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Tuesday, 19 June 2018

Kids In Cages: What Has Happened To America?

This is how the world sees the USA right now.
Let that sink in. How the hell did that happen??!

I've been following the story of US border guards snatching children from their parents from between my fingers. Every new story that trickles into my feed is even more horrifying than the last. I've seen pictures of children in cages — this is being reported by the right wing media! While many Americans are outraged, there is a disturbing number of people who retort,


But it's not a law, it's a policy intended to be a deterrent.

Supporters say the new policy is necessary to enforce existing laws and could help stem a recent rise in unauthorized arrivals. Last month, Homeland Security took 51,912 immigrants into custody, nearly three times the number detained in May 2017, when illegal immigration plummeted following Trump’s inauguration.
 
“The number of people trying to cross into this country illegally is increasing at a startling rate,” said Jessica Vaughn, of the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research institute that promotes stricter immigration control. “When there are meaningful consequences for illegal entry, people think twice about doing it.” - 'Why are you taking him?': Trauma lingers from 'zero tolerance' immigration policy that separates parents, kids, by Rick Jervis for USA Today

If that's true it's not working: people are desperate to move to America in the hopes of achieving the American dream. Let's take a look at some of the issues driving current policy.

  • Manifest destiny and white anxiety
  • Political polarisation
  • Economic pressures

Manifest destiny and white anxiety


Q: if you had the option of choosing between a savvy politician on first name terms with your nation's allies or a populist guaranteed to set your country's reputation on fire, who would you choose?

When "A" is predicated on how important your nation's standing on the world stage is and you're not even bovvered, you move from the international equivalent of Manchester United to Millwall. I'm not joking, this is officially a thing:

The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. I was talking to this person several weeks ago, and I said, by way of introduction, that I thought it might perhaps be too early to discern a definitive Trump Doctrine.

“No,” the official said. “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

“What is it?” I asked. Here is the answer I received:

“The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

It struck me almost immediately that this was the most acute, and attitudinally honest, description of the manner in which members of Trump’s team, and Trump himself, understand their role in the world. - A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch’, by Jeffrey Goldberg for The Atlantic

and Trump's rabid base is lapping it up. This comes from an innate belief that keeping both their friends and foes off balance benefits America, but of course this means that if America can't be trusted to lead, it can't do any actual leading. Not that Trumpkin types are complaining, seeing that they're seeing this boorish behaviour as America standing up for itself instead of apologizing for itself and having to bear the burden of the world's issues. That this has no discernible link to reality is not the point; as I've explained before when an authoritarian takes power, he arrives on a wave of hope and a promise to vanquish the boogeyman.

The role of the boogeyman 


The beauty of the boogeyman is that if people fear it enough, they won't care too much about what is done in the name of making it go away. To maintain control of the population, then, you must always be seen to be valiantly fighting the boogeyman without actually finishing the job. Remember, once the boogeyman has been slain you'll have to find another one if you want to keep people frightened enough to give you all the powers you said you need to destroy him. To keep people distracted, you need a scapegoat to accuse of being in league with the boogeyman. You might not be able to actually get at the boogeyman but the scapegoat is within easy reach. Thus the people will merrily lay into the scapegoat and completely ignore the fact that the things being said about the boogeyman aren't even generally true. Having someone to hit pretty much stops them thinking about the situation. - Fear My Boogeyman! The Politics Of Authoritarian Enforcement, by Wendy Cockcroft for On t'Internet

Trump's boogeyman is "elitists," who are basically anyone who's not in league with him, and his scapegoats are legion.

The power of the swagger


He has successfully leveraged the anxiety of mostly white rural folk left behind by globalisation in the same way his predecessors did by hinting at a Manifest Destiny denied them by the forces of liberalisation and that's why he's so hard to shift from the popular imagination. They will forgive him absolutely anything because he has promised them the absolution of "We're America, bitch!" You can't underestimate the power of the swagger and the feelings of empowerment it grants to those people who feel left on the scrapheap by the march of progress — and are regularly mocked by progressives. With Trump in charge they can feel at last that they're on top — whether they actually are or not. Personally, it reminds me of the time a farmhand approached my uncle David for a pay rise and went away happy without an increased wage because he had been promoted to farm manager. That's what happens when feelings trump facts.

The role of race


The roots of white anxiety actually stem from the belief in a Manifest Destiny and the horrors it engendered:

...in many ancient cultures, it was customary to brand or tattoo slaves to confirm their social stigma. But in the United States no such measures were necessary. Africans were chosen for slavery in part because they were considered inferior as a race. They already wore a racial uniform, which itself became the mark of slavery, and even later a stigma of shame and inferiority.

...The consequence was a virtually inseparable association in the American mind between the degradation of slavery and the degradation of blackness.

