I have resisted two claims made in recent conversations.
1. Compared with the early Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, Hispanics today face more prejudice.
I am afraid that the Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants faced a great deal of prejudice, and that this has been mostly forgotten. Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers is a must-read for its coverage of the eugenics movement. My reading of that book makes me suspect that the prejudice back then was even worse.
2. Compared with the 1960s, the stability of our country is less threatened in the Trump era.
This is a tough one, because it involves assigning probabilities to non-stochastic phenomena. Even if the probability of chaos is in some sense lower today than it was in 1965, it is still higher than zero today, and meanwhile we know that the country stabilized after the 1965-1980 period receded. So in some sense, it is simple to claim that we live in more dangerous times now.
I am prepared to argue that we survived the 1960s because politics was still coalitional and fluid rather than being entirely identity-driven. The Democratic Party absorbed the anti-war movement, even though the Vietnam war was initiated by a Democratic Administration. The Republican Party absorbed what had previously been the core constituency of the Democrats, the Solid South.
In 1967, blue-collar workers and college students were like two distinct tribes. But by 1973, blue-collar workers were sporting long hair, listening to hard rock, and experimenting with drugs and sexual freedom. I would be willing to bet that in 2023 we won’t see erstwhile Trump supporters adopting the race and gender doctrines that are prominent on campus today.
I’m not seeing the sort of coalitional politics that I saw in my youth. Mr. Trump won by gaining votes from among the anti-Bobos. The Democrats are doing remarkably little to try to get those votes back. Indeed the Bobos who form their base do not want the anti-Bobos in their coalition.
Because today’s divide seems less fluid to me, I think that the danger is higher that conflicts will not be reconciled peacefully.
With respect to #2, I’m reminded of this piece Scott Alexander mentioned at Slatestarcodex:
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
That’s an amazing link. Thanks for posting it.
Trump is mostly effect more than cause. He has been a celebrity for 40 years. But maybe focusing the angst on him is a good thing.
Because today’s divide seems less fluid to me, I think that the danger is higher that conflicts will not be reconciled peacefully.
The stakes also seem a lot lower, though, don’t they? That’s what makes me somewhat hopeful. The 1960’s had Jim Crow and Vietnam. Today we have idiots on college campuses freaking out because somebody said something or wrote something that somebody else didn’t like. Not much of a casus belli and I can’t imagine many people really willing to put themselves at risk of serious bodily harm over this.
I say that Cowen’s diagnosis of increased Complacency is not compatible with the guess of equal propensity to political chaos. Things aren’t as volatile now, and to the extent they might produce a reliable signal about such things, the markets seem to agree.
Everything I’ve read about the near social breakdowns in the 60’s and 70’s leads me to believe we aren’t nearly in that boat yet. Maybe things now are more like the late 50’s / early 60’s, with the tensions building for storms on the way, but I don’t see it as being in the same order of magnitude in terms of a national nervous breakdown. Things called ‘populist revoles’ seem to just fizzle out these days: Occupy Wall Street or The Tea Party, and maybe whatever movement led to Brexit too. Probably BLM and Trump too.
In the 70’s Oscar Rivera was part of the FALN which set off 120 bombs in the US, trying to vie for Puerto Rican independence (under Marxist principles, naturally, and in alliance with the Soviets, which is why the otherwise good idea couldn’t be entertained at the time.) Obama pardoned him, and this weekend he’s being cheered at the place of honor in a parade – but a meticulously compliant one. Meanwhile, 97% of Puerto Rican voters just favored statehood (i.e. financial dependence due to impending bankruptcy) over genuine independence, so it seems the movement is dead.
One thing we don’t have now is the demographic dominance of young adult baby boomers. Now we are dominated by the old. Also the Cold War and the threat of foreign and domestic Communism is gone. Most young people go to school, where it’s more important than ever not to cause too much trouble if the administration doesn’t have your back. There is more welfare, more materials comforts, more enervating distractions. The smart set is doing well, and you need impecunious, opportunity-starved young smart people to lead any genuinely disruptive movement. All we have are SJW’s and some antifas, but they just don’t compare to their predecessors in capability, motivation, and willingness to commit real violence, probably because they just don’t need to do any of those things these days. They can get anyone fired, and that’s enough to keep most everyone’s heads down.
