Group items tagged

Latino voters have increasingly made opposing the GOP agenda a top political priority in the age of President Donald Trump

The majority of black and Hispanic people do think that speaking English is at least a somewhat important component of Americanness, but almost a tenth of both groups think it’s not important at al

black and Hispanic respondents are much more likely than whites to say that belief in God is a very important component of a specific American identity.

Seventy-six percent of white people and 74 percent of Hispanics think that civil liberties such as freedom of speech are very important pieces of American identity, while only 61 percent of black respondents feel so

More than half of black respondents think that a belief in capitalism isn’t a very important part of that identity, while good majorities of both white and Hispanic people think that it’s either somewhat important or very important

Forty-five percent of Hispanic respondents said that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity make the country much stronger, compared with 32 percent of whites

white respondents are most likely to say that diversity makes the country weaker, or to be ambivalent about the idea of diversity altogether.

the small but influential sliver of black conservatives who identify as Republican appears to be diminishing, as the increasing influence of Trumpism and the alt-right of the modern GOP have made the Republican Party more and more openly hostile to black voters.

Other polls also show black voters increasingly concerned about racism. White voters might be moving in the other direction, and philosophically seem to be deprioritizing the importance of diversity in favor of an embrace of capitalism, nationalism, and individual liberty

40 percent of Hispanic respondents think that a potential citizenship question would be used for checking individuals’ immigration status as opposed to counting the population. Black respondents, on the other hand, are the least likely to buy the stated rationale for the question, and only 17 percent believe that it will be used for the sole purpose of counting the population

The profiles of the Republican and Democratic parties have shifted accordingl

A strong majority of white respondents—59 percent—think that speaking English is a very important part of being American.

Republicans have had to shape their party around explicit appeals to white voters and their anxieties, and have had to build an electoral strategy that can promote low overall turnout and stoke white grievances

In short, Democrats have cultivated an image as the party of racial and cultural pluralism, while Republicans have rejected pluralism as a viable strategy.

Majorities of both white and Hispanic respondents also favor the minimum-wage increase, but not at the numbers or with the fervor of black people

black and Hispanic respondents are also much more likely to strongly favor stricter gun-control laws than whites

black respondents are the most likely racial group to support providing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States.

Six percent of black people and 7 percent of Hispanic people reported that they or someone else in their household did not have the proper voter identification the last time they went to vote, a small proportion but one much higher than the 1 percent of white respondents who said they’d had similar problems.

Nineteen percent of black people and 14 percent of Hispanic people said they’d had to wait in long lines, as opposed to 9 percent of whites

they come after a 2018 midterm election in which claims of voter suppression and major civil-rights lawsuits came to define elections in places such as Georgia, Kansas, and North Dakota.

In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats elected one of the most racially diverse incoming classes of legislators since Reconstruction, and a diverse field of potential presidential contenders revolves around a multifaceted policy debate that’s heavily influenced by progressive ideas

These numbers track with the Census Bureau’s recent approximation that more than 600,000 households would fail to complete the census because of the question

these results from PRRI and The Atlantic shed new light on fundamental questions

They illustrate that the so-called demographic destiny of America is one that would look radically different should the country become majority nonwhite sometime in the next 20 or 30 years. The data indicate that white, black, and Hispanic voters have markedly divergent ideas on what exactly makes the American identity, and they also indicate that these differences are enforced and entrenched via spatial and social segregation

the data also cast some doubt on the political prospects of that demographic destiny. They show that black and Hispanic voters are more likely to be carved out of the political process, and that those efforts are perhaps aided by the existing regime of segregation

they show that the competing visions of America, as separated by race and region, are indeed competing, and that they are the chessboard upon which all politics is played.

There was “indignation and incredulity” expressed by the members of the Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told the lawyer, “Your argument is demeaning the priceless value of citizenship.” Roberts put it simply. If the administration has its way, he said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”

EXILE FROM ONE’S HOME is historically considered one of the worst punishments the state could employ; it was, after all, one of the traditional Greek and Roman punishments for murder, their alternative to the death penalty

To drag someone out of the life they have painstakingly created over many years, for something as petty as traffic violations or shoplifting, is a gross violation of the proportionality principle — that the punishment should fit the crime.

