The GOP Defines Patriotism As Complacency About Racism

If there has been any benefit to be derived from Donald Trump's racist tweet storm, it is that far right "intellectuals" - something that is increasingly an oxymoron - and the base of the GOP equate white skin and indifference to racial inequality, if not out right racism, with being a "true American" and a patriot.  Given Trump's words and his long history of racism, including racial discrimination in housing in apartment properties his family owned in Norfolk, Virginia, it is near impossible to say the man is not a racist if one indulges in any shred of honesty, yet the right refuses to condemn him. Why?  Because it supports the underlying premise that only whites are true Americans. Everyone else is supposed to be happy to be in America and keep their mouths shut when it comes to enunciating America's many flaws. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the redefining of patriotism and the right to be an American with skin color.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted several things that respectable conservatives do not wish to defend. No National Review columnist has seconded Trump’s assertion that U.S.-born congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” And only a few GOP officeholders have implored Ilhan Omar to heed the president’s guidance, and return to the “crime infested” place from which she came.

But beneath these distastefully forward flirtations with white nationalism, many conservative intellectuals see an argument worth redeeming. Trump’s chief complaint with “the squad” of progressive nonwhite congresswomen was that they had been “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States … how our government is to be run” (apparently, the voters who elected AOC & Co. are not among “the people of the United States,” and opining on government operations is an aberrant behavior for members of Congress).

GOP operatives have been trying to pretend that this was his only point: Far-left Democrats hate our great country. Congressional Republicans got the memo. . . . Trump, meanwhile, shifted his emphasis from whether AOC & Co. are American to whether they deserve to be.

Once sanitized by GOP message-makers, Trump’s stance ceases to be overtly racist. Ilhan Omar’s claim to national belonging is now negated by her anti-American attitude, not her Somali origins. And yet the moment one examines what “anti-American” means, in this context, the true color of Trump’s nationalism becomes plain.

[N]one of the congresswomen in question have said that they “hate America.” They’ve merely expressed dissatisfaction with its present state and challenged popular conceptions about its past — prerogatives of citizenship in a free society that Donald Trump has never denied himself. . . . And Trump has no compunction about goring the sacred cows of conservative nationalism. He has expressed contempt for American prisoners of war, said that George W. Bush did not keep us safe, questioned whether the U.S. government was more “innocent” than Vladimir Putin’s, and declared that America had done “a tremendous disservice to humanity” in the Middle East.

Clearly then, neither Trump nor his defenders believe that dissent is inherently unpatriotic. It is something about the content of the congresswomen’s dissent — and perhaps the congresswomen themselves — that causes conservatives to see their protests as expressions of unforgivable ingratitude.

Of course, that something isn’t difficult to discern. The American right refuses to recognize any distinction between the claim “racial inequality was fundamental to our nation’s founding, and remains a pervasive force in American society today,” and an expression of “hatred” for the United States. This refusal is not peculiar to Trump or his loyalists. Even the president’s most highbrow (and lukewarm) apologists regularly denounce the anti-Americanism of progressives who express dissatisfaction with the state of racial progress in the U.S.

Take Charles C.W. Cooke. On Monday, the National Review’s senior editor penned a column arguing that Ilhan Omar had a moral obligation to “temper her critiques of American politics and culture” because she came to the U.S. as a refugee, and therefore owes this country a debt of gratitude.

But directly engaging with Omar’s dissent would create a problem for the pundit, because not once in the Washington Post column he cites does the congresswoman say “America is a disaster” or “needs complete rethinking.”

Omar clearly expresses disappointment with the United States. But the cause of her disappointment is the discrepancy between her country’s egalitarian ideals and its inequitable realities. Her defining mission, as a politician, is to close that gap and realize the “promise that’s not kept.”

The difference, as Cooke subsequently makes clear, is that Omar’s critique challenges America’s racial innocence, while Trump’s does not.

Beto O’Rourke has no allergy to praising America. But when asked about what he would do to combat racism at a campaign event, he did acknowledge the fact that white supremacy was a de jure reality in the American republic for its first 188 years of existence, and that the legacy of centuries of race-based subjugation has not been fully eradicated in the 55 years since 1964. If Cooke regards the public airing of this sentiment as an invitation to “cultural suicide,” one must ask whose culture he wishes to preserve.

African-Americans have deeper roots in our country than virtually any other U.S. community. The hard labor of black slaves served as a (if not the) primary engine of American prosperity throughout our civilization’s first centuries of existence. Chattel slavery didn’t just fill the coffers of southern planters; “as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers,” historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write, slavery “proved indispensable to national economic development.”

