Other stuff to read: The Tea Party Jacobins | The New York Review of Books

The Tea Party Jacobins | The New York Review of Books

I like this takeaway:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

"Certified Patriotic"

If you're looking for something to do this week, warm up the pipes and enter the "Let My Voice Be Heard" on-line karaoke competition. A panel of thoroughly marginal music industry-types will judge your youtube-submitted singing, as will, eventually, a "fan vote." Sing two songs for your entry. But here's the catch: one has to be a patriotic song.

Still interested? Before you start practicing your banjo and refreshing your kindergarten-era memories of the lyrics to "This Land is Our Land," know that you may select only from one of seven pre-approved "Certified Patriotic" songs. They include the karaoke favorite, "The Star-Spangled Banner," and four country songs: "Only in America," "American Soldier" (even though Toby Keith flipped on supporting the Iraq War), "Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagle Fly," and, of course, Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA" Unlike the Reagan '84 campaign, at least the organizers of the competition actually listened to the lyrics of the Boss's "Born in the USA."

"God Bless America" -- ok. "God Bless my Underwear" -- not ok.

The competition is pretty innocuous, of course, particularly because this blog may be the best pub it gets. It seems to be tapping into an undercurrent our in the broader political culture, though, that is asserting that some "voices" in Obama's America are being stifled. Its press release states: 

Americans have always used music as a positive force when things get tough. Every generation has its music and today’s America needs its voice. Karaoke is all about the performance and singing a patriotic song just makes you feel good!

The first point is true: Americans have used singing historically to get through tough times. Public performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" first caught on during the First World War (and even then, people complained it was too hard to sing.) Social workers organized "community sings" among soldiers and civilians alike. The singing continued through World War II and one can draw a straight line all the way to the recent invention of having someone sing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch after 9/11. [although I strongly suspect the Yankees continued this trend not out of patriotism but to give their relievers a few more warm-up throws in the pen.] But the point of earlier patriotic feel-good sing-alongs was to sing together, to build up a sense of being in the tough time together. In this way, they weren't much different than singing in unison that other karaoke fav, "Sweet Caroline."

The country songs selected are also worth considering as part of the missing "voice" of Americans. They all celebrate American exceptionalism. They also assert that the experiences and virtues of ordinary people are all the nation really needs to remain on the sunny side of Providence. These songs do not celebrate the vast potential of the nation but the way things are right now and the people we are.

The last time I sang what I'd consider a "patriotic song" in public, it was "We Shall Overcome," the culminating moment of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis. The crowd sang it to re-dedicate itself to the causes of civil rights and social justice. I believe the song is patriotic because it was the anthem I see as true patriots -- those willing to put their lives at risk to have their nation live up to its ideals. The song speaks of that moment coming "someday." I think that's the central - and perhaps irreconcilable - divide between Left and Right patriotism. Roughly put, the Left sees the nation as perfectable; the Right as perfected.

More from Arizona: Ethnic Studies under fire

Thanks to Pete Rock for pointing this news out to me -- somehow I'd missed this item, although it is getting difficult to keep up with the flow of bloggable material from Arizona. The state legislature last week passed a bill written by state school superintendent Tom Horne that forbid public school systems from teaching courses that:
• Promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.
• Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
• Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
• Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating pupils as individuals.


Horne targeted the Tucson Unified School District's ethnic studies program specifically with this law. While the program offers courses on African-American, Asian, Native-American, and Latino studies that are open to all students, regardless of their own background, Horne is really only going after the the Latino program -- which, in fairness, provocatively echoes the Chicano Studies movement of the 1960s and 70s by calling itself "La Raza." As Horne explained to one Arizona newspaper, his bill "would ban La Raza studies because it's a course that's aimed primarily at members of one race, and we have testimony that this has promoted resentment toward one race."

For Horne and other conservatives, this bill is all about stamping out what they see as a left-wing separatist agenda among some of the Latino faculty in Arizona school systems. The part of the bill about teaching revolutionary doctrines in public school sounded to me at first to be an incongruous lifting of the exact same language in education law of the 1940s and 50s (designed to remove Communist teachers), but it actually is just a swipe at some Tuscon faculty who have allegedly placed portraits of Che, Fidel Castro, and Pancho Villa in their classrooms. Although his position oversees the curriculum of the state's public school system, Horne seems particularly concerned about indoctrination taking place under his nose -- he spoke out on Arizona television against President Obama's recorded talk to the nation's school children last year. (You know, the one that turned the nation's children into Red Guards for Obama's Cultural Revolution. Or kick-started his version of Hitler Youth. Or whatever.)