Human rights by their nature apply to both citizens and noncitizens alike. It is difficult to see why deportation for such violations is not also a human rights violation. How, then, have so many of us accepted these policies so at odds with our American values?

The word “criminal” has a literal meaning, of course, but it also has a resonant meaning — people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice. We do not generally use the term to describe those who may have inadvertently broken a law

Someone who runs to catch a bus is not necessarily a runner; someone who commits a crime is not necessarily a criminal.

Politicians who describe people as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors

Deliberately obscuring the crucial distinction between someone who violates a law and someone whose character leads them to repeatedly commit serious crimes is an effective strategy for masking gross injustice.

Our current administration is vigorously employing that strategy, and history suggests that it is rarely constrained to just one group. If we look away when the state brands someone a criminal, who among us then remains safe?

Mr. Biden’s immigration plan would provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and increase diversity visas and border-security funding. But, conceding the long odds of achieving such extensive changes, lawmakers are focusing on cobbling together a package of smaller bills that would legalize about eight million or fewer undocumented immigrants.

A team of immigration activists and researchers as well as congressional aides is exploring the question, digging into the best way to present their case to Ms. MacDonough, who declined to comment for this article. They have found past precedents, including one from 2005, in which changes to immigration policy were allowed as part of a budget-reconciliation package, and they are tallying up the budgetary effects of the immigration proposals — which total in the tens of billions.

“Before we can do anything meaningful on immigration, we’re going to have to deal with the current crisis at the border,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who has been involved in the bipartisan talks. “I don’t think the public is going to tolerate us ignoring this crisis, and it’s just going to get worse unless we deal with it.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month endorsed the idea of using reconciliation to push through an immigration measure, citing the “budget impacts of immigration in our country.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat, came out in favor of the approach last week.

To pull it off, Democrats would have to grapple with strict budget rules that limit what can be done under reconciliation.

The pro-immigration group FWD.us hired Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the maneuver this year.“Those provisions are the precedent for us,” said Kerri Talbot, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub. “A lot of things we’re trying to do now relate to what was approved in 2005.”

Twenty-two Democrats, including four senators, recently wrote a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to include an immigration overhaul in his infrastructure package. Many are worried that they will lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, and fearful that the Supreme Court will strike down former President Barack Obama’s protections for Dreamers.

Yet not all Democrats are likely to support a unilateral approach

For now, Senator Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat who has for years pushed for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, said that he was focused on passing a bipartisan immigration bill, and that Mr. Schumer had encouraged him to work to reach a deal with Republicans.

“The crisis at the border is undisputable — even the president admits that now — so if we can work on that, and then work on some of the path options that I’ve supported in the past, I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said.

“Britain is trying to turn large numbers of Hong Kong people into second-class British citizens. This has completely changed the original nature of BNO,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular briefing.

In 2006, the government issued just 802 of these EB-5 visas to investors and their families; this year, it granted 7,818. The program is now growing so rapidly that in the next year or two the number issued will probably reach the annual limit of 10,000. For the first time in the program’s history, applicants may be turned away.

Investors must put up $1 million for a visa, but if they invest in a rural area or one with high unemployment, that is reduced to $500,000.

Mr. Stenger dismissed criticism that the visa program simply allowed rich people to jump ahead of others in line for citizenship. “Yes, it’s true that the investment is getting them their green card,” Mr. Stenger said. “But to say they’re buying their way into the country — well, they’re investing in products and programs that are having a tremendously positive impact on the community.”

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.

Dabiq is a town in northern Syria currently held by ISIS where, according to Islamic prophecy, the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam.

And according to those prophecies, the Islamic armies will ultimately conquer Jerusalem and Rome.

No matter that the majority of Muslims -- even many jihadists - see ISIS' interpretations of the Quran and the hadith as manipulations or distortions.

The revival of the caliphate is the launching pad for a global battlefield. No caliph can govern without pursuing offensive jihad, and that jihad will continue, as Dabiq put it, until "the shade of the blessed flag will expand until it covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth."

"There will come a time when three armies of Islam shall simultaneously rise, one in the Levant, one in Yemen and one in Iraq."