And yet for the unspeakable sacrifices that their ancestors made in service of our nation’s development, black Americans have never been compensated. Rather, most were systematically excluded from the wealth creation that followed the Second World War. And studies suggest that African-Americans still face de facto discrimination in housing, employment, and the criminal-justice system.

Why would it be more “grateful” of Omar to evince indifference to the maltreatment of a deeply rooted American community whose past subjugation is inextricable from the comforts and opportunities that she presently enjoys? Or, to put the question more pointedly: Why does Cooke — a British-American immigrant who earns his livelihood at a publication that defended southern segregation and apartheid — believe that his relative complacency about racial progress is a mark of gratitude rather than entitlement?

The ostensible answer is that Cooke believes white, conservative Americans are entitled to his (and Omar’s) gratitude, while black liberal ones are not, no matter how long the latter’s “people” have been here. This belief does not appear to be conscious. But absent that premise, his argument becomes unintelligible. . . . 

On the same day that Cooke’s reflection on Omar’s ingratitude went live, the National Review’s editor Rich Lowry published an editorial with nearly identical flaws. . . . Like Cooke, Lowry does not quote the object of his critique because that would make it harder for him to misrepresent her argument.

As a response to Rapinoe’s actual argument, Lowry’s history lesson is a non sequitur. Her complaint is with America’s racial order, not its flag. But like Cooke, Lowry refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two. On a surface level, both columnists assail the left for equating love of America with indifference to white supremacy; in actual fact, it is Cooke and Lowry who insist on that equation.

Trump has made the color of conservative nationalism more plain to the naked eye. But a tacit faith in white Christian Americans’ superlative claim to national belonging has always been native to the creed.

The Republican Myth That it Represents "Real Americans"

It is hard to tell when the myth began, but it certainly gained traction among Republicans with John McCain's disastrous selection of Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla.  What myth?  The myth that the Republican party speaks for "real Americans" while the Democrat Part speaks for effete liberals and  those who are "other."   Never mind accurate facts and history.  Take Donald Trump, the supposed champion of these "real Americans."   All of his grandparents and his mother were born in Europe.  Meanwhile, most American blacks can traces their ancestry in America back a century or more longer.  In my own case, some of my ancestors were in America close to a century longer than Trump's.  Why am I not a "real American" while Trump with a short term family history in America claims he is?  Sadly, it is all a lie and when stripped of all of the smoke and hypocrisy, the myth is a coded message driven my race and in some cases religious extremism.  Despite their protestations to the contrary, many of my Republican "friends" ultimately bought into this race based myth.  A  column in the Washington Post  looks at the disingenuousness of the myth peddled by the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

The most offensive and corrosive idea in our politics today is that some Americans are more “real” than others. Don’t you dare buy it.

Republicans are cynically peddling this un-American conceit. “Real Americans” elected and continue to support President Trump, they claim, in defiance of snooty “coastal elites” who are hopelessly out of touch with the country. It’s a total crock, and shame on those using it for political gain.

The whole point of democracy is that every citizen’s voice is supposed to have equal weight — even voices in favor of fair and compassionate immigration policy, universal health care, fighting racism, promoting gender equality, enshrining LGBT rights and other progressive causes. There is no need to be tentative about these views for fear they somehow make you, I suppose, “unreal.” They do not.

 

Nor does living within some arbitrary distance of an ocean, having a college education or preferring big-city life deprive anyone of standing as an American.

 

The notion has taken hold that because the miner is a “real American,” his views must therefore be more authentic — and the barista, if he does not share or accede to those views, is “out of touch.”

 

With world-class hypocrisy, Republican officeholders and activists are selling this load of bull while themselves, by and large, being “coastal elites.”  One recent illustration: No group is supposedly more elitist and clueless than the so-called mainstream media. At the media’s biggest social event of the year, last month’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, comedian Michelle Wolf made some biting jokes about the Trump administration. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, and his wife, Mercedes, the White House director of strategic communications, conspicuously stood up and walked out.

 

“It’s why America hates the out of touch leftist media elite,” Mercedes Schlapp harrumphed on Twitter. She sent the tweet while she and her husband were in a limousine, on their way to a glittering after-party thrown each year by NBC.