The sinister plot to implant the children of America's immigrants with race hate and Fidel-ism started in, of all places, the Nixon Administration. With the passage of the Ethnic Studies Heritage Programs Act in 1972, the federal government provided funds and curriculum suggestions for exactly the kinds of courses under fire in Arizona. Horne, who is running for state attorney general as a Republican, may be surprised to learn that back then, the GOP actually tried to court ethnics (ok, white ethnics) to eat into the Democratic voting base.   

Clearly, that kind of Republican is not indigenous to the deserts of the Southwest. But Horne's no yokel. He has a B.A. and J.D. from Harvard. I'm sure that in calling the Tuscon program racist he doesn't think he is one, too. Rather, he reflects conservatives' embrace of the fractured logic of "color blindness," a topic I should probably tackle in its own right with its separate post later. This logic, too, has its roots in Nixon's America, when whites tried to find a more comfortable explanations for their resistance to desegregation initiatives like busing and affirmative action. It argues that while racism may exist, racial consciousness by a minority to address greater injustice that happened in the past only exacerbates racial tension in the present. In other words, blame the victim for decrying their victimhood. If only minorities accept the fact that in the here and now race doesn't matter then, well, race won't matter. Furthermore, in this conservative frame of mind, learning one's race mattered quite a bit in Arizona's (and the nation's) past can't help but radicalize the students of particular races because it offers but two outcomes of the lesson: renewed racial identification, and/or resentment of white oppressors past and present.

As the rest of the Arizona legislature's output this term indicates, this line of argument is nonsense. All the same, Tom Horne's bill highlights how limited the conceptual progress for integrating non-Europeans into the national community has been since the start of last century. We are much less likely to see race as determinant in individual lives than we were in past decades (unless, maybe, you're David Brooks). But we're no better at seeing race as something artificially and historically imposed upon groups of people, with boundaries of categorization that shift over time. I'm not even sure something like the Tuscon plan is the best approach. But I'm certain the "color-blind" alternative only offers an opportunity for whites to cynically walk away from any responsibility to consider race at all -- past, present, or future.

Duncan Hunter echoes California's nativist past

I wanted to give something I saw this week a bit of historical context: Rep. Duncan Hunter's comment that he supported the deportation of native-born American citizens who are the children of illegal immigrants. The comment came during a Q&A and you can view it here:



I'll get back to this issue being American reflecting "what's in our souls" later. His call for American citizens to be deported (and children no less) obviously runs smack into the 14th Amendment, which must be left out of the copies of the Constitution Hunter's Tea Party crowd carry around with them. That such a proposed law would engender some debate at all is rather shocking to me. I'm no Con-Law scholar, but "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" sounds like a description of American territories in the 1860s.

Anyway, anti-immigration leaders in the 1920s at least knew their constitutional precedent better than Hunter and his lot. At that time, California Senator James Phelan and Sacramento Bee editor V.S. McClatchy supported the proposal of a constitutional amendment that would strip the right of citizenship from native-born children of Japanese immigrants. The initiative went nowhere in Congress but in 1924 the National Origins Act did outlaw the further immigration of Japanese or any other Asians. And states in the West passed a swath of laws that restricted Japanese land ownership and rights of commerce. Supporters of these measures, like Hunter, focused on the supposed negative economic impact that Japanese immigrants had on state and local economies. They argued that Japanese farmers and businesses routinely undercut the price of their "American" competition.

Of course, that wasn't the whole story. Racism seeped into the seams of these arguments. Japanese farmers were able to reduce their prices so aggressively because they held much lower standards of living. They weren't concerned about their impact on their native-born neighbors because Japanese immigrants were loyal to a foreign land and an inferior religion. I have read Congressional testimony by demographic experts of the era that claimed that because of the high birthrates of Japanese immigrant families, which were reflective of their racial difference from whites, California would be majority Japanese by 2000.

