Joseph Welch, who demanded to know whether McCarthy had any sense of decency. Think of Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist Trump accused of persecuting him because of the judge's Mexican heritage. Curiel has revealed the soulless little man behind the curtain of Trump's alleged empire, the avaricious money-grubber who conned hard-working Americans out of their hard-won cash to attend his so-called "university."
And we can hope there still remain in the Republican Party at least a few brave politicians who will stand up to Trump, as some did McCarthy. This might be a little harder. For every Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham who have announced their opposition to Trump, there is a weaselly Paul Ryan, a cynical Mitch McConnell and a passel of fellow travelers up and down the ballot who claim not to like Trump and who may not wholeheartedly endorse him but will vote for him in the name of party unity.
As this headline in The Huffington Post aptly put it, "Republicans Are Twisting Themselves Into Pretzels To Defend Donald Trump." Ten GOP senators were interviewed about Trump and his attack on Judge Curiel's Mexican heritage. Most hemmed and hawed about their presumptive nominee. As Trump "gets to reality on things, he'll change his point of view and be, you know, more responsible." That was Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. Trump's comments were "racially toxic" but "don't give me any pause." That was Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Republican African-American in the Senate. And Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas? He said Trump's words were "unfortunate." Asked if he was offended, Jennifer Bendery writes, the senator "put his fingers to his lips, gestured that he was buttoning them shut, and shuffled away."
No profiles in courage there. But why should we expect otherwise? Their acquiescence, their years of kowtowing to extremism in the appeasement of their base, have allowed Trump and his nightmarish sideshow to steal into the tent and take over the circus. Alexander Pope once said that party spirit is at best the madness of the many for the gain of a few. A kind of infection, if you will -- a virus that spreads through the body politic, contaminating all. Trump and his ilk would sweep the promise of America into the dustbin of history unless they are exposed now to the disinfectant of sunlight, the cleansing torch of truth. Nothing else can save us from the dark age of unreason that would arrive with the triumph of Donald Trump.
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