 

I know the Schlapps. . . . they recently purchased a $3 million home, as I certainly did not. Both have advanced college degrees. Matt Schlapp was a top lobbyist for Koch Industries before taking over at the ACU. The couple also founded their own public relations and lobbying firm. How are they anything but “elite,” according to the false dichotomy they espouse?

 

To put icing on the cake, Mercedes Schlapp reportedly said at a recent White House meeting that “I stand with Kelly Sadler” — referring to the White House aide who said of Sen. John McCain’s opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel that “it doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.” Schlapp is awfully selective about what she finds offensive.

 

Think for a moment about how ridiculous this whole thing is. Trump is a billionaire who started life as a millionaire, his father having been a wealthy developer. His Cabinet is a coven of plutocrats. His administration’s most consequential achievement thus far is a tax cut that showers corporations and wealthy citizens with lavish benefits, leaving just peanuts for the middle and working classes. The administration is also waging a relentless campaign to punish immigrants and the poor, apparently for existing.

But Trump cleverly uses cultural, racial and geographic markers to define who is “real” and who is not. And the Republican Party, to its eternal shame, has decided to go along.

Yes, it matters a great deal what people think in small-town Pennsylvania or rural Texas. But it matters just as much what people think in the rebuilding inner cores and thriving suburbs of our major cities, even if those cities happen to be on or near a coast.

Progressives have to speak to those left behind by wrenching economic and social change. But our voices are as authentic, and as worthy, as anyone else’s. I am a real American, too. Deal with it.

The Death of the Myth of Americans' Goodness

I have never been a fan of the myth of American exceptionalism.  Yes, preachers and politicians like to use the phrase, but if one looks at the details of America's history, it is filled with ugliness and hatred.  Most of us like to conveniently forget these past sins and overlook the still rampant racism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry and hate.  Looking the other way doesn't make the reality go away or magically become untrue.    For good or for bad, the results of the 2016 presidential election and the victory of Donald Trump's gathering of deplorables has torn the artificial veneer off the face of America and shown to the world that far too many Americans are not nice, decent or equality supporting people. Hopefully, this will be a wake up call and motivate the non-engaged to get involved and take back America from the 25,1% of the eligible voters who voted for trump.  Over 46% of voters stayed home and, bu their laziness and irresponsible behavior put Trump in the White House.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this harsh reality hitting home.  Here are excerpts:

So this is America, after all. It’s not the one many of us hoped we lived in right now, but it’s the one verified by the electoral map, and it’s the one that others of us have feared we lived in for a very long time.

All through the election, Hillary Clinton’s surrogates tried to repudiate the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency and all of its strident, fear-laden rhetoric. America is better than that, they said. Those values aren’t American; those values don’t represent us.

All through Tuesday night, Wolf Blitzer and John King bickered in front of their CNN Magic Wall about the “surprise” and “upset” of Trump’s victory. No one saw it coming, they said. Nobody could explain it. It wasn’t until the wee, exhausted hours of Wednesday morning that Van Jones, an African American political commenter, broke in with a shaking, emotional voice and offered his explanation: “This was a white-lash,” he said. “This was a white-lash against a changing country. It was a white-lash against a black president, in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes.”

What if America isn’t better than that? What if this was America all along?

Not the America that welcomed immigrant “huddled masses,” but the America that kidnapped African slaves and made them build a country, brick by brick and cotton field by cotton field. Not the America that lets women work and dress and worship as they please, but the America in which a man who sexually assaults one of them can be imprisoned for only three months. Not the America pulled along by hope but the America pushed along by aggression.

The people who were truly shocked by the outcome are those who have never experienced certain behaviors of the citizenry. . . . Good white people don’t fully understand why people of color fear encounters with the police, because the police have been mostly kind to them.

“I’m seeing so many posts, from mostly white friends, saying, ‘America, I don’t even know you,’ ” says Wendy Tien, a Milwaukee attorney and second-generation Taiwanese American. “And I’m thinking, ‘Where have you been? What do you mean you don’t know this America? Why haven’t you seen it?’ I’ve seen it. I see it all the time.”

This is America, the America that we built, the America that we all live in. But if this election taught us anything, it’s that we haven’t all been living in it in the same way.

“Now do you believe us?” tweeted Xeni Jardin, an editor in California, early Wednesday morning. “Us girls and women? Now do you believe Americans who are not white when they say white supremacy prevails?”

Jardin, who is white, grew up in a Southern city across from a prison, where she remembers that mostly white spectators would gather with coolers to celebrate the executions of mostly black inmates. But, she says, polite people didn’t discuss such things, just like they didn’t discuss sexual violence or other mistreatment of women.

