Reihan: Columbus Day

For those of you who haven't read Carol Swain's The New White Nationalism in America, the basic premise is that the changing demographic composition of the US population and the logic of official multiculturalism will soon lead to a potent white identity politics. Michael Lind made a similar argument in his brilliant The Next American Nation over a decade ago. This comes to mind because it happens in a context of declining "ethnic" allegiance among whites: consider the marked lack of hullabaloo over Columbus Day this year, a holiday that at least in part reflects the political and cultural clout of Italian Americans. One of my best friends is in the first year of an anthropology Ph.D. program at Yale, and she didn't even register that yesterday was Columbus Day: on campus, at least, that battle has long since been settled.

Will we eventually miss transactional ethnic politics? While talking to a cynical ethnic businessman a few months ago, he told me that when the Italians shake you down it's called "the mafia" and when members of underrepresented groups shake you down it's called "the coalition." Suffice to say, he's not the most enlightened character in the world, but his remarks reflect this idea that transactional ethnic politics are alive and well, on a much-reduced scale, in the big cities.

But if Swain is right, the new new thing is a kind of racial tribalism that will make wrangling over Columbus Day look like a breeze. More worrisome still, it's not obvious that intermarriage and assimilation will do much to blunt its effects.

I tend to be pretty optimistic about the prospects for ethnoracial conflict in the United States. In my admittedly limited experience, this country has adapted remarkably well to pretty dramatic changes in its population. Any prejudice I've encountered has been massively outweighed by indifference or maybe good-natured curiosity. I am interested, and of course concerned, to see if anti-Muslim sentiments become an enduring feature of the landscape. And I'm hoping the Republican Party doesn't choose to become "the white party," though it's easy to see how that would make for an accessible if not exactly attractive strategy. We'll see.

As for Columbus Day, it occurs to me that the so-called "Columbian Exchange" was probably the most important thing to ever happen to humans on Earth. Consider, and here I'm drawing on blogosphere favorite 1491, how badly things could have gone, say if indigenous Americans had contracted diseases from domesticated animals that could have spread back to the "Old World": the massive die-off in the Americas that is rightly remembered as a central tragedy could have been replicated in the rest of the world easily enough. Somehow what was torn asunder was going to be brought back together. Perhaps peace-loving Americans would have, given some time, traveled to Europe or Africa first. But one has to assume that this would have only delayed the die-off.

(Felipe Fernández-Armesto, one of my heroes, has a short book on The Americas offers a useful, contrarian look at some related issues. It turns out that he was recently beaten up by crazy cops.)

Comments

And I'm hoping the Republican Party doesn't choose to become "the white party,"

LOL as if this hasn't been true since 1980 (or since 1964).

Posted by sal mineo | October 9, 2007 11:20 AM

The only ethinc holidays which we celebrate wildly center on alcohol consumption (St Paddy's Day and Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest). I'm afraid ethnicity is subverted by consumerism just about every time. If there is no opportunity to consume, the ethnic holiday loses meaning (as it has for Columbus Day).

Posted by Citizen (World) | October 9, 2007 12:10 PM

There's been a substantial rise in ethnic nationalism in this country recently, as immigrants have been spreading out from the usual urban centers into suburbs and small towns like Manassas, VA and Carpentersville, IL.

What concerns me the most is how legitimate concerns about border security, flophouses, and strained social services are quickly shunted off into pointlessly and explicitly ethnocentric distractions such as "English Only" requirements for government services, which accomplish nothing except to increase ethnic tensions. We've started down the long, time-honored road toward sectarian strife. We can only hope that it doesn't start boiling over into racial violence, as in Europe.

Republicans have been sowing the whirlwind for years, holding together a marriage of convenience between wealthy investors who profit from immigration, and nationalist conservatives who are paranoid about immigration, by stoking resentment of cosmopolitan liberals. But if you are genuinely concerned about the potential rise of white nationalism, you need to take a stand. Don't let the immigration issue degenerate into stupid, symbolic acts intended to provoke discord instead of resolving it. Because we're already trending in that direction.