Again, it’s far too easy for Americans to look at history through an Experience In America Filter. The 60’s and early 70’s were crazy and volatile and chaotic everywhere, to include Japan.
In general, major political distruption requires a multiple-iteration game of chicken to keep escalating to higher and higher levels of dangerousness. It seems to me that most players of such games are throwing in the towel much, much lower down the chaos-threat ladder.
One quibble on a point that I just read about: I’m not sure that anyone should take the PR statehood vote as representative of anything. Almost 2/3rds of ELIGIBLE voters didn’t bother to vote. The 97% for statehood is the percentage of those who were interested & motivated enough to actually get to a polling place. Apparently, there was also a boycott called by a couple of antagonistic political parties.
If PR citizens don’t give a rip, then Congress shouldn’t waste any time on it either.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/americas/puerto-rico-statehood-referendum/index.html
I have to wonder if there’s a bit of statehood fatigue. That debate has been going on there for decades.
PR is practically a US state already. It gets a lot of Washington pork, Puerto Ricans are born US citizens, and they don’t have to file federal income tax returns.
For most who are still there, why would you even want statehood or independence?
All this current election stuff is true but I believe PR statehood passed in 2012 so we can’t disregard the 2017 election here. And as time goes by the cost of independence versus state/territory is getting a lot higher so it is clear PR does not want independence here. So statehood is better than territory status. At this point, I see best to accept PR as a state but I don’t think that is possible in our current anti-Immigrant (especially Hispanic Immigrants) politics.
I suspect the sticking point is more that it would add several Democratic representatives and senators, so the Republicans would resist it strongly.
Yes. Also, leaving aside the political effect, what is the benefit to the U.S. as a whole in adding an insolvent state as the 51st? PR borrows money at high rates to pay its regular operating costs. It has no way to pay down, much less pay off, its territorial debts, which are gargantuan in comparison to its revenues. What is PR bringing to the “table” in asking for statehood?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/08/news/economy/puerto-rico-bankruptcy-takeaways/index.html
1. Compared with the early Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants, Hispanics today face more prejudice.
Definitely false, we forget how segregated the US truly was and how awful things were for minorities. Heck in several states California, and New Mexico, they are the majority now! Unfortunately the story about Civil Rights focuses on MLK marches of the 1950s and 1960s and not the segregation in other parts of the nation.
2) While things are ‘worse’ than 1965, they are certainly better than the 1970s which is more comparable as it was a significant Recessionary Time. (Again I simplifying 1973 – 1982 as one long recession here.) The road to integration was exceptionally tough as I remember it was big deal in my 1976 Maryland suburban that a (doctor) African-American family was moving into the neighborhood. It was a rough period and
2a) Remember the Clintons campaigned for McGovern and look what happened when they were in charge? I expect the SJW to do the same thing here the next couple decades.
2b) Wages are rising and that always improves everybody mood.
2c) Please compare crime rates and other social issues. Every single one hit high point in 1979 – 1981 and most have improved significantly the last 35 years. (Yes there has been some upticks since 2014.)
2d) Wasn’t the 1968 – 1980 have vastly changing political coalitions? And didn’t the Democrats really only strike gold with Clinton 1992 which only succeeded due a weird third party run and the extended 1990 jobless recovery when unemployment hit high point in summer of 1992?
2e) AGAIN, the Bobo vs anti-Bobo only works when you leave out anti-Bobo minority voters and Bobo older educated voters. BTW, next week the GA06 special election will be an interesting test case of future coalitions.
I suspect that current turmoil attends a change in sustainable political, economic, and technological patterns. I do not know how much that was the case in the 60s.