It just existed, quietly, part of the rotten underbelly of that America.  Now it exists, loudly, part of the blaring horn of this one. 

 I grew up as a white male from a relatively affluent family with many of the perks that all of that entails.  It was really until I came out as gay, was fired from my job for being gay, was brutalized by a homophobic judge during my divorce and had anti-gay taunts and death threats aimed at me that I got the first real, honest to goodness look at the real America.  It is not pretty.  I like to believe that a majority of us are not like Trump's racist, homophobic, xenophobic and misogynistic base.  But for too long we the majority have been complacent and let organizations ranging from the GOP, to the KKK to falsely monikered "family values" organizations fan the flames of hatred.  If any good comes from this travesty election, I hope it will be that the majority who did not support Trump will mobilize and organize to take back our country.

What the Surging Hispanic Population Portends

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One of the ironies that strikes me when I hear white - usually Christofascist - rant about Hispanics not being "real Americans" is the idiocy of those attacking Hispanics.  If anyone is not a "true American" it is the white conservative bigots many of whom come from families that have been in the Americas for a fraction of the time period that Hispanics have been in the Americas - especially Hispanics with significant Native American ancestry be it Mayan, Aztec, or other groups that were in the Americas for thousands of years before the coming of European explorers and adventurers.  A piece in The Economist looks at (i) the reality of who are "real Americans," (ii) how the surging Hispanic population in the United States will change America, and (iii) how wrongheaded GOP policies are harming America's future prospects.  Here are highlights:

IN THREE TERMS representing Colorado in Congress, John Salazar got used to angry voters calling him a Mexican and not a proper American. During fights over the Obamacare health-insurance law, a constituent told him to “go back where you came from”. The attacks were misplaced. Mr Salazar is proud of his Hispanic heritage, but he comes from a place with deeper American roots than the United States. One of his ancestors, Juan de Oñate y Salazar, co-founded the city of Santa Fe in New Mexico. That was in 1598, some 250 years before it became American territory (and the best part of a decade before English merchant-adventurers splashed ashore at Jamestown, Virginia). A laconic man in denims and cowboy hat, Mr Salazar is a fifth-generation Colorado rancher, farming the same corner of the San Luis valley that his great-grandfather settled 150 years ago, just when Mexico ceded the territory to America. As families like the Salazars put it, they never crossed the border, the border crossed them.

But their high desert valley is home to many Spanish-speaking newcomers too. A demographic revolution is under way. In 1953, when Mr Salazar was born, America’s Hispanic population numbered perhaps 3m. It surged after changes in immigration law under President Lyndon Johnson, nearing 9m by 1970. Today it stands at 57m, out of around 321m Americans, and is on course to double by mid-century, when it is projected to be 106m out of 398m. In the past two decades Hispanic migrants have spread from a few states and cities to places that had not seen big foreign inflows since the days of steam trains and telegraphs. The biggest group, with 34m, is Mexican-Americans.

Hispanics are transforming the definition of what it means to be a mainstream American. During the roughly 200 years from the presidency of George Washington to that of Ronald Reagan, whites of European descent consistently made up 80-90% of America’s population. By the time of the 2010 census, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites (for simplicity’s sake called whites hereafter) was down to 64%. Some time around 2044 it is projected to fall to less than half.

[I]t is white decline that makes today’s demographic revolution so remarkable. America has twice before witnessed European migration waves that were proportionately even larger when measured against the population at the time: once in the 19th century and again at the start of the 20th century. Those new Americans came to be seen as respectable, over time, as they assimilated towards a majority culture rooted in what were explicitly called Anglo-Protestant ideals: self-reliance, rugged individualism, thrift and hard work. Yet now that white majority is on course to become a minority.

Every year around 900,000 Hispanics born in America reach voting age. Neither party should imagine it will own their votes in perpetuity, but Republicans have the most work to do. In the 2012 presidential election Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, got nine in ten of his votes from whites, whereas Mr Obama won eight in ten of the votes cast by minorities. If the Republicans want to catch up, party hardliners will have to stop taking extreme positions on immigration. Hispanics are unlikely to listen to messages about jobs or health care from candidates who are also proposing to deport their mothers.

