Name That Majority

Rachel Maddow spotted and spotlit this paragraph in a Washington Post profile of two Rabid Right pols whose claim to fame is helping to create Rabid Right tyranny by scaring people about illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico: Kris Kobach and Michael Hethmon.  The graph quotes Hethmon:

Immigration is “on track to change the demographic makeup of the entire country. You know, what they call ‘minority-majority,’ ” said Hethmon, who is general counsel at the Washington-based Immigration Reform Law Institute. “How many countries have gone through a transition like that — peacefully, carefully? It’s theoretically possible, but we don’t have any examples.”

So if you were wondering why illegal immigration is such a big deal to these folks, apart from the usual cynical lying GOPer politics, you (as usual) won't find it in the facts.  Immigration from Mexico for instance is severely down from its peak, and because of demographics (fewer young Mexican men in the current and future generations) is unlikely to ever increase much. Border enforcement and other federal enforcement of illegal immigration is stronger. And (according to the new Pew study) at least as many Mexican families are leaving the U.S. to return to Mexico as are coming from Mexico to the U.S.  But the real "issue" is a certain political fear: a perceived threat to certain whites who are afraid of losing the "white" majority.

The economic impacts, good and bad, are highly debatable. So let's parse the racial issues.  Part of the impact of immigrants in a given town or city or region is cultural, if they are from unfamiliar places.  That's real, and it is also not new. Before the relatively recent waves of immigrants from southeast Asia and now from Mexico, there were the huge waves of poor people from Ireland, eastern Europe and Italy.

 Countries in Europe experiencing waves of immigration now, even greater in some respect than the U.S., are coping with the often difficult changes, especially when immigrants become the face of all the other change.  All this can inspire a panic turned into a principle of racial and national purity, which has its own ideologies or "pragmatic" fears (for Hethmon wants to sound pragmatic), along with lots of ugly history.  In its most obviously warped expression, it's behind the massacres that killed 77 people in Norway, most of them teenagers, by a man (now on trial) upset by the racial tolerance represented by broadcast of Roots and a popular children's song based on a Pete Seeger ditty about multiculturalism (which some 40,000 people sang to the murderer in Oslo on Thursday.)

But it's more than a racial rainbow that scares Hethmon, it's the end of the white majority, and therefore of white privilege and supremacy.  He is afraid of a "minority majority" in the U.S. caused by immigration.  First of all, he doesn't need to be afraid of new immigration--even without it, the minority majority is in the demographic cards.  The 2010 Census made it clear that we'll achieve this by the middle of this century.  There are already fewer white infants than non-whites.

To get a little personal, those of us of a certain age are watching the world we knew slip away, and it does cause anxiety.  We understand a world dominated by English-speaking white people, English/American institutions and culture.  Even those of us who welcome the wisdoms and liveliness of other cultures into the common culture, are nervous about being overwhelmed by intrusions, and by what we cannot understand.  But let's face it--that applies as least as much to the world of a thousand aps and computer viruses as it does to an influx of other languages and behaviors from other countries.    

But that's very minor stuff compared to the fears of people like Hethmon. What really scares Hethmon? I don't think it's what he says (societal stability, more or less), at least not directly.  What threatens Hethmon and GOPers is finally out in the open--it is the loss of their political control.  That's why this virulent anti-immigration scare stuff is of a piece with voter suppression and other efforts to maintain their control, to keep minorities out of democracy, and (in Michigan for instance) democracy out of minority communities.  That they are likely Democratic voters is of course the proximate reason but probably not the entire one.  White supremacy--their supremacy--is the motive, and he all but announces it.

  Hethmon refers to the lack of any precedent of a peaceful, careful transition.  Well, "careful" is about control, and we don't control who has children, at least not yet, although we can carefully manage any sort of transition--that's what governments are supposed to do, by matching support and solution  to need, with housing, community support, employment policies as well as law enforcement.  But peaceful?  No such transition is possible without violence?  There is no precedent for this?

In a way he's correct.  There was violence and people died--mostly black people--in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.  On the other hand, you could hardly call African Americans "immigrants." There was also violence involved in the 20th century union movement, mostly by police and agents of the 1%.   For the union movement was largely representing prior waves of immigrants, who were the workers in American industries--in the textile mills, the mines, the steel mills. 