The terminus of this logic was the World War II internment camp. While we will almost certainly avoid anything resembling that blight on the nation's "soul," if you will, elected representatives need to take a bit more pause before playing to the nativist rabble and calling for the expunging of people's citizenship rights.

Immigration narrative in fragments

I'm not a huge fan of polling, mostly because I'm a writer and I don't like the way questions are written most of the time. Of course, that didn't stop me from looking the results of the latest NYT/CBS poll, mostly on immigration.

I'm very interested in the kind of narrative Americans are cobbling together about the issue of illegal immigration and about Latino immigration generally. Most Americans probably start by thinking about it through the popular historical narrative that's been written into the story of the nation: of European immigrants who came to escape repression or seize better opportunity, worked incredibly hard, assimilated fully (but maybe keep their food), and rose in status. But the echoes of other historical narratives survive as well: the ignorant and unskilled who come merely to soak up the low-wage demands of American industrialists; the inherent racial difference of newcomers, which propels political corruption, crime, urban filth, disease, and all sort of other vices.

That positive narrative is a product of post-World War II America. Even it was not enough to overcome resistance to (legal) immigration reform until the Civil Rights Era. In time for the Bicentennial, it morphed into the rediscovery and celebration of Ethnic America, captured in all its whitewashing grandeur by the song that served as the theme for Neil Diamond's remake of The Jazz Singer, (complete with its own blackface scene, no less): "America." This seems by far to be the preferred narrative when Americans consider the immigrants in their own familial histories.

Other people's families may be another story. Only a third of the poll's respondents believed that the US should "always welcome all immigrants." Twenty-seven percent said the US shouldn't allow any new immigration at all. And the headline of the poll was that a majority of those polled supported Arizona's "show me your papers" law.

It's clear from all the hand-wringing about the meaning of the Arizona law that we know those other immigration narratives less worthy of a sing-along moment are out there. Progressives have (I think very justifiably) pointed to the similarities between the law and older regimes of racially-based immigration restriction. Conservatives have defended the law as a necessary enforcement act standing in the place of an absentee federal government, an argument that's not merely about race but about controlling an inexhaustible flow of desperate and very cheap labor. But I still don't think we really know what's actually happening in the broader public on this issue.

Take, for example, the poll's question on whether or not the nation should keep legal legislation at its current level. How many Americans know what that level is? I had to google it: 1.13 million persons became legal residents in 2009.

The rest of the poll is simply too polite. It asks whether or not respondents believed racial profiling would follow in the wake of the law (majorities say yes) but didn't ask them if they thought this was a bad thing. Almost all of the rest of the poll asked about the economic and government services impact of illegal immigration. The only question that even hints at the potential underlying racial aspects of support for the bill came in a question about the bill's impact on crime, and only as one part of the vague (and untrue) social ills unchecked illegal immigration may cause.

While it's proper to connect the sentiment behind the Arizona law to the broader swirl of racial and xenophobic ideas at play in the Birther and Tea Party Movements, this contemporaneity is not a sufficient explanation for the law's passage or its popular support. Belief that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon nation, or a white nation stretches back to the our very first naturalization law in 1790. In a post-Civil Rights Era America, however, this kind of opinion is, to put it mildly, passe. While its easy to cherry pick examples of when conservative immigration opponents tap into it, we need a more systematic plumbing of its depths. Instead, the current debate emerging is largely one about legal and governmental process, of how to distinguish between law breakers and law abiders and of a failure to enforce what in reality is unenforcable short of Soviet-styled construction solutions.

Let's set the issue of immigrants' legality in entering the country aside for one moment and discuss more important and uncomfortable issues. How many Americans believe still that race is a critical factor in American national identity and that immigration from non-European nations undermines its "culture," "values," or "traditions" -- words, I believe, are merely code for "whiteness." Americans at the turn of the twentieth century struggled mightily to reconcile the desire to integrate immigrants into the nation with those immigrants' perceived racial difference. What are the contours of that struggle today, now that race-based theories of social organization are discredited? The only hint we get from this poll is that 32 percent of respondents believe illegal immigrants should be summarily deported -- a solution as impractical as it is inhumane.

In light of the coming demographic change for the country in this century, when "minorities" will become its plurality of residents, these questions are of vital importance. If we are to overcome those more sinister narratives about immigration in our national experience -- and all sing along with Neil -- we need a more honest and open examination of the strata of American public opinion.

