I know. Whats going to happen is 2nd and 3rd generation latinos will identify as the in-group and side with the whites who are full of rage about immigration and brown people.
One of the more prominent white supremacists these days is a guy named Fuentes.
And the head of the proud boys was Enrique Tarrio
Guys like that remind me of Rodney Dangerfield’s confused great-grandfather. During the Civil War, he fought for the West.
Those are the sort of people historically known by terms such as “useful idiots”. The people who vote for the face eating leopards and are surprised when their faces get eaten.
They may think they are part of the “in group”, but they aren’t. They are supporting people who will deport or kill them, given the chance.
But that a segment of them, given time, would be incorporated into the in-group trough sociocultural assimilation, had been the historic lure in US society and is still at play. One thing that had this working for a long time was that there always had been another “off-white” European group that could be “promoted” – Irish, Italians, Slavs, some Jews – but a factor heightening the tension right now is that there is no longer that fallback. At best right now there’s the White middle-class Latinos (and never mind in the cases like the first-wave Cuban and Venezuelan emigrés who were from the middle classes, and generally embrace RW politics) and middle-class Asians. So there’s the perception that there is no longer that time factor by which by the time the grandkids were in school they would look to a casual observer for most practical purposes generic-American with interesting food at grandma’s. The argument that “these people cannot be assimilated” has intensified.
This article by longtime peace, environment, and civil rights activist George Lakey (he’s in his mid-80s now) talks about polarization past and present and what we can do about it. TLDR? Don’t panic. Work with others. Don’t fear polarization, despite the anxiety it causes.
HELL no.
Whatever their differences the Republicans and Democrats were all anti-USSR. Today, you have a major political party openly allied with a foreign adversary.
Today’s poltical divisions in the USA are completely unprecedented in living memory. No comparison at all. There are definable reasons for this, too.
I agree, Thing Fish. My historical memory goes back to Eisenhower. I was a tot when he was elected, but I remember his hospitalization for heart surgery. Later on, his meeting with Khruschev when the latter visit America. Then the 60s, still prepubescent till the middle of the decade, slowly maturing. It was a very divisive time post-JFK. Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement made America more divided, as things began to almost literally fall apart 1967-69: from the Summer Of Love through the MLK and RFK assassinations, and the escalation of our war effort in Vietnam fueling the flames of every year.
Even through the very early 70s a 60s mood prevailed, with the de-escalation of the war in Vietnam, followed by Watergate somewhat united us. By then the state of the nation was almost like All In The Family, the TV series. There was till lots of arguing and yelling, yet with a more accepting mood and less posturing of Lib versus Conservative. This was not a flattering picture of Life In the US of A, yet it wasn’t so bad, either.
For me, things felt increasingly near apocalyptic at the tail end of the 50s, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if much of the discord of the period was driven by Youth, by young people coming of age, and the rising of what was even then called the Baby Boom Generation, and as such driven as much by rampageous hormones of young, angry kids turning from girls and boys to men and women. Thinking back on those day now, and there were good times, very good times, mixed in with the bad, I can’t help but think of the Divided America, by age race, gender, class and, indeed, ideology as well, was of a time and a place, a thing unique unto itself, and in little in the conflicts that divide us now I feel little of the kind of dynamics of now more than a half-century later. We were divided in both the era of today and of the 60s to 70s period, and yet by different issues, a more homogeneous country, more stable, kids and grownups alike, with the conflicts and divisions feeling more like a cold turning into a bad cold, then to pneumonia, and then the passing, renewed health, and then the mumps, followed by what seemed at the time yet another cold, then becoming the flu, a near death experience, with good health once again following.
What’s going on today is a different ailment, or ailments; it cuts deeper, by region, class and race; we are also more economically divided, and more egregiously than before. Also, we seem to have no unifying public figures as we did back then, to varying degrees, and within different groups; of MacArthur and McCarthy, Eisenhower and JFK, LBJ, followed by Nixon.There’s little of the Common Culture that remains. And what, from a more sophisticated perspective, what we used to call the canon (or Canon) of the Greats of European and American literature and the arts: Plato, Homer, Aristotle; the Renaissance, and the Great Artists of the Rembrandt and Michelangelo type; of Opera, the rise of concert, or classical music; and then the Enlightenment; followed by Romanticism, and then the Modern Era, in which we are (or may be) at the tail end of. We lack unity, even a vocabulary, of an educated kind, to utilize in our discussions. The Unity is gone, and that was still present in my growing up and early adult years. But this isn’t just about me; we all seemed to have suffered a great loss; and we can’t even find a way to discuss and confront, in a civilized manner, what to do next, or what shall now, in effect, succeed the Great Past, now itself passing into history. These times are far more divided, more conflicted, than any I can think of, in the Western World in the modern era; and I’m at a loss to further expand on the issue beyond the aforementioned.
Just my two cents.
John