Something that I think must be understood by as many Americans as possible going forward, is that the lost possibilities we are presently lamenting are all based on a relatively short period of time in our history. We can extend the timeline out a little, but the fact is we have been a nation that has embraced oppression as a matter of course since our inception. That the framers of the constitution laid the groundwork for that to one day no longer obtain may be a testament to wishful thinking or maybe an idea that, should everything else work the way they intended, the fundamental assumptions of human relations would eventually erode. Those assumptions start with a longing to be special and a fear that those who are not like us—not our equals—will take some hard-won success away from us by co-opting the work done for themselves. The fact is that America has been a place where the divisions have always existed and most of them have been accepted as the natural order. The major convulsions in our domestic felicity have always occurred in response to a realignment that brought previously oppressed groups into the fold of the equal.
You won’t find that particular formulation in the history books of our schools. But it is true. Pick your period, there has always been someone upon whom the boot of society rests until those who enjoy the privileges of their assumed rights become personally repulsed by the means and actions of those who do the oppressing. In my own memory, it was the advent of television and the projection of images from the South into the living rooms of everyone of how badly black people were treated just because they wanted the right to vote. It stirred a quiescent conscience that roused those who till then had thought everything was fine.
The Norm in our history is this—that there has always been a group on the bottom whose reasonable demands for equal opportunity have been turned into the screeling threats of demagogues who use their cries for freedom to frighten the self-satisfied with the loss of privilege in order to acquire power. Pick your period.
The engineered genius of the constitution is that it fosters smaller revolutions within the larger one to gradually, over time, make the necessary changes. None of those changes occur decorously. The majority who feel they deserve what they have always chafe at opening the precincts of their privilege to those on the outside, even when it seems obvious that they will lose nothing. The inclination to share and withhold exist simultaneously, and this is the tug of war that most defines who we are through life.
Lincoln appealed to the better angels of our nature, a call for healing. And to be sure, the war I describe here within us is not universally overwhelming, but it can be a default during times of stress. It does not require a majority to corrupt our common decency, not even, I feel, a very sizable minority. Only enough to trigger those defaults and render us uncertain how to respond at moments of turmoil.
We are more aware, I think, of the struggle today. Certainly social media has played an outsized part in constantly triggering people who, in other eras, might have passed through life unaware, dragging us all into a turmoil in previous times we might have ignored. But that is only one part of the problem and I’m not convinced it’s the major one.
What we see globally today in the rise of far Right nationalism and the reanimated corpse of fascism is being driven, I believe, by one thing. And it was in a somewhat different way the same thing that contributed to the last time fascism became a dominant force. Immigration.
Let me be clear: immigrants are not at fault. And not all forms of immigration are drivers. It is specifically the refugee crisis.
The numbers of refugees have climbed steadily since 2011. If you follow the trends, almost all right-wing movements have grown in response to this. Certainly, they have other agendas, but they achieved what successes they have by frightening people about unchecked immigration. You can see the numbers here. There have always been refugees, but previously they have been in numbers small enough not to disrupt the sense of security of people now voting (where they can) for fascistic parties. Refugees are, among others, our most recent option for oppression.
We can run down the list of reasons, certainly, but one of the chief drivers today for this is climate change. People are finding it more and more difficult to sustain themselves in too many places because weather patterns have shifted, drought afflicts areas where it had not before. This affects migration in a couple of ways. Not only does it render subsistence less stable but it also threatens the power base of autocratic regimes, driving them to crack down on minorities within their borders. Between these two factors, people take to the road to find a place where they can survive and perhaps thrive. We tend to forget in our own reaction to the border crisis that all those people are not coming here on a lark. They’re coming here because to remain where they were would likely mean death.
To maintain power, we see those in charge demonizing them. Everywhere. And people respond because we don’t like to be unsettled or feel responsible for something we believe is not our fault. We (and I mean humans, everywhere) don’t handle large influxes of strangers well. One or two, who might blend in well over a year or two, fine, that even makes us feel good about our presumed generosity, but whole communities? Mileage varies, but the period of adjustments take longer and have rougher stumbles.
This is only going to get worse, until at some point someone does something so egregiously unsupportable that people die just for showing up.
Welcome to the new normal. The environment is changing. The level of immigration is not likely to go down anytime soon. We need to come to terms with our own history as well as the current reality. Reasonable solutions are available—if we’re not too afraid to see them. But we must realize that the myths we like to believe about ourselves are just that: myths. We have always oppressed someone. Because they didn’t fit it, they don’t look right, they don’t share our beliefs, they haven’t got any money, they were used by one group to frighten another. And to be honest, we’ve kind of gotten off on it—not just the oppression but the chance for self-righteous heroics when we respond to it.
I’m not sure what will work, but I’m convinced becoming a hard-ass fascist nation will not. So that’s my hope for the coming year, my Christmas wish, if you will, that we stop letting ourselves be frightened into becoming what we know is a degrading, hateful people. Making ourselves feel better by standing on someone because we’re afraid of them solves nothing and will rot our souls. It’s something we’ve always done, though, to greater or lesser degrees. Time, I think, to end that tradition.