Racists and nativists are pulling down the US
But history suggests they have always raged against the dying of the light, only to be left behind by changing times
Those who come here are generally of the most stupid sort of their nation… they will soon outnumber us.’ Those are not the words of Donald Trump, but rather of one of America’s much-loved “founding fathers,” Benjamin Franklin, speaking in the middle of the 18th century about the migration of Germans, who he feared would be unable to learn English and assimilate. In ‘Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,’ he writes that Germans, as well as Swedes, Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen, and Russians were in sufficiently white, having“a swarthy complexion .” Their coming to the New World was tainting an otherwise virtuous project. America should not be so willing to let immigration “darken its people.”
From the beginning, Americans have fretted about whom they should accept as part of their national collective and who they should reject. There exists the powerful notion that America is a country for all people, a country ideal is ed by symbols such as the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, which lifts a light to the world andembracesits “huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” In reality, that ideal has been under cut at all times by a tenacious force in American life: nativism.
One of the strange bo ons of Trump’ s presidency is that it has exposed stark ly the underlying tension sin American society. He recently made terrible comments about immigration, in which he used a vile expletive to refer to countries in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean while insisting it would be preferable for people to come to the United States from Norway.
Their sentiments, however, are nothing new and find echoes throughout American history. Americans are taught to think of Benjamin Franklin as a liberal exemplar of reason and a champion of liberty. Yet his beliefs about Germans would presage centuries of xenophobic and racist thinking. In the 19 th century, anti-immigrant ideologues lamented the influx of Germans and Poles, Irish and Italians as fatally compromising the American project. Like immigrants today, these people were seen as coming from ruined, impoverished countries with nothing to offer America.
Nativists also feared the spread of Catholicism as a fund amen tallyu n-American religion. They raised the spec t re of“yellow peril” regarding the Chinese migrating to the western US, eventually leading to legislation that explicitly banned their coming. In the early 20 th century, Jews arrived in enormous numbers from Eastern Europe and were vilified not just for their religion, but because they supposedly brought radical politics with them. Nativists often were able to push through legislation that limited the arrival of certain peoples to the US. In the grand scheme, however, they lost. America has grown immeasurably rich er thanks to its inc lu si vi ty and its willingness to welcome people of different linguistic, religious, and cultural affiliations.
At the same time, that primordial animus of nat iv ism has survived and adapted to modern times. There is an awful, but perceptive insight in the seemingly clumsy, scattergun offensiveness of the Trump White House. Many Americans still cling onto the idea that their country is in some part a “racial” project, that there is a core cultural or ethnic identity to the nation, and that their whiteness in some way makes them superior to others. Trump won the 2016 election in large part because he recognised the tenacity of white nativist thinking. He pandered to it at all times, constantly inveighing against the current na ti vi st bug bears, Muslims and Spanishspeaking Latin os. It seems his administration will continue to draw from an ancient vein of xenophobic and racial thinking.
But it will only help them so much. President Trump’ s voting base represents a minority of the country. American history suggests that nativists have always raged against the dying of the light, only to be left behind by changing times.