Donald Trump has announced that he plans to rescind birthright citizenship through an executive order.
While possibly a ploy to encourage support among his white nationalist base in the upcoming midterm elections, this new proposal fits into the Trump administrations larger policy project: making America white again. While they cannot change the demographic reality of the nation, they will make the nation whiter by fiat.
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With so much in the headlines recently, it would have been easy to pass over a significant development in the Republican Party. On September 17, 2017, the New York Times released a confidential memo from the Senate Leadership Fund to Republican donors explaining the implications of the Alabama Senate special election. In it, the establishment wing of the GOP, including Mitch McConnell and his allies, concede that the Republican Party is Trump’s now.
The Senate Leadership Fund explains that the neoliberal branch of the GOP had been able to hold off the angry insurgent nationalist wing of the party in 2010 and 2014. “However, this year’s Alabama Senate special election shows that the 2014-16 playbook for winning Republican primaries needs to be recalibrated and improved….[The] electorate has dramatically realigned itself with President Trump at the helm,” states the memo.
On Friday April 14, 2017, Iowa representative Steve King was a guest on Iowa Press, an Iowa public television political show. The interviewer, Kay Henderson, pressed King on criticisms that he was a racist. In response, King defended earlier statements he made with a lengthy discussion on declining fertility rates in the Netherlands and the United States. He clarified that Western nations and the U.S. were no longer meeting their replacement levels (according to him 2.15 children per mother). This was to their detriment. “If you believe in Western Civilization and you believe in the American dream and the American civilization, then we ought to care enough to reproduce ourselves,” he explained.
Henderson did not press King on his notion that civilization—a compendium of institutions, social customs, laws, economic systems, and cultural productions—could be passed on only through sexual reproduction and birth. King was asserting that civilization was genetically inherited, not learned or shared. That is, King believes that white American babies are born with a biologically determined knowledge of the English language and capitalism.
Over the last year and a half we have witnessed the pyrrhic victory of the Republican Party. Yes, Donald Trump was elected president, but less than half the population of the nation voted, he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes (less than a quarter of Americans voted for Trump), was definitively helped by foreign influence, and his campaign appealed to the darkest forces in American culture and history. Trump literally announced his presidency by calling the largest community of the largest minority group in the United States criminals and rapists.
Weeks ago, Hillary Clinton took flak for her passing statement that half of Trump voters were a group that she would characterize as a “basket of deplorables.” Clinton was criticized by many for her statement by both left and right. She ended up apologizing for the percentage (which she claimed was “half”), but not for the statement itself.
The criticism she drew from well-intentioned liberal strategists and journalists, builds upon a theme that has grown during this election cycle. 2016 is the year of economic anxiety. During the primary season, two populist dark horses rose to prominence—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Their messages of economic populism struck a deep chord and brought new voters out in droves. Trump, as he likes to mention, received more votes than any other candidate in a Republican presidential primary. Similarly, Sanders energized the millennial vote, a young population that is growing in its electoral importance. The rise of these unexpected candidates was explained through their economic messages. In Sanders, young students and workers were tired of a system that burdened them with school debt and made them pay for three decades of tax cuts for the Baby-Boomer generation. In Trump, white workers saw a figure that put America first and promised to “Make America Great Again.”
While Trump declared his run for the White House on an explicitly racist note, it was not until much later—when he issued a call for a banning of all Muslim immigrants and called Judge Curiel a Mexican who was biased and unfit for the bench—that the press started to call Trump a racist. But it was always Trump who was the racist, intentionally leading his supporters astray. The white working-class was not at fault for their racism. They were economically anxious, afraid because they had lost their place in society. They were misapplying their anxieties to communities they had no contact with and couldn’t be blamed for resenting the first Black president, for wanting to deport 11 million Mexican migrants, for wanting to ban Muslims. They were sad they were making less money and losing their cultural hegemony in their nation. Trump, the snake-oil salesman, the crooked used-car salesman, was selling them the empty promise of racism and the poor white working-class was using its last bit of money to buy his magical solutions—a wall so tall that they would be protected and they wouldn’t even have to pay for it.