I don't think northeastern conservatives really understand the depth and power of ethnic nationalist sentiment in this country. It's flared up many times before and it will again. I'm afraid many Americans are going to learn this lesson the hard way.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | October 9, 2007 12:28 PM

Consider, and here I'm drawing on blogosphere favorite 1491, how badly things could have gone, say if indigenous Americans had contracted diseases from domesticated animals that could have spread back to the "Old World": the massive die-off in the Americas that is rightly remembered as a central tragedy could have been replicated in the rest of the world easily enough.

domestic animals isn't the only parameter, raw population size is another. length of habitation is probably another. eurasia, with an enormous and mildly interconnected population network, is a good environment for mass pandemics which sweep periodically. africa has been inhabited by hominids for so long that likely there's a whole ecosystem of incubating pathogens (the local wild animals have been around humans for a LONG time so one can imagine pathogens which jump back and forth more easily than between llamas and new worlders).

there is a parallel with the columbian exchange in natural history: every time the bering strait closed up and turned into a land bridge a massive invasion of eurasian animals occured. in general the eurasians superseded local north american variants, with a few genera such as camelids going the other way. the exact dynamic occurred between north america and south america, a few groups, such as armadillos went north, but mostly the northerners swamped the south americans. the size of the ecosystem is probably what mattered here.

Posted by razib | October 9, 2007 1:56 PM

The current anti-immigration hysteria is pretty much closing out the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party in the near future. How bad this gets depends probably on awfully Republicans are defeated in 2008, and if they decide to go base-heavy or try to moderate, Tory-style, for 2012. Since Republicans forswore the black vote decades ago and will probably never win it back, yes, the Republicans have essentially decided to become the White Male Party.

As for enduring anti-Muslim sentiment, again yes on the Republican Party and the conservative wing, but not the nation as a whole.

Posted by tequila | October 9, 2007 2:20 PM

"Consider how badly things could have gone if Americans had been infected by animals and these diseases spread back to Europe"? What possible "consideration" of that lunatic idea could result in the conclusion that it was better that Europeans should introduce diseases to the Americas that killed half the population?

Sounds, uh, just a tad Eurocentric to me.

But as it happens, dim memory reminds that Europeans got syphilis by buggering sheep, and infected themselves, while the Spanish brought gonorhea back from the New World, a virulent infection that quickly killed sufferers for about a century, and then became attenuated, assuming the less mortal form we know today.

And aren't those "potent white identity politics" the politics formerly known as "the Southern Strategy"? Somehow this post misses the fact that Republicans decided maybe Irish Catholics were white people after all when they saw the opportunity to harness ethnic white racism.

Some of the irony here, of course, would be that the Republican Party of the 1850s and 1860s was heavily influenced by German refugees from the revolutions of 1848, men and women who spoke English poorly or not at all. How fitting it would be if the Republican Party perished on a platform of 'English Only' and "Coloreds Keep Out'.

Posted by serial catowner | October 9, 2007 4:26 PM

I see this coming as well, as it would only seem natural that this would happen. After all, has there ever been a time in history when a people just let themselves be displaced? None that I'm aware of.

A people can only take so much. The demonization of European culture and history, affirmative action, racial quotas, black on White crime, and mass immigration is going to eventually become tiresome on the white population.

Whites would be crazy to not start lobbying for their interests. Can you imagine life as a minority under black or Latino rule? I mean, these people actually think they have the right to assault white school children in the schools. And with a business, academic, and media elite who's committed to "multiculturalism" for their own interests, there's going to be no one to complain to when this happens.

If you want to know what a society looks like after the white to non-white power transition, I suggest you take a look at South Africa or Zimbabwe for the future if white people fail to act. However, the biggest opposition to white ethnic politics will not come from racial minorities, it will come from the current elite that I've described above. Because of their interests in the homogenization of the people, they will stop at nothing to stop any political movement from happening.

You can forget about Internet freedom as this is one of the biggest threats the elite face. We can also count on so called "Hate-speech" laws to be enacted similar to Europe. These two measures will take the ability to organize away from whites, as any attempt to do so can be deemed as "hate speech." Don't think the Constitution will matter either, because as Bush has said "its only a God damn piece of paper."

The only way to make a "multicultural" empire work is with a totalitarianism style government. The question is, how will the Men of the West respond to this challenge? Has forty years of conditioning made us into impotent couch potato's? Or, does a Charles Martelle still live inside each one of us?

Posted by Joe Mothw | October 11, 2007 12:16 AM

i just wanna know if any one has any idea how to fix the frecin problym!!!

Posted by brianna | October 16, 2007 12:40 PM