These three articles from 1907/08 give a view into how the immigrant wave was viewed and discussed even in “polite” society
The Perils of the Republic
Author(s): Goldwin Smith
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 184, No. 610 (Mar. 1, 1907), pp. 464-471 Published by: University of Northern Iowa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105804
“The original population of the States, it is true, was mixed. But there was nothing unassimilable in the Dutchman, the Frenchman or the Swede. Irish immigration frightened Americans into Know-nothingism. But about the worst that it did, after all, was to fill the ranks of Tammany. It has found its level and is a source of alarm no more. Not so the Italian, with his Mafia, or the Eussian and Polish exile. The spirit of European revolution and of European anarchism is invading American cities. Sympathy with political assassination is proclaimed at a great meeting at New York.”
Foreign Criminals in New York
Author(s): Theodore A. Bingham
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 634 (Sep., 1908), pp. 383-394 Published by: University of Northern Iowa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25106203
“When the circumstance is taken into consideration that eighty five per cent, of the population of New York City is either foreign-born or of foreign parentage, and that nearly half of the residents of the five boroughs do not speak the English language, it is only a logical condition that something like eighty five out of one hundred of our criminals should be found to be of exotic origin. In no one police precinct on Manhattan Island does the percentage of native-born heads of families reach 50? the highest, 45.44 being in the West Side district lying between Forty-second and Eighty-sixth Streets and Eighth Avenue and the North River, and the lowest, 3.12, in the densely congested East Side quarter, largely peopled by Russian Hebrews, bounded by East Broadway, the Bowery and Houston and Norfolk Streets. Wherefore it is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one-quarter of the population), per haps half of the criminals should be of that race, when we con sider that ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor, is conducive to crime; nor is it strange that in the precinct where there are not four native-born heads of families in every hundred families, the per centage of criminality is high.
A Common-Sense View of the Immigration Problem
Author(s): William S. Rossiter
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 634 (Sep., 1908), pp. 360-371 Published by: University of Northern Iowa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25106201
Actually, the election evidence shows that the GOP absorbed the Peripheral South and gained in the South primarily from the importing of “millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants.” into the region. The racist Democrats in the Solid South primarily stayed Democrats. The GOP got more votes from the non-racists, both among the existing population and from immigrants from other States to turn the South into their voting block, beginning with the least (not most) racist States. The details have been written up in many places, but here’s one I found with a quick Google search if you’re looking for more details.
Much more wealth, more security and good jobs available for college educated folk willing to work — less risk.
Much less “we’re all Americans”, with so many Dem elites making fun of and contemptuous of normal, somewhat patriotic Americans. Romney’s 49% comment was mostly true — Clinton’s “deplorables” comment is false, but is true in the minds of the elite with much of the power.
Identity politics leads to tribalism and tribal warfare, all throughout history and through much of the world. Free markets reduce tribalism.
It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.
The free market as represented in the hypercompetitive new media and social media space is encouraging tribalism and partisanship in an attempt to woo left-leaning young people. Meanwhile fuddy duddy government bureaucracies still operate with a generally utilitarian mission.
The classical liberal notion that free markets naturally reduce racial and political tensions seems badly in need of review.
Free markets of buying and selling, especially with repeat customers, DO reduce political tensions.
Social media markets, allowing lots of “no cost” status increases thru more extreme speech, increase tensions. Who on which team can beat on their chests the most?
The 2001 “dawn” sequence of two groups of primates comes to mind, as well as “Stargazer” (from the book) taking a bone weapon to use and to “win” the battle, after lots of chest-thumping.
Finally — people WANT to hate others, and want the freedom to hate others. That’s a sad reality of the human condition. Not all, not all the time, but most, most of the time, at least a little. Ignoring this fact leads to reducing the honest anti-hate real tolerance that the West previously got from Christianity & liberal democracy.
The demonization of Hitler, especially over Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other commies, is part of the desire to feel superior thru hatred.
Intolerance in schools is being taught and enforced by teachers and principals.
Actual violent hate crimes were worse 100 years ago, but much less bad in the 70s & 80s, and are now, again, getting worse.
I’ll also add that it’s the private liberal arts colleges at the bleeding edge of promoting SJW animosity.