But these were white immigrants, weren't they?  Not always by the definitions of the times.  Even in the 1920s, Italians--with dark skin, hair and eyes (like those in the top photo, or to the right)--were considered black.  Polish and other eastern Europeans may have been pale, but they were--in an expression that survived in Pennsylvania well into the second half of the 20th century--Not Quite White.  For Hitler, these folks weren't "white" or Aryan at all--they were racially inferior and planned for eradication.  The extermination of the Jews was to be just the first act, partly to test the equipment.

If you go by early 20th century definitions, the U.S. is already a minority majority country and has been for at least half a century--not entirely without trouble, but successfully.  Of course, many of the participants don't choose to see it that way.  Some of the most rabid oppressors of new minorities have been and are from these nationalities, previously scorned as Not Quite White.  This entire concept of "race" is fraught.  There's no more scientific justification for it.  It's all about other things now.  And one of those things is power-and-wealth.

But Hethmon and the white supremacist police state that the GOPers support is also congruent with their anti-Obama racism.  This is yet another test of the strength of the American constitutional system and the American culture in creating common ground as a civil culture, as a self-governing society.  In the end, all the issues about economic fairness, equal opportunity, tax equity, equality before the law, rights of women and members of all other groups--they all come down to this: the basis for self-government.  Because without these, we're seeing the future in Michigan (where state appointed dictators negate elected officials) and in the laws passed by GOPer legislatures and signed by GOPer governors that dictate to doctors how to treat their patients, that take away rights of individuals to govern their own bodies and lives, that substitute the rule of the few--including the wealthy 1%--for self-government.  That's the minority we really need to be worried about.

The Mechanics of Fear

Unwarranted and ultimately self-destructive fear is apparently a byproduct of a set of natural responses designed to help creatures like us avoid or escape from mortal danger. But the excesses of a glandular or pre-conscious response (disproportionate to the danger, or evoked mistakenly or falsely) become more consequential when culturally ossified or automated, and especially when linked to the power of machines, which multiply the human ability to damage and destroy to horrific proportions.

Historically this became apparent with the Great War of the early 20th century, when fear and hatred on societal levels supported warfare that otherwise made no sense, except for a few rulers, military leaders and those who made fortunes on armaments and other fuel for the fires of war. It was the nationalistic response to that war that inspired the coining of the term "brutalization" to describe a nation's psyche and behavior (in this case, France. Jay Winter wrote a very powerful and illuminating essay/review on civilian support for World War I and the subsequent disenchantment, in the Times Literary Supplement of June 16, 2006. ) Such fervor was not unprecedented--but the power of modern machinery to kill so many was new, and shocking.

That war was an enormous shock to European thought, and for awhile to political life. But the madness continued, resulting in another World War. And fear did not end with that armistice either--in fact, it got worse and even potentially more consequential. After the machinery of World War I killed a generation of young men, the even more destructive machinery of World War II was trained on civilians as well, and killed millions of them, climaxing with the death by blast, fire and radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by means of the atomic bomb.

But even that was not enough to inspire sanity's control over rampant, frenzied unreasonable and often artificially created fear. The atomic bomb that could kill a city was made larger, and multiplied. Then the hydrogen bomb multiplied that destructiveness geometrically, and a few nations made tens of thousands of them, aimed at each other, ready to launch at a moment's notice.

In a review of a new history of the cold war (in the New York Review of Books, 12/17/2009), Brian Urquhart writes:

“It is useless, though tempting, to speculate on who was the most responsible for the cold war and for the fantastic risk and expense it entailed. The paranoia of Stalin; the aggressive language of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism; the wild exaggerations and panicky assumptions, sometimes for short-term political objectives, that created dangerous reactions; the tendency, on both sides, to confuse military capacity with military intentions; the mutual ignorance and hostility that led to the most hazardous and expensive arms race in history—to none of these factors, or to the people involved in them, can be confidently assigned the entire blame for a phenomenon that held the world in dread and suspense for more than forty years. The contestants in the cold war, it now seems, were all caught up in a monstrous nuclear nightmare of fear, anger, suspicion, and irrationality that no leader seemed able to dispel.”