...To be white meant, de jure if not de facto, to be a thoroughbred European, uncontaminated by a single drop of Negro blood. Even after slavery, the one-drop rule would ensure that blacks, as a group, would remain distinct and distant from whites who could think of themselves as a ruling class. - We the Slave Owners by Dinesh D’Souza for the Hoover Institution

The horror of racism is actually predicated on the need to feel superior to the people lower down the social scale and the hope of attaining to a higher level:

...non-slaveholding whites shared with white planters a common set of values, most notably a belief in white supremacy. Whites, whether rich or poor, were bound together by racism. Slavery defused class tensions among them, because no matter how poor they were, white southerners had race in common with the mighty plantation owners. Non-slaveholders accepted the rule of the planters as defenders of their shared interest in maintaining a racial hierarchy. Significantly, all whites were also bound together by the constant, prevailing fear of slave uprisings. - Wealth and Culture in the South - Lumen Learning US History (OS Collection)

This is why racism persists today: even if you live in a trailer park and live off food stamps at least you're not an N-word. If you add to that the changing demographics you can see what white Americans are getting all worked up about:

Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades. By 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority. Much of this change has been (and will be) driven by immigration. Nearly 59 million immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in the past 50 years, mostly from Latin America and Asia. Today, a near-record 14% of the country’s population is foreign born compared with just 5% in 1965. Over the next five decades, the majority of U.S. population growth is projected to be linked to new Asian and Hispanic immigration. - 10 demographic trends that are shaping the U.S. and the world, by D’Vera Cohn and Andrea Caumont for the Pew Research Center

Then there's language and culture:

Following English, the most spoken languages in the United States are Spanish, Chinese, French, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.- The Most Spoken Languages In America - World Atlas

Dear White People, don't get too worked up about all this:

The racial wealth gap is growing, not shrinking, even while the percentage of people of color within the population is increasing. And since your parents’ wealth is the strongest indicator of your financial success (and the biggest factor in determining wealth is inheritance) the real advantage of white skin privilege achieved as a result of historically prohibiting property ownership among people of color is increasing.

As long as you have the wealth to influence political outcomes, you don’t need to be the numerical majority by race to control politics in the U.S. That’s why the 1% is able to lord it over the 99%, forcing us to cover the losses resulting from their reckless disregard for the majority of us in 2008, even as the majority grew poorer as a result of that same recklessness. - Why Whites Should Fear Demographic Change, by Scot Nakagawa for Race Files

None of the above presents much in the way of comfort to a white man watching steam rise from the radiator of his broken down pickup while a non-white man sails by in his red Mustang GT. You tell that man to check his privilege, he makes sure he's registered to vote so he can vote Republican to get his hero Trump a second term. Forget that at your peril. It doesn't matter to him that his victimhood is mostly imagined, it matters that his white skin promised him a privilege he has yet to experience in his own life.

Political polarisation


The partisan hackery that has resulted in the polarisation we're seeing today isn't new. The Southern Strategy that pushed right-wing voters to the Republican party and cemented it as "conservative" goes back to the 1950s. That Republican party members often cite the Democrats' racist policies as a reason not to take them seriously is a reason not to take them seriously; the Southern Strategy caused the parties to flip. These days, they like to pretend the Democrats are "the left," as if Blue Dogs didn't exist. Heck, they sometimes characterise them as "traitors."

Team games


The team games that result from such harmful attitudes results in a "Compromise is surrender" attitude in which each side blames the other (often hypocritically) for failures in transparency and honest dealing in order to score points off each other. Thus it is that Donald Trump blamed the Democrats for his own policy when the outrage started heating up the headlines:


What part of that tweet doesn't look like undisguised blackmail to you? To his fans he's just enforcing the law, so what's the problem?


To them this is well-deserved punishment that the soft-touch Dems lacked the spine to carry out. That Cathy uses a picture of her own baby in the bath may seem ironic but it's the unwritten law she's referring to: America is for white people, isn't it, Cathy?

Manufactured outrage


I've been accused of faking outrage at the appalling abuses of kids by ripping them from their parents' arms on the grounds that I wasn't freaking out about Obama doing it. Yes, but a) if that's true it wasn't okay then and it ain't okay now and b) Obama's regime didn't break up families to put them off wanting to enter America; they were locked up together. It's the muahahaha-ing of the border patrol agents that makes this so damn hard to accept. That Democrats are using this as an opportunity to mobilise their base against Trump for the mid-term elections this November is a fact but whether or not they'll succeed in lame-ducking him depends on how far down the toilet Americans are willing to see their country's reputation flushed.


I'm thinking "To the bottom of the sea" at this rate. I'd like to be proved wrong but as long as the team games continue expect more cruelty and less consideration for what other people think. Meanwhile, as such behaviour becomes increasingly normal, the Democrats will have to work harder to rile people up against the GOP. When caging children ain't no thing, why would anyone oppose their Glorious Leader?

Economic pressures


Traditional wisdom foretold that reducing taxes on the rich would crash the economy and that people would never forgive the GOP* for defunding CHIP; but there's little in the way of outrage. Apparently it doesn't matter. The economy is doing very well, thank you very much. That Trump inherited a recovering economy that Barack Obama's administration clawed back from the brink of the abyss is being ignored (of course).