The notion that the white working-class was somehow tricked into racism or lacked the understanding of global economic change is deeply flawed and it is historically inaccurate. The white working-class was not tricked. They have used racism to combat their economic decline and to assert their social worth at multiple points in U.S. history. White supremacy and their connection to it helped transform them into meaningful contributors to the nation.
Day 1: Make America Safe Again
Monday July 18, 2016 was the first day of the Republican National Convention. Following the presumptive candidate’s restorationist theme of “Make America Great Again,” the theme for the day was the multitude of threats that the nation faced and how to correct them. After hours, of speeches it became clear what the most significant threat to the nation was for Trump and his supporters: people of color. American decline was not caused by neoliberal policies, outsourcing, massive tax cuts, deregulation, and a disbelief in government. Instead, the speakers screamed, it was Muslims, Mexicans, and Black lives that threatened America.
On March 15, 2016 after a devastating primary loss in his home state of Florida, Marco Rubio suspended his campaign. He won only one county, Miami-Dade. He was utterly bested by Donald Trump. His loss could very well mark the end of his career. He will lose his seat in the senate and the Florida primary revealed his limited electability at the state level. His defeat and subsequent retreat doesn’t mean he should be forgotten. Rubio, more than any other figure in the Republican Party, explains how the GOP understands the Latino community. Rubio was not a happenstance shooting-star, the wish of a wayward party come to life. His rise was certainly meteoric but this meant that he was destined for a crash-course and an eventual burn-out. His rise was always connected to his fall. Rubio’s place in the Republican Party was predicated on the fundamental misunderstandings of the Latino community by the party itself.
As covered in part I, Latino conservatism is not an outlier or a historical aberration. Many of its features developed over the course of the early twentieth century and were, at first, fused to civil right goals. Civil rights social conservatism accepted the idea that racial and economic inequality was not the product of structural problems, but individual failings. For these middle-class mid-20th century Latinos, Anglos did not systematically exclude Latinos, nor did they make Latinos poor. Instead, Latinos kept themselves in poor economic conditions and in segregated neighborhoods because they refused to assimilate, learn English, become educated, and be industrious with their time and money. Groups like LULAC and the American GI Forum subscribed to these types of ideas for much of their histories.
The coming presidential election has brought Latinos into the spotlight. Primarily, Democratic presidential hopefuls have reached out to the community, hiring key immigration activists and political actors. Yet, it is the Republican Party that has brought forward two Latino presidential candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But how did a party known most recently for its anti-immigrant stance produce the first two Latino presidential candidates? Many have wondered about how Latinos could be conservatives or if Latino conservatism is an oxymoron. United Farm Worker Union (UFW) co-founder Dolores Huerta even called them “sellouts,” a term with a long history associated with elected Latino officials. Luis Valdez, founder of Teatro Campesino, a Chicano theater troupe associated with the UFW, wrote a 1967 play called “Los Vendidos” aimed at Mexican-American appointees of Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California.
More recently, the Republican autopsy after the 2012 elections pinpointed Latino voters as key to Republican electoral success, yet Republicans in general have only doubled-down on anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric. Citizen militias, 2nd Amendment activists, and Tea Party activists supported the rhetoric of politicians that targeted Latinos and immigrants as the source of American political and social decline. Almost all on the far right, and increasingly in the mainstream, believed that immigrants were destroying American culture. And yet, Rubio and Cruz came to the fore. Does this mark the beginning of a new era of Latino conservatism or is this an anomaly?
It is probably a little of both. Latino conservatism is not an aberration. It has a long history within the Latino community in the U.S. and it continues today. Interestingly, in many moments in history it has even intersected with civil rights activism. It is important to note, that there are many types of conservatism and not all of them have strong traditions in the Latino community.
