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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Let me start by admitting that I find your manifesto-posting poorly constructed, intermittently dishonest, and suggestive of bad faith. I think you’re burying the lede partly to fool people into thinking there’s more substance to this argument, and partly to avoid moderation for naked outgroup-bashing. Your thesis appears to boil down to:

  • Early Americans didn’t politicize immigration

  • At some point they started to do so

  • (muttering about Jewish interests)

  • Therefore the Democrats are evil anti-American

With that said, I will try to address a couple of your actual points.

Emma Lazarus died in 1887, right after the statue was dedicated. And her friend, Georgina Schuyler—of the Schuyler sisters, by the way, a direct descendant of Alexander Hamilton—decides to memorialize her friend, Lazarus. And she starts an ultimately successful campaign in 1900 to have Lazarus’ poem put on the statue’s base.

This seems like pretty good evidence that immigration was quite salient by 1900. Is Hamilton mentioned to make the Schuylers seem more established? He’s almost the textbook case of an immigrant who both integrated into and shaped society.

So, just to conclude, for our first 200 or so years, we were primarily a nation of settlers. Then, from the mid-to-late 19th century, we were a mix of settlers and immigrants, depending on who was coming to where at what time—some people who were settlers, and some people who were immigrants.

The Constitution took effect in 1789, suggesting one hundred years of settling, followed by 150 of immigration. That’s a lower bound if you neglect the role of immigrants in the antebellum period, which you seem to be doing by redefining who counts as an immigrant at will. This is sophistry.

But I think that really informed what became this project to create this nation of immigrants ideology, kind of out of whole cloth in the 1950s.

You’ve just spent a comment and a half providing evidence for the ideological roots. Why pick the 1950s?

Jewish

Ah, there it is. None of this works if you can’t gesture threateningly at everyone’s favorite elites. Blaming old money and Catholics only gets your breakpoint to the mid-late 1800s. And you need that breakpoint to be later and later to prop up your distaste for modern Democrats. The Southern Strategy is small potatoes compared to the political realignments that happened in the Progressive and Reconstruction eras.

By all rights, blaming the Jews shouldn’t get your inflection point past the Fabian Society, either, but the point is rather moot. For all your hand-wringing over radical historians, this revisionism isn’t any better.

I agree more or less entirely with this post, but would add the more specific remark: a big deal is made of the "immigrant" (meaning foreign born) population never exceeding 15%, when

a) that is quite a lot of people

b) glosses over the downstream effects of this. The children of those immigrants are going to be native born, but they will still exist in immigrant communities and the "settler" population (meaning the Anglos) will dwindle as a share of the population. These groups have been almost entirely assimilated, but you can still see the residual social structures of German, Irish, Italian, Polish, etc... immigration, especially in major cities. Hell, you can see it today - most Hispanic Americans were born in the US. Despite this, they are still seen as (and many see themselves as) immigrants. This is a major part of what shapes the "Nation of Immigrants" narrative. It's not that at any point that the US had a majority immigrant population - its that the American populace has a collective memory of immigration/having immigrated. Contrast with Europe (or almost any part of the Old World, really), where this collective memory is very much absent. (Another major part is just the obvious impact that immigrants and immigration have had on almost every aspect of American culture).

You are a more patient soul than I.

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