Later in the review he adds: “Thus, until quite recently, we lived in a time when many of the most powerful and brilliant people in the world spent their energy and talent, and huge sums of public money, on developing weapons that, if used, would have almost certainly destroyed orderly life on this planet. That it was impossible, for forty years, for the two superpowers to discuss this most lethal of threats to all life in a rational manner must rank, in retrospect at least, as the greatest foolishness and the greatest shared irresponsibility in history.”

Though he guesses that leaders early on realized that these nuclear weapons should never be used, and that common sense often prevailed over panic, that the human race got through the cold war was, Uurqhart writes, miraculous.

Now we face a crisis that is a threat to "orderly life on this planet" that is different in many ways, but is just as grave. To fail to address it would easily replace the cold war as "the greatest shared irresponsibility in history." But to address it requires even more unfamiliar ways of thinking as well as common sense, and above all, it requires urgent attention. Fear only gets in the way.

Two things happened during the Cold War. The consequences of nuclear war were so severe that the citizenry at large, at least in America, simply shut down emotionally and refused to face it. The prospect of societal self-destruction was too much to deal with, and it was largely absent from public dialogue. It wasn't dealt with consciously, though subconscious fears were alive, and were expressed in the arts, especially movies--from the bug-eyed monster and alien invasion flicks of the 50s to the nuclear dramas and satires of the 60s.

It could be argued that's happening again. With relentless and passionate Climate Crisis denial buttressing the tendency to avoid the paralyzing fear of a horrific future, emotions are driven underground, expressed not only in end-of-the-world cinema but in fashionable tales of zombies and vampires: the walking dead.

At the same time, fears and suspicions of the other side--more familiar feelings, perhaps more tangible--distracted society from even considering what needed to be done. Now that Americans and other westerners travel easily to Russia, and there is more access to all the cultures involved, it may seem inconceivable how monstrous stereotypes could inspire fear for so long a time. But they did. Though there were ups and downs, some of the same stereotypes from the 1950s were repeated in TV commercials in the 1980s.

The analogy to today's irrational fear of terrorism is not exact: the threat of nuclear annihilation was real, whereas the chances of anyone in America dying from a terrorist act is minuscule--crossing a small town street is statistically much more hazardous. But the grip of fear on our political life and national dialogue is just as obvious and disheartening. One failed and pretty sorry terrorist attempt on one airliner has once again thrown this country into panic, as predictably as a literal knee-jerk reaction.

So, for example, this story, which appeared in the Eureka, CA Times-Standard:

Suspicious device found on trail in Sequoia Park

A suspicious device reported to authorities Monday afternoon was destroyed by the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office bomb squad.

According to a press release from the Eureka Police Department, at about 2:21 p.m., EPD received a report of a suspicious device on a trail in Sequoia Park. An officer responded and found that the device was an archery arrow with a duct-taped cylinder attached to the arrowhead end of the arrow.

EPD requested the assistance of the explosive ordinance disposal experts from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office, who came to inspect the device. They responded with their EOD robot.
After inspecting the device, they subsequently destroyed it using the robot's water cannon.
”The device was obliterated but appeared to have been some type of foam rubber that had been wrapped in the duct tape, and not an explosive device,” said the release.

Several people in the immediate area of the device were evacuated from the area while the investigation was conducted. "

That foreign terrorists would train and dispatch an operative to blow up an unsuspecting hiker on a trail in this remote corner of the country, or that this financially strapped county would deploy a robot with a water cannon to douse an arrow with a bit of foam rubber stuck to it--all pretty laughable, though not quite on the Doctor Strangelove level. Except that it's indicative of what fear can do, and how it can absorb attention, short-circuit rational thought, and above all, distract from real threats.

Today there are still more than 20,000 nuclear devices in various stages of readiness in the world, including a thousand outside the direct control of the U.S. or Russia. And there is the ultimate time bomb churning away in our thin veil of atmosphere, a fire we are feeding every day, while we indulge in familiar fears and comforts. Our ability to destroy our world and ourselves thanks to our machines far outstrips our apparent ability to deal with those machines and the aspects of human nature--including the dynamics of groups and nations--that unleash our machines against us. If that remains so...the hand of evolution, having written, will move on--even if it will seem to us to move backward.