Americanisms reboot

It was a long (and in many ways discouraging) fall and winter but I've decided to re-start this blog, mostly for reasons of my own personal development and/or sanity. Like Stringer Bell changing the colors of the caps, I've changed the layout just so you know this is real and I'm back in the game.

Same content format as before: explorations of political culture. I'm going to write more about relevant pieces of pop culture and the media's relationship to citizenship, too. And I'm going to focus a bit more concretely on actual policy debates like on immigration, civil liberties, civil rights, and social justice. So let's do this.

...and we're back

A friend of the blog reminded me how long its been since I posted anything new this morning. Yeah, sorry about that. A combination of three straight weekends of being out of town, other more pressing things to do, and a bit of blogging ennui kept me behind.

I really wish I had stayed home Saturday to check out the teabagger march on Washington. Anything would have been preferable to watching the UVa football team stink it up yet again, but I'm really curious to see what two million people jamming into the city looked like. What, it wasn't two million? More like the attendance of the Ravens game? Rats.

Seriously, I would have liked to have gotten a personal flavor for the crowd (much of the one I was in left at halftime). Fortunately, Daily Kos did a nice job linking to a bunch of different photostreams. I've been holding my powder on most of this movement so here are my impressions, second-hand as they are for this weekend at least.

* I agree with Nate Silver that Democrats/progressives mock these protests at our own peril. Yes, they represent a coalition of hard-Right groups that are outside the mainstream of American politics (get rid of the Federal Reserve? Seriously?) Some wear funny hats and jeans shorts and can't tell the ideological difference between genocidal dictators. But they employ a wide array of potent symbols and phrases that are central to American national identity with aplomb. I think that, if asked, every person at Saturday's rally would agree with the Palinesque assertion that they represented the "real" America and "real Americans." And they know the currency of patriotic symbolism well. Their invocation of Revolutionary War-era symbols -- the Don't Tread On Me flags, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence -- might be historically nonsensical, if not merely corny; but they are familiar and easily digestible messages that may peel off millions more voters to their side of the debate. All they have to do is give the feeling of authenticity as a grassroots movement and address many Americans' gut feeling that something is amiss for the nation. That their conflation of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian meanings of the word "Liberty" would give Herbert Croly a migrane is not important.

Which is why I loved the last 10 minutes of President Obama's speech to Congress last week -- the Why We are Liberals part. The American narrative of living up to the Better Angels of ourselves is just as potent as "Don't Tread on Me." Given how the untrammeled greed of our time threatens most of our well being its power should be even greater.

* How much the idea of American exceptionalism shapes the Right is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of American political life. Take this comment reported by Politico from one of the marchers: “I see our nation changing into something the roots of us don’t want,” said Jim Bryant, an aviation consultant from Trenton, Georgia. “Why turn the greatest nation in the entire history of mankind into something else?” Conservative Americans have believed in this principle since the 1920s. They interpret the chaos, belligerence, and horror of other nations' experiences in modern history to be the result of their embrace of "isms." The American nation's capacity to rise above this history is the result of its unique political and governmental traditions and institutions. Hence, the fixation upon the Constitution (to be a true believer in Americanism, you need a pocket-sized copy for extra portability.)

The argument that America has escaped the gravity of history and therefore must never change is the antimatter to liberalism's matter.

* The American exceptionalist narrative at the center of these protests makes it impossible to separate out its political critique from its racism. This narrative comfortably asserts that the particular genius of white, Protestant American men led the nation to its historical greatness. Obama's blackness upsets this narrative quite obviously. But there's more to it. Just as this form of American exceptionalism insists the nation must reject foreign "isms," it also demands that immigrants to its shores be utterly transformed and accept the ideological standards of American politics. It is not just that Obama's father was from Kenya for these people, or that he spent part of his childhood overseas: it is the combination of what they perceive to be his personal foreignness and the alien nature of his ideas (from the Orwellian socialist wastelands of Canada and the United Kingdom) that exacerbates their reactionary ways. The Right's assertion that "he is not one of us," made in so many ways during the campaign and now during Obama's presidency is more complicated than mere white supremacy - but it's still racist.

If you are struggling to understand some of the more conspiratorial elements of this movement, ask yourself, how would I perceive the world if I believed what the guy quoted in Politico was absolutely true?