Business is waking up to the rise of Hispanics.  . . . . if Hispanic-Americans were a country they would rank 16th in the world. A giant reason to be optimistic about the rise of Hispanics is that they are making America much younger. The median age of whites is 42; of blacks 32; and of Hispanics 28. Among American-born Hispanics, the median age is a stunning 18. As other parts of the rich world face a future of aging, shrinking populations, Hispanics are keeping American schoolyards full of children and replenishing the supply of future workers. 

Take away Hispanics and other fast-growing minorities, and America’s numbers look like those for Italy, a country full of pensioners with a shrinking labour force. As things stand, however, America’s working-age population is expected to grow at a healthy clip.

Many more Hispanics are enrolling in college—and still more would seek degrees if conservative politicians looked to the long term and changed state laws that make the children of unlawful migrants pay much more than their American classmates for a public college education. When one in four children in public schools is Hispanic, economic self-interest alone should prod states to get them ready for the 21st century.

This report will show how some Republicans in Tennessee, a conservative state, are debating pragmatic changes. Alas, in other states, Tea Party zealots are leading a charge in the wrong direction. Texas used to stand out among conservative states for a businesslike approach to immigration. But in 2014 a dismaying number of Texas Republicans ran for election vowing to repeal a far-sighted 2001 law granting subsidised college tuition fees to students resident in the state, regardless of their legal status.

Nativist panic-mongering about a Hispanic “invasion” has helped to skew public perceptions. Many Americans vastly overestimate the incidence of illegal immigration. A survey in 2012 by Latino Decisions, a pollster, asked non-Hispanics to guess the percentage of undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants. The average guess was one in three. The real figure is one in six. And fresh immigration as a cause of Hispanic population growth was overtaken in 2000 by Hispanic births in America. Of the 17m Hispanic children in the country, some 93% are native-born citizens.

Calm logic should prod older Americans to welcome well-educated young taxpayers of any colour. But in politics culture matters just as much as logic. Even different generations of Hispanics can clash, as John Salazar has witnessed in Colorado. During an attempt to pass a comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, he was berated by Mexican-American constituents whose families had been in his valley “for ever”. They asked him why he was trying to help the mojados (wetbacks)—a pejorative for Mexicans supposed to have swum across the Rio Grande.

Today's "Real Americans"

As I noted in the post on day three of our vacation, the face of America is changing rapidly and the "real Americans" look far different than the fantasy image that the Republican Party and its racist/Christofascist base.  I for one  - unlike the angry, extremest base of the far right/GOP - am not threatened by those who look different from me and/or who have allegiances to other faith traditions so long as they are likewise accepting of others.   A column in the New York Times looks at what real Americans look like.  Here are excerpts:

Is America in 2013, in any meaningful sense, the same country that declared independence in 1776? 

The answer, I’d suggest, is yes. Despite everything, there is a thread of continuity in our national identity — reflected in institutions, ideas and, especially, in attitude — that remains unbroken. Above all, we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.

And that’s a remarkable thing when you bear in mind just how much the country has changed. 

America in 1776 was a rural land, mainly composed of small farmers and, in the South, somewhat bigger farmers with slaves. And the free population consisted of, well, WASPs: almost all came from northwestern Europe, 65 percent came from Britain, and 98 percent were Protestants. 

America today is nothing like that, even though some politicians — think Sarah Palin — like to talk as if the “real America” is still white, Protestant, and rural or small-town. 

But the real America is, in fact, a nation of metropolitan areas, not small towns. Tellingly, even when Ms. Palin made her infamous remarks in 2008 she did so in Greensboro, N.C., which may not be in the Northeast Corridor but — with a metropolitan population of more than 700,000 — is hardly Mayberry. In fact, two-thirds of Americans live in metro areas with half-a-million or more residents. 

What do we do in these dense metropolitan areas? Almost none of us are farmers; few of us hunt; by and large, we sit in cubicles on weekdays and visit shopping malls on our days off. 

And ethnically we are, of course, very different from the founders. Only a minority of today’s Americans are descended from the WASPs and slaves of 1776. The rest are the descendants of successive waves of immigration: first from Ireland and Germany, then from Southern and Eastern Europe, now from Latin America and Asia. We’re no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; we’re only around half-Protestant; and we’re increasingly nonwhite. 

Yet I would maintain that we are still the same country that declared independence all those years ago.

Of course, our democratic ideal has always been accompanied by enormous hypocrisy, starting with the many founding fathers who espoused the rights of man, then went back to enjoying the fruits of slave labor. Today’s America is a place where everyone claims to support equality of opportunity, yet we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite.  

But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals — and in that fact lies the hope of redemption.