The unemployment rate will drop to 3.6 percent in 2018, and 3.5 percent in 2019 and 2020. That's lower than the Fed's 6.7 percent target. But former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen admitted a lot of workers are part-time and would prefer full-time work.

Also, most job growth is in low-paying retail and food service industries. Some people have been out of work for so long that they'll never be able to return to the high-paying jobs they used to have. Structural unemployment has increased. These traits are unique to this recovery. Yellen admitted that the real unemployment rate is more accurate. - US Economic Outlook for 2018 and Beyond, by Kimberly Amadeo for The Balance

Basically, white collar workers are doing better and are likely to continue doing better while blue collar workers languish in the doldrums. Their only hope is to either develop niche skills or compete with others in the same low-pay boat. It's the low information blue-collar workers who tend to plump for Trump.

Competition is good... until it's bad


Generally speaking, Americans are all about the free market and healthy competition since they believe this fosters innovation and helps to keep costs down. This is the economic gospel they've been preaching since forever. However, the advent of the zero tolerance immigration policy might come back to bite them on the bum:

Personal choice, competition and freedom are the themes that resonate with Hispanic voters open to these Republican ideas. ...While supporting a legitimate role for government, many also support a limited role for government, ensuring an economic climate conducive to job creation, and health and energy policies steeped in competition in order to control costs. They embraces the free market ethos of America. And they believe in the American Dream.

But Republican appeals to Hispanic voters are not made in a vacuum. The well-funded message machine on the left, assisted by the mainstream media, will surely change the debate from ideas to identity politics. They will cast the Trump immigration policies as divisive, and the only issue Hispanic voters care about. We encourage Republican candidates to not succumb to single-issue thinking. 

Hispanic issues are American issues, and American issues are Hispanic issues. If Republican candidates want to survive the 2018 mid-terms, they need to not only develop a message centered on freedom and choice, but to use modern tools like data analytics to help them use their limited resources to deliver that message with precision to voters who are open to it. - Bucking the 'Blue Wave' -- Republicans would be smart to focus on Hispanic voters in 2018, by Chris Wilson and  Brent McGoldrick for Fox News

I can't help wondering how hard these two facepalmed when news of the zero tolerance policy began to spread. This comment from contrarian Ann Coulter isn't going to help:

Dems are having fun with it:


All this is about... the fear of being "overrun" by immigrants who look a little different and speak another language.

More than three-quarters of third generation Hispanics are English-dominant. Accompanying the transition to English dominance is a clear trend towards American beliefs and values across succeeding generations of Hispanics. - Hispanic immigration and integration in the U.S. - Allianz Knowledge

So much for competition. That birth rates among white people is falling doesn't help the perception that they're being out-bred:

 ...research, based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics, focuses on white births and deaths from 1999 to 2014.

It shows that birth rates among white women fell drastically during the recession, between 2007 and 2009 as families - already strained financially to breaking point - chose to have fewer children or none at all.

There were also fewer white women of childbearing age between 2000 and 2014 because of low birth rates during the 1970s. - America's dying whites: Caucasian death rate now outstrips the birth rate in a third of states, by Hannah Parry For Dailymail.com

What, neoliberal policies are decimating the people it's supposed to benefit? Colour me surprised! Basically, White Protestant Capitalism teaches that you must be self-sufficient, don't expect other people to carry you, and take responsibility for your own choices. Result: people who don't think that way pop out babies like there's no tomorrow while "de white folks" hold back out of distaste for "Relying on government." While raising their wages would solve the problem of them not wanting to have kids because they can't afford them, it's considered antithetical to capitalism to do so. Expect more hand-wringing and racial tension-inflammation as the people responsible for manufacturing this "crisis" refuse to take responsibility for their own choices.

And since they can't "compete" fairly, they're cheating by picking on the children of the most vulnerable.

Actions have consequences


America has sold its soul to Mammon and clings to delusions of grandeur. Rather than admit this is wrong, it has decided to bully vulnerable people and rob them of their children in an effort to limit competition for low-paid jobs in fear that the recipients thereof might go on to live more affluent lives and thereby dilute the existing hierarchy. Meanwhile, it's in complete denial that its foreign and economic policies are responsible for much of the refugee flow from the Southern American countries.

This has been building for generations and I'm not even sure it's reached its apogee. I only know that behaviour once considered to be unacceptable is now considered normal and that anyone who complains is either dismissed or ignored. That some prominent people have been speaking out is great but if America wants to regain its position as a global leader it will first have to regain our trust. After what we've been seeing lately I can't see that happening any time soon. Its soft power is eroding and with it the idea of an ideal; I foresee the growth of nihilism and ultimately the fracturing of the nation. Countering this trend requires transcending the political and social trends that brought it to the state it's in now but that requires the will to do so.

What can we do?


Until people are willing to break free of the social strictures that keep them from thinking for themselves things will get a lot worse before they get better. In the meantime I recommend we keep talking to each other, finding common ground with those we disagree with in order to forge a common future. It's really all we can do.



*Grand old party, a popular name for the Republicans
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