It is powerful motivation to ISIS supporters, and it's also a message to Muslims: The end of times is at hand, and if you want to be a true Muslim, on the right side of history, you had better join us.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said it was an obligation to establish the caliphate and therefore to recognize him as caliph.

A caliphate can only exist if it holds territory: ISIS' raison d'etre is to sustain and expand

ISIS followers -- and Dabiq -- are fond of quoting the words of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the "spiritual" father of the movement and leader of al Qaeda in Iraq until he was killed in 2006.

Libya is the only other country where ISIS holds territory -- the coastal town of Sirte and other patches along the Mediterranean

Libyan territory can also be (and has been) the platform for launching terror attacks in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

But ISIS' ambitions run much further -- it has established a presence in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

ISIS does not recognize the borders of nation states that make up the modern world nor the idea of a democratic state or citizenship.

"The Islamic State does not recognize synthetic borders, nor any citizenship besides Islam," he declared in 2012.

"We won't enjoy life until we liberate the Muslims everywhere, and until we retrieve Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and regain Al-Andalus (Andalucia in Spain), and conquer Rome," Adnani said in 2013.

ISIS wants to stir religious hatred in Europe and the United States -- so that Muslims no longer feel they belong in the West, and either carry out attacks in their homelands or leave to join the caliphate.

It has already shown extreme cruelty toward Shiites -- most notably slaughtering more than 1,500 Iraqi air force cadets in Tikrit in June 2014.

And it sees the United States as complicit in supporting a Shia government in Iraq.

Embroiling the U.S. and the West in a land war -- ISIS reasons -- would give Muslims no choice but to come to the defense of the caliphate, setting up a global confrontation.

"Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse,"

"We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it."

voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world.

Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots

“I anticipate arrests, in and outside the Capitol,” Brooks said. “Congress allowing the Voting Rights Act to be gutted has disrupted our democracy … so our democracy should get back to functioning as it should.”

acts of civil disobedience and even a mid-April march from

What many view as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act has prompted civil rights advocates to take action. A coalition of 100 organizations including the NAACP will stage a string of protests

controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.

"We are making it very clear that we're protecting the right to vote, insuring the integrity of the right to vote and getting out the vote. This is not all of us registering people to vote and waiting for November with polite patience."

Rights that had appeared to be resolved as matters of controversy in American politics are unfortunately once again up for grabs. It’s hard to imagine what’s more American than insuring the right to vote for all Americans, and what could be more un-American than impeding it?”

Citizen Cruz: Our view

Legal case against the Canadian-born senator's eligibility is weak, but not non-existent.

The most boisterous exchange in Thursday night's Republican debate was not over terrorism, guns or the economy. It was over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s eligibility under the Constitution

to run for president because

“Democrats are going to be bringing a suit,” Trump predicted, adding, “There’s a big question mark on your head.”

the chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero.”

Cruz is as American as anybody born on U.S. soil.  And Trump, by suggesting that the Constitution’s “natural born” citizen clause could actually keep Cruz out of the White House, is trying to eliminate an oppone

the founders wrote that only "a natural born citizen" is eligible to be president. They  did not define the phrase further.

Cruz was born in Canada, but there is no doubt that he is an American citizen because his mother was a U.S. citizen.

1787, the founders feared that some foreign-born interloper, perhaps from England, might come to the USA and seek the presidency for nefarious reasons

candidacies of others have been challenged on this point. Former Michigan governor George Romney, who was born in Mexico to two American parents and ran for the 1968 GOP nomination, was threatened with legal action before he dropped out for other reasons.

The overwhelming weight of legal scholarship is on Cruz’s side. Many scholars assert that an infant born to an American parent, regardless of location, acquires citizenship “at birth” and therefore passes the “natural born” test

They argue that the meaning of “natural born” should be viewed in the context of the 1700s, when where you were born was the controlling factor.

In 2008, a bipartisan Senate resolution was passed by unanimous consent, asserting that McCain was indeed a “natural born” citizen

If the problem can't be fixed legislatively, a constitutional amendment would be necessary. Those are hard to pass, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, discovered after he introduced one in 2003 that would have allowed anyone who has been a citizen for 20 years, and is otherwise eligible, to become presiden

Amnesty is not immigration reform: Opposing view

There have been several legislative attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration policy over the past decade. All of them failed

how immigration affects the economic, social and national security interests of the American people — was, at best, an afterthought.

Immigration has taken center stage in the 2016 campaign because many Americans have come to recognize that it is a policy without any definable public interest objective

Granting amnesty — euphemistically called “a pathway to citizenship” — is not immigration reform

institutionalizes the government’s failure to protect the interests of the American people, and encourages still more illegal immigration.

amnesty benefits illegal aliens, it does not promote any public interest. Nearly half of all adult illegal aliens have not completed high schoo

high-productivity, high-earning workers. What it will do, over time, is make them eligible to add to the 51% of immigrant-headed households in the U.S. that rely on some form of welfare.

Amnesty would also exacerbate the already alarming erosion of America’s middle class, as former illegal aliens would be eligible to compete legally for all U.S. jobs and petition for millions more similarly skilled relatives to join them here.

The American people are seeking a new direction in the long simmering debate over immigration.

Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?

Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.

Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.

In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. The nationalism, and the delusion.

Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.

The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.

The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power.

The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board

Even before William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically,” the modern conservative movement has struggled to reconcile the ethno-nationalism that moves masses of its voters with the pluralism embodied in the notion that all persons are created equ

What is just as important is what is not included. The so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” which was several times pushed and failed over the last decade had two basic pillars: new security and impediments to illegal immigration and some settlement for the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the country and in many cases have been here for years or even decades. “DACA” was one portion of that larger whole – what we might call the most “deserving” subsection the 10 to 12 million: undocumented immigrants who came too young to have any choice in the matter and knew no other country than the US, despite not being citizens.

Trump’s pillars don’t explicitly say these 10 to 12 million people must all be deported. But that’s the upshot.

Trump is on record for mass deportation and he’s shown for a year that he is as good as his word. We don’t need to guess. Mass deportation is already the policy and practice.

So we’ve gone from border security in exchange for a path to citizenship (Bush and Obama-era comprehensive reform) to the Wall, mass deportation and a dramatic reduction and whitening of legal immigration. Non-deportation of ‘Dreamers’ is now the apparent ‘compromise’ point. But even that seems highly dubious.

My own evolving take is that Democrats should be willing to go along with some version of the wall in exchange for a protection and a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Walls, frankly, can be torn down. It’s a huge waste of money. But walls can be torn down. And the money budgeted this year can be taken back next year. It will take years even to get started. It is a huge mistake and waste of money. But protections for almost a million American young people (de facto not de jure) is worth it

We should be focusing on Trump’s broader plan, to try to cut America off to immigrants in general and make a last stand for America as a white man’s country.

Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state.

For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry.

studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.”

“A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.”

in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history

The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence.

When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. 

is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism? 

o review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws.

A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry.

These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”

Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny

the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”

Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874.

An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:

Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective

“The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.” 

Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights.

The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around

Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism.

much of U.S. history has been a battle between them. 

“Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” 

In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.”

the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens

For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”

that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly.

Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany

That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.”

began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments.

the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction

All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.

the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism

The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book.

hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.

with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home.

Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis

If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking

Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions

a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history

Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore. 

Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.

What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois

A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned

At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.

The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender

Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women

But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.

In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 

After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”

The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.

Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.

Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.

Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.

the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.

But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.

Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders

they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;

and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.

Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.

Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.

If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024

My father had come to recognize that in contrast to what so many of today’s most vulnerable immigrants face, the system his family encountered ultimately supported them. He also knew intimately that lives are at stake.

The stars are aligned to make progress on immigration. If it was up to me, I’d take the Biden package and say, “Let’s go.” But the reality is, what can be done that will get 60 votes? What can be done through reconciliation? Now that the Covid bill is done, we turn our attention to this.

So, there’s the T.P.S. question. There’s the situation at the border. There’s restoring the asylum system. There’s taking care of Dreamers. My bill says any essential worker deserves a pathway to citizenship. But there’s other more bureaucratic pieces people aren’t talking about: the length of time the process takes to become a citizen; the cost of the application itself.