By Lee Cokorinos
Pat Buchanan: the amiable fascist for all seasons.
Prominent leaders of the anti-immigration movement would have us believe that not a ounce of racism lies behind their efforts. The most media-visible figures in this camp, such as Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Tom Tancredo and Victor Davis Hanson may argue the case for restricting, deporting, rounding up and cutting off public services to those "illegals" stigmatized as culturally backward, unhealthy potential terrorists. But they protest that their motives for doing so are as pure as the driven snow.
In their writings and media appearances, the leaders of the anti-immigration movement claim their politics are based not on a hatred of the racial Other but on their commitment to the rule of law, the integrity of "our culture," the objective findings of social science, or better employment prospects for American workers.
Tancredo spoiling the Colorado landscape.
On page after page of In Mortal Danger, Tom Tancredo's diatribe against non-European immigrants and multiculturalism, the presidential candidate and congressman repeatedly complains that he and his colleagues have been unfairly painted as racist or had their arguments misconstrued as racist. But alongside these complaints Tancredo's book drips with cultural condescension toward Mexican-Americans, Muslims and African-Americans. While he claims that illegality is the problem, Tancredo soon moves past this and calls for revoking the legal citizenship of what he terms Mexican-American "anchor babies."
Conjuring up racist and sexist imagery, he declares that "gravid wombs should not guarantee free medical care." One wonders whether Tancredo, both of whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, would apply such terminology to his parents, and thus forfeit his own citizenship.
"Clarity of Thought"
Beset by a "malignant multiculturalism," the "vast majority of Americans" are, according to Tancredo, forced to deal with its "raging intolerance of traditional America." This leads to such outrages, he tells us on the following page, as Vanderbilt University renaming its Confederate Memorial Hall dormitory to Memorial Hall just "because the word 'Confederate' made some people uncomfortable." It apparently doesn't make him feel uncomfortable.
Tancredo addressed a meeting bedecked with Confederate flags and promoted by the neo-Confederate League of the South last year. Dr. Michael Hill, the League of the South's president, has warned that the U.S. faces the prospect of "being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants." In his book, Tancredo also reaches back into history to embrace the crudest forms of colonial racist rhetoric. He points to what he calls a "very poetic speech" delivered in 1899 by Winston Churchill against Muslims' "degraded sensualism," "fearful fatalistic apathy," "improvident habits," "slovenly forms of agriculture," etc. These, of course, are exactly the kinds of taunts that the racial nativists of the American past directed at Tancredo's Italian forebears when they reached the U.S.
By your pals thou shalt know them. Here Tom poses with hyper-reactionay Bush hack John Bolton.
Casting about for more current action heroes, Tancredo settles on "noted constitutional attorney" Ann Coulter. Coulter, a former staffer with the Center for Individual Rights, has defended Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which links race and IQ, and regularly heaps racist abuse on Muslims and others, as in "I believe our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How about 'camel jockey'? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?"
Although Tancredo claims that individuals should be judged on their actions and merits rather than their group identity, he takes up Coulter's proposal that everyone from "suspect countries" should be immediately deported. Tancredo has also proposed wholesale deportation of undocumented immigrants. "If only our political leaders possessed" Coulter's "clarity of thought," he writes.
The Suburban Plantation
Victor Davis Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming and another prominent think tank/TV talking head in the immigration debate, also argues for a radical cutback in Mexican immigration and vigorous efforts to root out multicultural thinking. At the core of his approach is an imperious demand that immigrants conform to his narrow, Anglicized view of American culture.
He also abuses his progressive critics for allegedly falsely charging the anti-immigration movement with racism. "To discuss the issue rationally," he claims, "is to expect charges of racist and nativist." He then blithely condemns American schools for promoting "the fiction of cultural equality."
Hanson, a senior fellow at the right wing Hoover Institution, comes from a long line of California Central Valley growers and occupies a special niche in the firmament of reaction, providing a philosophical bridge to earlier forms of anti-immigrant ideology.
One of the more enduring mythical themes in the cultural history of white supremacism in the United States has been the idyllic nature of the Southern plantation, where everyone knew his or her place in the racial pecking order. In exchange for accepting this social order the laboring classes, according to this mythology, would be rewarded with a stable existence, leading to a "natural" harmony.
This thinking was championed by mid-20th century adherents of the so-called "Southern Agrarian" movement such as Richard M. Weaver, one of the founding intellectual figures of modern conservatism. Skirting around the questions of slavery and Jim Crow lynching, they romanticized the supposed gentility and "small is beautiful" values of "civilized" southern life. Hanson extends some these Agrarianist themes, such as the dignity of manual labor, to the farms and ranches of the southwest, worked largely by immigrant workers from Mexico.
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