Activating white panic
Adam Serwer points out that the white nationalists are winning.
Despite the controversy over the rally and its bloody aftermath, the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda. As long as that agenda finds a home in one of the two major American political parties, a significant portion of the country will fervently support it. And as an ideological vanguard, the alt-right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.
A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tells his audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.”
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White nationalists win by activating white panic, by frightening a sufficient number of white people into believing that their safety and livelihoods can only be protected by defining American citizenship in racial terms, and by convincing them that American politics is a zero-sum game in which white people only win when people of color lose. While this dynamic has always been present in American politics, it has been decades since the White House has been occupied by a president who so visibly delights in exploiting it, aided by a right-wing media infrastructure that has come to see it as a ratings strategy.
On the other hand, the rest of the media infrastructure is not nearly as monolithically white male as it was in Nixon’s day. I think that’s one ratchet blocking a total victory for the white supremacists.
While liberals may have seen the backlash to Trump’s defense of the rally in Charlottesville as heartening, the incident itself seems to have convinced Trump and his allies that they could survive any controversy over the president’s views on race. Former Trump aides told Politico’s Annie Karni that “the takeaway from Charlottesville is the nihilistic notion that nothing matters except for how things play.” That helps explain why, about a month later, Trump began attacking black athletes for protesting police brutality. After an initial show of defiance, the NFL ultimately forced players to cease their protests or pay fines, allowing the head of state to dictate when Americans are allowed to protest violations of their rights by agents of that state—violations Trump himself has vocally encouraged. As long as the president believes racist demagoguery plays to his advantage, he will not retreat from it, and neither will his most loyal acolytes.
Indeed. We’re hanging by a thread here.
I’m not sure… Being super racist is against the zeitgeist… It just means that the minority is feeling its druthers.
It is true that the super racists are the ones in power, but for how long?
Here in Australia, in the second term (1949-1966) of Liberal (ie in this context conservative) Prime Minister Robert Menzies, we had massive post-WW2 migration, and overwhelmingly from Europe. It was all carried out under what was then openly proclaimed by the Federal Government as ‘The White Australia Policy.’ Fares from Europe were government-subsidised: hence the expression ’10 pound Pom’, because 10 English pounds was all each would-be immigrant had to find for the fare out.
The White Australia Policy proved unsustainable simply because racial testing was so repugnant to so many, particularly in the post-WW2 context, and there were also no agreed criteria. Importantly, there was also no significant manifest desire on the part of non-Europeans to migrate here.
Today, that is not the case, and border protection is a serious political issue, particularly where it involves would-be immigrants, legal or otherwise, from the Islamic world.
@Omar:
I thought the big thing with Aussies was South East Asians… has that changed?
BK:
1942 was a crisis year for Australia after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. All sorts of preparations were made for the country to be at least partially occupied. Menzies, whose own promising military career was unfortunately cut short by the advent of war in 1914, rode to power and stayed there on the communist bogey. And he committed Australia, though he had no legal basis to do it, to support Britain against Hitler in 1939, without bothering to move any motion in Federal Parliament, putting himself right out of order constitutionally. In the post-WW2 environment, he simply did whatever he thought necessary in order to help keep the US involved in Asia.
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 scared the bejesus out of Australian conservatives, and out of a fair portion of the Labor Party as well. The Chinese were seen as being poised to take over SE Asia. The Korean War of 1950-53 was seen as a Soviet thrust towards Japan, while the Viet Minh successes in Vietnam were seen as the opening gambit in a Chinese grab for whatever they could get in SE Asia.
The current threat is seen to be from refugees from the wars within Islamic societies within that great Islamic arc that stretches from Nigeria to Indonesia, and which generates the ‘boat people’ who arrive by sea. As Australia is a signatory to the UN’s International Refugee Convention, the government cannot really claim they are illegal, but works to stop them embarking in the first place by shunting them off to places like the camps on Manus Island on the ground that they are in danger of drowning at sea. So those people claiming refugee status are jailed for their ‘own protection.’
Trouble is, there are 65 million people on the UNHCR’s books, and one helluva lot of themt of them would like to come here if they could.
No country in the world, save perhaps failed states like Somalia, has open borders. And only about 10% Australians at most would support such a policy.
I was blown away by this quote from former Trump aides:
They actually said that? They must have…it’s in quotes. Wow.
Except it seems a little odd that multiple former Trump aides said this exact sentence (separately? in unison? in a jointly signed statement?). Let’s check the Politico article:
Oh. So not a quote from any aides at all, but a summary of their views from the Politico reporter. That is some sloppy reporting. I expect much better from the Atlantic.
And if the next two paragraphs are two of the former aides, I don’t think that’s even an accurate summary of their expressed views. It’s more like a separate statement that’s not incompatible with their expressed views.
Trump does so much that needs to be strongly condemned. This kind of reporting is not helpful. We don’t want the idiot in chief to be successful in his attempt to dismiss everything he doesn’t like as “Fake News”, and yet who can defend this reporting:
Oh ffs Skeletor – it is not sloppy reporting. Serwer is quoting Karni’s summary of what three aides said to her – that’s what’s in the quotation marks that you find so shocking. He’s quoting her summary, he’s not quoting the three aides in a bunch. Yes it is in fact quite normal to summarize the gist of what three people tell you, and that’s what she did, and that’s what he quoted her saying. Good god. All this nitpicking and that’s what you come up with.
You seem to have been confused by the fact that there are three levels instead of two. If you’re going to insist on irrelevant nitpicking you should at least keep track of the levels.
What has to happen is very difficult. The offensive individuals have to be known, named, made widely known and shunned. Nothing else will work.
This echoes Dr Joseph Goebbels’ oft-quoted remark:
The danger is that The Trumporamus, despite his own lack of insight into himself, amid his more general ignorance, will intuitively grasp this nonetheless, and in circumstances favourable to it, attempt to steer his regime in ever more authoritarian directions.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot