Category: Uncategorized

Some of those who seek entry into the United States or who enter and stay here illegally are fleeing from danger for reasons that align with international convention. However, most are not. They are economic migrants, lured across the border by employers who seek to exploit their labor at the expense of native-born workers. Some immigrants come to the United States for the promise of a better life, but others do not intend to stay; they plan to return to their country as soon as they feel they’ve made enough money here. As terrible as criminal violence can be, this is a reason to change the circumstances in one’s country, not flee it.

The effects of immigration on native-born labor is not trivial. When the supply of labor increases, the price of labor (i.e. the wage) decreases. Over the last half century, wages for the most vulnerable native workers have fallen with the increase in the labor supply, and workers in those sectors that absorb the most immigrants have suffered the most. While immigrants come with variable skill levels, it is the low-skilled immigrants that have the biggest impact on native-born workers because they crowd out low-skilled labor, those at the margins of society who are disproportionately black and brown, and who are most likely to be the targets of the agents of coercive control.

The United States absorbs a far greater number of immigrants than other countries, and in the past two decades alone immigrants without high school diplomas have increased the low-skilled workforce by around 25 percent. It’s not just low-skilled sectors; studies of abuse of the H-1B visa program find that tech firms fire native-born workers if cheaper immigrant labor is available. But the working poor suffer the brunt of, in part because they are less able to pivot to something else. Regardless of skill-level, as Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School professor George J. Borjas points out, “Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer.”

The debate over the economic impact of immigrants is typically framed in terms of whether it is a boon or a detriment to the economy. However, this obscures the economic impact of immigration in a manner similar to how per capita GDP figures obscure economic inequality. For the working class as a whole, the presence of immigrant labor results in the transfer of half a trillion dollars from the working class to the capitalist class every year, disproportionately impacting those workers with lower skill levels. The winners of this massive transfer are capitalist firms, who pay significantly less in labor costs, and immigrants, who could not command the same level of pay or enjoy the same living conditions in their home countries. The losers are native-born workers. They not only lose income and livelihoods, but the quality of the conditions of life, while seeing consciousness and the political formation of their social class disrupted. 

Focusing the debate on economics also obscures the social and cultural impact of immigration. The elites who exploit immigrants for super-profits do not care about the crowded living conditions, compromised social services, or the other problems caused by illegal and large-scale immigration. The rich don’t live in those communities so they don’t have to suffer the material and cultural fallout from mass immigration. Working people have to pay for the social problems capitalist create in their pursuit of profit. Immigrants utilize government assistance at higher rates than natives, yet they pay lower taxes (because they have lower earnings), and, in the case of illegal immigration, pay little to no property, payroll, and income taxes. This means that every year a multi-billion-dollar burden is placed upon the shoulders of the native-born population.

Where is the today’s left on the problem of immigration? Only a decade ago I wouldn’t feel so alone in my support for immigration restrictions. Progressive folks on the left were then speaking up on behalf of native-born workers. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept wrote on his blog in 2005, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, Paul Krugman, professor of economics at the City University of New York, and columnist for The New York Times, wrote, in “Notes on Immigration,” that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and noted that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” He concluded, “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.”

But Greenwald has walked back the sentiments expressed in that blog entry, chalking it up to youthful carelessness and a penchant for provocation. And, in a June 2018 op-ed, Krugman, contradicting his early statement about the impact of low-education immigration on the wages of low-education native-born working, appeals to the fallacy of reductio ad Hitlerum, pairing popular complaints about immigration to the antisemitic blood libel. In the same paragraph wherein he admits to disagreement over the effect of low-skilled immigrants he next characterizes such concerns as “just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.” He writes, “There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime. No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred.” (Maybe it is not a crisis for Krugman when immigration results in the transfer of $500 billion annually from the working class to the capitalist class. While I cannot take this up here, it should suffice to note that claims about the neutral impact of immigration of crime lump all immigrants together; a significant proportion of immigrants are from the Asian world, the least criminogenic cultures on the planet. And while there is an upsurge in hate in the United States, to an extent driven by right-wing rhetoric, the rhetoric works upon the ground of widespread frustration among the working class with US immigration policy.) 

The shift among progressives from defending the interests of native-born workers to advocating open borders and smearing those who dissent from the agenda has a lot to do with the psychological fallout over the election of Donald Trump, which has reframed the uncontroversial policies of the Obama Administration and redefined them as right wing and nativist. Remember when the left opposed war in Iraq when Bush was president, but fell silent as Obama bombed Libya and instigated civil war in Syria? Or #MeToo outrage over Donald Trump’s misogyny yet silence in the face of allegations of rape against Bill Clinton? The cause of the phenomenon—the pendulum swings from hysteria to equanimity to hysteria—is the mass psychological condition under the two-party political apparatus. The politically active do not focus their politics on class analysis and moral principle as much as on identity politics and virtue signaling these days. Whether something is wrong depends on the identity of the wrongdoer not the nature of the wrongdoing. This is what lies behind Krugman’s about face on immigration’s harmful impact.

Analysis of immigration requires seeing beyond the ideological subjectivity of emotionalism and partisanship. The facts are striking. There are approximately 43 million foreign-born people living in the United States: 21 million naturalized US citizens and 23 million noncitizens. Of the latter, approximately 13 million are permanent residents, 11 million are here illegally (although that number is likely higher), and two million hold temporary visas. The number of foreign-born persons in the US has more than quadrupled since 1965. In 1965, foreign-born persons represented 5 percent of the US population. By 2015, they comprised 13.5 percent of the population (this is not much below peak immigration in 1890, when the foreign-born population was around 15 percent of the total population). The desire to come to the United States is very great. In a June 2017 poll, Gallup found that as many as 37 million people in Latin America desire to relocate to the US permanently. One-third of all Hondurans express a desire to come live in the United States. In total, 150 million people—or 4% of the world’s adult population—would move to the U.S. if they could. If everyone who wanted to move to the U.S. had their way, the country’s total population would increase by almost 50%.

Significantly, the period of mass immigration 1890-1930 moved Americans to demand restrictions on the flow of immigrants, not so much out of nativism or racism (the immigrants were white Europeans), but because steam ships allowed for the mass introduction of low-skilled labor who were used by industrialists to suppress the wages of native workers. Mass immigration was behind marked deterioration of neighborhood conditions, with rising inequality, poverty, and crime. So is it really that surprising that the topic of immigration would return as a political topic when the numbers again approached that level? Yet the experiences of ordinary Americans are pitted against the multiculturalist attitudes and cocooned life of affluent Americas on the east and west coasts that accuse those who complain of the worst possible motives. Failing to see the left come to their defense, working Americans are seeking out new leaders and checking out different politics.

The pace of illegal immigration has been slowing. The Obama Administration was aggressive in controlling immigration and the Trump Administration has continued these policies—in the fact of tremendous resistance. The strategies used by Obama and Trump include tighter border controls, stepped-up deportations, and more frequent prosecutions for unlawful re-entry. The decline is also attributable to the economic crisis of 2007. At that point, the illegal proportion or the US population exceeded 12 million. Half of all illegal aliens in the United States are Mexicans, which is why the problem often gets defined as the problem of Mexican immigration, but here, too, the numbers are declining. From 1980 to 2014, the number of Mexican legal residents in the US grew faster than their illegal counterparts. However, numbers from Central America’s Northern Triangle, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are growing, outpacing growth from elsewhere. More than illegal border crossings, immigrants who entered the United States legally (on nonimmigrant visas) are overstaying their visas. Illegal immigrants are overrepresented in the workforce, so they carry a disproportionate economic impact relative to the presence in the population. Many of those who are being deported are those who have overstayed their visas.

What about refugees? During the 1990s, most refugees were from the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. Most refugees today come from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sudan. Most of the rest come from other African countries. Comparatively few refugees come from Central and South America, but given the proximity of the United States to the southern western hemisphere, we see more of them than do other countries. The number of those leaving the Northern Triangle, number in the tens of thousands. It is a very dangerous journey, especially for unaccompanied children, which comprise a large proportion of the total. They risk human trafficking and death from starvation, thirst, and exposure. Signaling open borders puts more of them in danger. Many of those claiming to be refugees cite criminal violence as the push factor. However, this, as well as the claim of domestic violence, have not been historically considered legitimate reasons to seek asylum. Such claims are hard to verify. Moreover, on principle, they do not align with the principle of asylum seeking. Criminal and domestic violence are rampant throughout much of the world. There is broad consensus internationally that these are legitimate claims: nationality (ethnicity), political opinion, race, and religion. Criminal violence that does not target members of groups on the basis of that association is considered interpersonal and does not confer refugee status.

Although it is worse in the US than elsewhere in the world in terms of the proportion of the population that is foreign-born, the problem of mass immigration is not unique to the US. Europe is experiencing a migrant crisis. There are crucial differences. In Sweden, for example, a country I have looked at closely, 80% of those who entered Sweden in 2015 were young men, whereas half of immigrants in the United States are women, a long-standing shift in gender representation. As in the US, most of those who cross the border or overstay their visas in European countries are not refugees or asylum seekers but economic migrants. As with many European countries, Sweden does not have housing and jobs for immigrants. The consequence of this is strain on the social supports Swedes (mothers, children, the elderly, the disabled) depend on, and a rise in crime and poverty. This is not only unfair to Swedes, but to the refugees and asylum seekers who need critical services, as well as to immigrants who are following the rules to legally enter the country (yes, persons who illegally enter a country harm the chances of those who are seeking to legally enter). 

I am in favor of following the international convention on refugees and asylum seekers. The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, or the 1951 Refugee Convention (with amendments) defines who is a refugee, delineates the rights of persons granted asylum, as well as the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. The Convention is rooted in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1967 protocol defines a refugee thus: “A person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” Crucially, refugees have substantial legal obligations in the Convention, principally, they must abide by the laws of the nation hosting them.

There is a basic truth in all this: if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. There is nothing immoral or oppressive or reactionary about drawing borders and defending them. Our foremost concern must be about justice. It is not fair to native-born workers to undermine their livelihoods and communities for the sake of capitalist profit. If we enforce immigration law, fewer people will come to the United States, and those who do will come via an orderly process and bring with them the knowledge and skills that will improve communities in the United States. The United States is not here to police the world or save the world, and it troubles me that those who support rational immigration policy are smeared as “nativists” and “racists.” The reality of enforcing the law is no reason for ignoring the law. Instead of demanding the abolition of ICE, the left should insist on due process and humanitarian treatment of those who cross the border or overstay their visas.

(Note: Readers may object that Borjas’ politics lean conservative. However, as The Miami Herald points out, while he supports increased restrictions on immigration, “he doesn’t believe a wall—built by Mexico or anyone else—does any good. He opposes the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as inhumane. And he advocates a tax on businesses—high-tech, agricultural and all the rest—that profit from cheaper immigrant wages, and giving that money to Americans displaced by the immigrants.”) 

Offense taking is one of the motives behind a desire to censor opinions and images. There are people who find things people say offensive and want those who hurt their feelings held accountable and offensive opinions and images taken down.

A feminist, uncompromised by multiculturalism, criticizes the Muslim community for the expectation that women wear the hijab or the chador. According to the feminist standpoint, the hijab and the chador represent the modesty rules of a patriarchal religion designed to regulate sexuality on grounds that woman tempt men with their bodies and, seeing how each woman is meant for a particular man, women must be to some extent hidden (sometimes completely) from the male gaze. Feminists are correctly opposed to the notion that women should be subject to male control, so demand and expectation to cover are subject to criticism. An imam may describe the feminist attitude as “Islamophobic” and deem it offensive. In this case, what is offensive is criticism that challenges a system of sexual repression, and the desire to censor such criticism is motivated by a desire to perpetuate patriarchal arrangements.

I could provide many more examples, but it will suffice to note that expressions people find offensive are in theory infinite in number. In many of these cases, such as in the present case, the desire to censor is about protecting an unjust power – controlling what other people say and do because it challenges hierarchy and privilege. The underlying desire to prohibit speech critical of Islamic practice is a perceived need to prevent others from receiving ideas that may bring the legitimacy of that practice into question and, more broadly, shake their faith and undermine their traditions—which is what enlightenment is all about. The feminist challenges the patriarchy with her criticism. The claim that her words are offensive represent a tactic to silence her for the sake of the imam who believes others should not hear her words. This is no different than a desire to censor speech critical of white supremacy on the grounds that racists find such speech offensive.

The desire to control not only what people say, but also what others hear, to control what they think and believe, should compel each of us to become more fierce in our free speech advocacy. How could anybody who believes in freedom stand by silently while speech critical of oppressive practices is suppressed—or, worse, join with the offensive-takers and express their censorious desire? When people tell me that certain forms of speech should be restricted because they are offensive, I wonder when and how they acquired the authority to speak for other people. Who are they that they should control the thoughts and expressions of others or deny individuals the opportunity to hear the opinions of others or to receive their expressions? And who are you to stand idle while they attempt to do this? You invite your own oppression.

Restricting speech on the grounds that it may offend members of a group robs members of that group of the opportunity to hear speech they might find useful, enlightening, funny, liberating. Is speech critical of the Islamic prohibition on homosexuality offensive to homosexuals in Muslim communities? It doesn’t stand to reason that it would be. Might they find such speech useful in their struggle against stifling heterosexuality? Indeed, they might. As a supporter of gay rights, I have an obligation to stand with homosexuals everywhere. Who is your choice of comrades in that struggle? Gays and lesbians or Muslim clerics? Do all women in Muslim majority communities believe in Islamic modesty rules? Might there be women who do not want to wear the hijab but are scared or don’t know there is another opinion to hold on the matter? The latter is most certainly true. Might they welcome opinions that support their desire to exist uncovered or to at least have the conversation without being censored? I feel confident they do. And that is why I stand in solidarity with the victims of patriarchal oppression, not with the men who oppress them. Who is your choice of comrades in this struggle? Women or the imams? Are there no Muslims who find cartoons of Muhammad funny? I bet there are.

Why are the conservative and traditionalist voices of Islam allowed to set the terms of freedom for everybody? How could an atheist or a Christian ever accept being bound by the blasphemy rules of Islam? For that matter, why should a Muslim be bound by Islamic blasphemy rules? Would you tolerate this attitude coming from the Christians around you? I hope not. If an ideology doesn’t promote free thought, then of what use is it to a free people? I would have to think very lowly of people identified as Muslims to believe they were all incapable of seeing through the lies of their religion or that they were undeserving of the same rights I enjoy.

By falsely defending the sensibilities of a group which he assumes is monolithic in its sensibilities and for which he presumes to speak, the censor oppresses individuals by denying them access to information and knowledge. Censorship is not just about suppressing the speech or expression of the speaker or artist. It’s about withholding information and knowledge from people who need it or want it. They are not allowed to choose for themselves if the censor chooses for them. The censor claims to know the minds of other people and appoints himself defender of their interests. He robs people of their agency and their autonomy and their freedom by telling them that he and community leaders will think for them.

There is no human right that protects the desire to have one’s ideology held safe from criticism and ridicule or one’s harmful practices free of restriction. But there is a human right to be free to think and say what you will and to be free from harmful cultural and religious practices.

The censorious desire is the mark of the authoritarian mind. The human right to liberty is universal and unalienable.

Several women have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. The four most well-known are Juanita Broaddrick in 1978 (rape), Leslie Millwee in 1980 (sexual assault), Paula Jones in 1991 (exposing himself and sexually harassment), and Kathleen Willey in 1993 (nonconsensual groping).

The Broaddrick case is disturbing: “Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. He starts to bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” This lip biting is described by other women. It’s part of his MO, a signature move.

Broaddrick continues: “It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip.” Clinton then raped her. “When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door.” Broaddrick emphasizes, “It was not consensual.” Broaddrick has a witness to her injuries. 

President Trump took these accusations seriously during the 2016 campaign even though the accusations surfaced some time after they happened, in some instances several years after. For example, Broaddrick was extremely reluctant to come forward, even denying the rape occurred before finally relenting and describing the crime in 1999. Now Trump is saying that a legitimate claim of sexual assault should come with a contemporaneous police report. Does he intend to apologize for citing the claims of these women as a reason for voting against Hillary Clinton in 2016? 

I am married to an immigrant. I personally know how much work is required to keep such a family together in the United States. The process is difficult and intimidating and not everybody has access to the cultural and financial resources to make it through it. Sitting in immigration offices and watching things go badly for other couples is a frightening experience. On several occasions, my wife and I were questioned so fiercely it felt like a police interrogation. I know firsthand how important it is to learn to navigate the system and make sure you have crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” But I can only imagine how crushing it must be to lose the person you love to deportation. My wife got to stay here. She followed the rules and now she is a US citizen. To be sure, my phenomenological experiences neither make me an expert on immigration nor grant me any dispensation to speak on the matter as if I were; however, as a sociologist with expertise in political economy, I am familiar with explanations of the dynamics – the push and pull factors – driving immigration and can speak about it with some authority. My training makes me sensitive to the social problems immigration brings.

These realities are pertinent: Immigration provides cheap labor for capitalists in labor-intensive industries (that includes modern agriculture); business firms have an incentive to keep borders open enough to allow sufficient numbers of migrant workers into the United States – and they have the political power to keep immigrants at a disadvantage in law and policy while they are there. It is the prospect of these jobs that draws migrants into the United States, primarily across the southern border. Cheap labor effects the wage and employment structure, keeping down wages and fracturing worker solidarity, thereby hampering the ability of workers to organize successfully around their collective interests, while making it difficult for legal workers to find employment in low-wage sectors. We see this, for example, in African Americans, who have historically performed low-skilled manufacturing, agricultural, and service sector work, being priced out of those markets. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, at which point only five percent of the population was foreign-born, saw the labor force participation rate for adult black men steadily decline; in 1973, the rate was 79 percent. Today, it is 68 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor, within less than a decade, if current trends prevail, it will fall to 61 percent. Harvard economist George Borjas found that one-third of the decline in employment among black male high school dropouts between 1980 and 2000 was attributable to immigration (see LA Times). The impact of illegal immigration on communities is a national phenomenon paid for at the local level in burdens imposed on school districts and neighborhoods, with overcrowding in classrooms and houses and apartments, a load that rests heavily on the shoulders of the citizens and residents who pay income, payroll, and property taxes. Moreover, the chances of millions of people who engage the immigration system legally are compromised by those who side-step that process and enter the country illegally. We are often told about the benefits of immigration. But to whom do these benefits accrue? For the most part, the wealthy Americans who employ immigrants and the immigrants themselves.

As a socialist, having elected to stand with the working class, I understand the concerns my brothers and sisters have about the impact immigration has on their communities and the importance of getting the politics right on this question. I believe in a borderless world, but not per se; my borderless world depends on what type of world that is. Is it a capitalist world or a socialist world we’re building? Is it a secular world, where religion is at best at the margins of culture and politics, or a world where religion is on the march? Nation-states have borders (you have no country without them), and as long as capitalists exploit human labor, and as long as there is religious fanaticism in the world, there is a need for immigration rules and enforcement to protect my work and my person. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more clearly than Sweden’s experience with mass immigration – an explosion of criminal violence and cultural corrosion in a historically progressive, humanitarian, and orderly society that occurred because its political leaders opened the country to large numbers of immigrants, mostly Muslims from the Middle East, a culture very different from Sweden’s.

But there is also a political-strategic need for immigration control. Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto that “working men have no country.” They explain:

Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word. National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

There is a causal order in the process of transformation: “In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” Which is why they write, famously, “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”

When Marx and Engels talk about “nation” in the first instance they mean the population of a sovereign state. When they talk about it in the next instance they mean other nations, which includes communities of descent and language (the ethnic meaning of nation). The development of the proletarian struggle, when in command of political power, that is, having wrested control of the state from the bourgeoisie, begins the process of undoing the antagonisms between nations in the latter sense. Illegal immigration, and to some extent legal immigration, particularly in great numbers, is counterproductive to the proletarian struggle for the host countries as well the emigre because, on the one hand, it is disruptive to the process of organizing citizens for the political fight against the national bourgeoisie, while, on the other, it drains the emigre’s home nation of proletarians who could join the fight against their own national bourgeoisie. In other words, capitalism takes workers from the front lines in the struggle for socialism and pits them against other workers in other national contests to thwart the struggle for socialism. It is important to recognize in this regard that immigration is one side of capitalist globalization. Immigrants are enticed here because the purposes for which they are needed cannot be exported. Where work can be exported, capitalists seek cheap labor overseas, in export processing zones throughout the world (including Mexico). This is the other side. The working class is exploited wherever they are. Immigration is a tool of capitalist globalization. 

Although not a Marxist, Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry, in an op-ed for The Boston Globe, shines considerable light on the matter when he writes, “While liberals and progressives have stopped short of endorsing open borders, they’ve come to treat opposition to illegal immigration and constraints on illegal immigration as unacceptable, even racist.” He notes that, from a historical perspective, in relation to Trump’s position on immigration, “the Democrats’ new default position – that opposition to illegal immigration and constraints on legal immigration are virtually unacceptable – is just as extreme, certainly by historic standards.” Granted liberals, progressives, and Democrats are not socialists, but this fact only points out more clearly the problem of the left accepting the multicultural and open-borders mentality of the establishment “left” in America. It was not always so. Skerry writes, 

Within living memory, a powerful labor movement favored limits on immigration and fought against the reviled Bracero guest worker program, which began during World War II and was finally ended in 1964. At times, labor organizer Cesar Chavez supported the arrest and deportation of illegal farm workers. His union, whose members were predominantly of Mexican origin, viewed these interlopers from Mexico as strike-breakers and scabs.

As a child working in the California agricultural industry, Chavez came to understand why farmworkers suffered low wages and poor working conditions. His biographer Miriam Pawel quotes him as saying that “a surplus of labor enabled growers to treat workers as little more that interchangeable parts, cheaper and easier to replace than machines.” When Congress ended the bracero program in 1964, the pay and conditions for farm workers improved; but the rise of illegal immigration that followed undermined their progress. Ralph Abernathy and Walter Mondale joined Chavez in 1969 to protest the use by capital of illegal immigrants as strikebreakers. They marched to the Mexican border. 

Skerry notes that “multiculturalism has become a more powerful force within the Democratic Party – and American society – than labor solidarity.” This observation underscores the point I have long made that the multicultural attitudes of the liberal Democrat and the progressive are at odds with working class interests. The rhetoric we hear from them surrounding the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of a “nation of immigrants” misleads historical understanding. The reason French republicans donated Lady Liberty to the United States was to celebrate the American republic and recommend it as a model for the rest of the world. Lady Liberty is not a lighthouse to bring to the US those adrift in their own nations, but the bearer of a torch to light the way for other countries to sail to enlightenment, her broken chains representing human liberation from slavery literally and figuratively. “Far from inviting freedom-loving peoples around the world to the United States,” Skerry writes, “Lady Liberty’s torch was intended to inspire them to stay put and establish republics of their own.” That’s the statues’ slogan: “Liberty enlightening the world.” The famous lines from Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “New Colossus,” “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” did not find its way to the statue until the early twentieth century (the statue was dedicated in 1886, its purpose conceived well before then). The oft-heard claim that the global relation between the arrival of immigrants and the expansion of the colonial system – “We are here because you were there” – requires America’s to be a doormat to the world punishes the living for the crimes of the dead, an utterly immoral demand. But then why should working people pay for capitalist exploitation at all? They don’t already pay enough? If anybody is owed reparations, it’s the working class whose value makes the capitalist’s life possible.

The characterization of those who desire immigration control as “racist” and “xenophobic” gets story and motive wrong. In their book The Age of Mass Migration, economic historians Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson focus on the effects of immigration on labor markets and neighborhood conditions. The advent of the steamship, which made the trans-Atlantic voyage cheaper, faster, and safer, greatly expanded the flow of illiterate migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Large numbers of young men (many of whom did not intend to stay) “posed challenges involving neighborhood stability, community cohesion, social disorder, and crime.” Harvard economic historian Claudia Goldin found that the shift in national groups in the 1890s to those whose living standards and schooling levels differed markedly from earlier immigrants negatively impacted the wages of native-born workers. The story that immigration restriction in the U.S. during this period were the result of nativism flies in the face of evidence showing that opposition to immigration had much more to do with the negative consequences of immigration on the national proletariat than on nativist sentiment. Hatton and Williamson conclude that “racism and xenophobia do not seem to have been at work in driving the evolution of policy toward potential European immigrants.” And British scholar A.T. Lane: “careful examination of the columns of many labor journals has produced few examples of racist thinking applied to immigration.” 

It would take decades of the melting pot dynamic to forge a nation not of immigrants (the rhetoric doesn’t make much sense when you think about it), but of citizens, a history of assimilation that depended fundamentally on the restrictions imposed on immigration during the first decades of the twentieth century. And there were problems along the way, such as the large proportion of the German population loyal to the Fatherland (German American Bund) in the face of the fascist threat in Europe. 

The internal cohesion of the nation is an essential part of the ground upon which the national proletariat is built, reflected in the strength of labor unions in the post-war period. As immigration restrictions were loosened, and with the national dereliction of duty in securing the borders – there are between eleven and twenty million illegal immigrants in the United States today – labor’s strength and numbers proportionally declined. To be sure, there are many reasons for declining union numbers and power, as well as stagnant wages and rising inequality, but to ignore the effect of foreign workers on the character of labor markets is to deny reality.

The debate about immigration is so polarized, so emotionally explosive, yet at the same time so unfocused from a critical theoretical-practical standpoint (and here I mean from the standpoint of labor) that it is difficult to have a rational debate about it. Accusations of “racist” and “xenophobe” grind conversation to a halt. Those who have questions often respond by keeping them to themselves – and answering them for themselves. And that is not always for the best. Those of us on the left who care about the political context worry when people are driven to the rightwing end of things because the leftwing end doesn’t address their concerns. Immigration is a major source behind the frustration of many in the working class in the United States. Working families are feeling alienated from the social democratic traditions because of the way their concerns are dismissed out of hand – or worse, decried as “racist” and “fascist.” We do better when we discuss these issue with those with whom we disagree with charity and compassion. And we really do better when we argue from a class-theoretical standpoint. Then we’re on the ground of social realities. We’re forced into these conflicts by powerful forces: capitalism and war, the long histories behind them. Neoliberalism acutely lies behind the current crisis of immigration and the rise of nationalism. Neoliberal policymakers exploit open societies to undermine democracy and worker security. They throw everything into the market, extol the virtue of diversity in rebranding the result, and marginalize those who question any part of it. Without the traditional social democratic response – a labor-based/class analytical approach – working families turn to those forces who take their concerns seriously, and, unfortunately, that means ethno-nationalist voices. What is portrayed as the other side – the body of multiculturalist/identity-based practices that passes for left-leaning policy thinking today – is itself the ideological projection of bourgeois interest. 

The European situation is in many ways a preview of our future in the United States. Although the nationalist right is on the move there, most of our European brothers and sisters don’t hate other people. But they do want to know why, if the immigration issue in Europe is driven by humanitarian concern for refugees, those crossing the border are mostly young men. Where are the women, children, and old people? To be sure, there are some, but few enough to make the question relevant. Why, if new arrivals are not associated with crime, are the enclaves they establish and settle in so unwelcoming and even dangerous to travel to and through? Parts of Europe are seeing levels of violent crime – murder and rape – they haven’t seen in decades. People want to know why so many immigrants resist assimilation and integration only to hear that the desire for assimilation and integration is a racist one (it’s not). Why are intolerant fundamentalist religious communities popping up in secular societies like Sweden? Why are European governments tolerating cultural practices, for example in the treatment of women, that are contrary to the secular traditions of Europe? And why on earth are the governments of supposedly free and open societies criminalizing the right to complain about all this? People want to know why, if preservation of culture and tradition is so important, they’re smeared as “bigots” and “racist” for wanting to preserve theirs, a culture that has contributed so much to the world – the values of secularism, liberalism, equality, human rights, rule of law, free speech, and religious liberty. Sure, the West isn’t perfect (no place is), but have people taken a look around the planet? Certainly Europe and the United States must have something worthwhile in light of the fact that it is such a desirable destination. Is there value in keeping it a desirable place to live and visit? Increasingly, Europeans do not feel at home in their own countries.

Neoconservatives (really liberals) like Douglas Murray are on to something when they point out that the leaders of Europe are not listening to the people and so the people are turning to those who will, and that the left won’t like who they’re turning to. For the US, Peter Skerry puts it this way: “Trump, no doubt, played to racial sentiments. But he also saw something his opponents didn’t: that even if Democrats refuse to acknowledge some of the complexities of immigration, many voters still see a need for limits.” If we on the left want to slow the advance of the right, and accelerate the advance of the socialist cause, then we have to be realists on the immigration question. We have to listen to the national proletariat and fight for their interests, not for ivory tower ideas like multiculturalism and identity. Those are bourgeois notions that stand in place of an authentic working class politics. Indeed, they aim to fracture the working class. 

For much of its history, the South was full of white supremacists. It still has some, I’m sorry to say. But I want to stay with history for the moment. As history records, there were acts of white supremacist terrorism against blacks in south. The violence was widespread and came in a myriad of forms, many too disturbing to dwell on. At the same time, the vast majority of white supremacists never committed terrorist violence against black people. For this essay, I want to focus on the implications of this fact for thinking about how to think about oppressive ideology. 

Would those of us who believe in justice and equality accept this line in the defense of white supremacy, that only a minority of white supremacists carried out terrorist action? Is it not still true that it was the ideology of white supremacy that moved some white people to violence? White supremacy taught southerners that the virtue and integrity of their group, their right to live as they wished, apart from black people, was worth fighting for – worth committing violence over. This was their heritage. It was part of their identity. When a black woman was brutalized at the hands of a lynch mob, or a black man was hunted down by a gang of racial zealots, it was white supremacy that killed them – the noose and the bullet were its instruments.

White supremacy didn’t just kill people. As part of the warp and woof of southern culture, white power guided almost everything – and it wanted more than that. It guided who sat next to each other in schools, from which water fountain a person could drink, which clothes a person could wear, and with whom persons could have sex and enter into marriage. Violence was a way of keeping black people down, reminding them of the culture and ideology that hung over their head – a sword of Damocles. 

White supremacy was an ideology in which members of one group were deemed inferior and subordinate to members of the other group. The oppressed group was judged to be incapable of fully participating in the social and economic life with the oppressor group, a society of whites. The white oppressors cleverly dressed up their cultural and social superiority by claiming that what they did they did for black people. It was the good of everyone. After all, they raised the black man and woman up out of their pagan ways and Christianized them. However rough it could be, white supremacy was a great advance over the barbarism that stood outside it. White supremacy was the source of moral rights and wrongs. It was the source of civilization and innovation. It was analogous to a religion. And religion had a lot to do with it. 

Yet, at the same time, blacks were systematically mistreated. Their bodies shamed. Their movements restricted. Indeed, throughout much of southern history, blacks weren’t allowed to leave home without an escort. They had to wear uniforms that marked their inferiority. They had to behave in prescribed ways, especially in expressing their sexuality. They had to greet their white superiors with proper deference, eyes cast downward. Behind the white rationalization of paternalism were beatings and other humiliations.

We can speak honestly about it now. But there was a time when to speak this way about the oppression of blacks was criticized and condemned. Criticism of white supremacy was a form of blasphemy. Those who deviated from the ideology were heretics. Nobody was allowed to be apart from the system; apostasy was really not an option. Blasphemy, heresy, apostasy could get even your throat cut or a bullet in your heart. So few people said anything. As they say, sometimes all it takes for oppression to prevail is for good people to be silent. 

There are two lessons we can derive from this history. First, it is not how many members of a group commit violence, but the character of the ideology that provides the motivation for violence and how deeply group members are indoctrinated with that ideology. The more people cling to a divisive and hierarchical ideology, and the more intensely they are devoted to it, then the more likely violence will have at its back some piece of that ideology. This is why we oppose the ideology. It is why we hope to save the people caught up in it. Second, terrorist violence is almost always a small part of the many oppressions associated with divisive ideology. Far more common are the systemic injustices, the everyday oppression. No matter how well fed the oppressed are. No matter the degree of comfort of their abode. 

“Don’t attack ideology X on account of the bad things a few people do for its sake. Most people who believe X are good and decent people.” Being as charitable as one can possibly be, this argument couldn’t miss the point any wider. If people do bad things for the sake of an ideology, then we must be concerned about the ideology. We’re not talking about people doing bad things “in the name of” ideology. If the belief system does not contain commandments to carry out unjustifiable and despicable acts, then it cannot be the actual motivation for unjustifiable and despicable actions. We’re talking about people acting on the basis of what their ideology commands. Members of a community who kill a gay man because their ideology commands them to do this terrible thing are acting for the sake of ideology. And everybody who claims that ideology, whether they throw stones or not, is responsible for the consequences of their ideology’s commandments. If you claim white supremacy, you own all of it.

We cannot say those who fail the test of their faith aren’t our problem, that they aren’t relevant examples of anything. Why should we care how nice racists can be as individuals? That they don’t do bad things doesn’t make their ideology good or tolerable. The ideology that commands people to do bad things would have great trouble persisting if good people didn’t claim it. 

It doesn’t matter how much a person’s beliefs mean to him if these beliefs move him to oppress others. Justice calls us to liberate society from the influence of divisive and hierarchical notions of human social organization. When we say “No Gods, No Masters,” this is what we mean.

The far-right populist Sweden Democrats gained in the September elections. They can now claim nearly 18 percent of an electorate that actually goes to the polls. The Social Democrats’ vote, on the other hand, fell to just over 28 percent, its lowest level in more than a century. This tells us that the Swedish situation is serious. But we knew this already. Gang violence is rising. Neighborhoods are marked by unrest. School administrator are reporting as commonplace threats of violence and weapons, weapons such as hand grenades and Kalashnikovs. Women are being harassed and assaulted by groups of young men. Immigrants and their offspring – Iraqis, Syrians, Somalis – are largely the perpetrators of the violence (they comprise more than three-quarters of gang membership). As we see throughout the western world, crime and violence continue to decline beyond the immigrant enclaves and the surrounding areas affected by them.  The contrast between native-born and foreign-born is striking.

Why is this happening? It’s not about race. It’s about culture and economics and public policy. Across the decades, social democracy in Sweden has provided an extraordinarily high standard of living and extensive social support for people living there. For nearly a century, Sweden has stood as a model of social democratic capitalism. However, neoliberal restructuring of Swedish society is undermining these historic and progressive arrangements, and the progressive inertia they put in place is winding down. Today, mass immigration, sought by capitalists for its cheap labor, and ill-conceived humanitarianism, are conspiring to stress an already weakening system with predictable results.

The situation is marked by three developments: (1) influx and segregation of low-skilled immigrants devoted to a regressive ideology incompatible with western values of equality, liberty, secularism, and civil and human rights; (2) multiculturalist policies that undermine the assimilation process that has historically liberated immigrants from backwards cultural modes of thought and practice and allowed for integration into a better life-way; (3) insufficient investment in resources that could facilitate the integration of foreign populations into Swedish society, the result of decades of neoliberal restructuring of the public sphere. By privileging identity over integration and fracturing worker solidarity by essentializing and fetishizing group identity at the expense of individual needs (both native and foreign persons), immigrant enclaves extend and entrench, and the social problems associated with them follow suit.

Sweden is experiencing the political fallout from decades of straying from the path that works best for people under capitalism: social democratic welfarism. This has set in motion a terrible dynamic. The appearance of extremism and violence spreads fear across the population. Other-culture rejection of western values by a minority confident of its culture, and a corresponding loss of cultural self-confidence by Swedes is giving rise to frustration across the country. Swedes are a people who have benefitted tremendously from Enlightenment trends, particularly the marginalization of religious thought and practice. Now they’re seeing those accomplishments eroded as religious fanaticism returns. With these developments the right has been emboldened. Fear and frustration, especially in the face of a loss of commitment to social democracy by the left, feed popular support for conservative and traditionalist politics, forms of thought and practice that emphasize authoritarian control over social support.

As a consequence of decades of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, Swedes are finding themselves caught between two irrationalisms: Islam and ethnonationalism.

This analogy is half correct: A black man is a product of racial thinking just as the sinner is a product of religious thinking. Neither “black” nor “sin” exist without the respective systems that construct them. This is why I criticize religion with the same enthusiasm I criticize racism with: both are systems of oppression—just as the black man carries a stigma that subjects him to prejudice and discrimination, so the sinner carries a stigma that subjects her to prejudice and discrimination. Stigma is the basis of persecution, and stigma is a social construction, its meaning relative to a belief system.

We have in the West made great inroads in marginalizing religion as an organizing principle of society. A big reason for this is religious pluralism, which recognizes that there is no overarching religious system under which we are all defined. This includes the possibility that we are not defined in religious terms at all. But race remains an overarching organizing principle of social and cultural life. Of course, for those still trapped in religious systems, the experience can be just as punishing as racism. But in the West the situation is supposed to be different. We’re liberal and secular here.

Yet western society is massively hypocritical when it comes to feelings about racism and religion. One is condemned. The other celebrated, often even deemed necessary. As a consequence, I’m often regarded by as a bigot because I am consistent.

At the same time, there are differences between the cases. Racism constructs race from material found in reality, from the identification and organization of immutable, albeit superficial, phenotypic characteristics, empirical things like skin color, hair texture, eye shape, etc. Moreover, especially where ambiguous, race is rooted in ancestry, lineages of heritable traits. A racialized man cannot easily escape his ascribed status because his physical appearance and genealogy fate him to that status.

Religion, on the other hand, references immaterial things: gods, devils, demons, angels, the divine—things that are, as objective matter, impossible. At best, they are simulacra of social facts, projections of the profane into the sacred realm of imagination. A religious identity is not immutable in the way race is. I was born in a Christian family, to a minister, in a Christian community in the Bible Belt. Yet I have never been a Christian. And if I had been, I would not be now, proof that religion is abandonable. But I am white regardless of what I believe.

Here’s another difference between the cases: Whereas religious belief comes with specific cognitive and emotional content (I have a good idea what a Christian or Muslim believes when I know he is a Christian or a Muslim), race comes with no cognitive or emotional content at all. You can tell nothing about my belief simply on the basis of my race—or gender, for that matter. It won’t help you at all to know my politics or even my religion to know I am a white male. As a white male I could believe anything, listen to any kind of music, believe in any god or no god at all. But if a person is a Muslim, that comes with a suite of attitudes, assumptions, beliefs. Sure, it’s not monolithic. But it has ideological parameters. If you believe you are a Muslim by virtue of your birth, you are confused about what religion is. It’s not like being Arab for example. After all, Arabs can be Christians. Or atheists.

The reality is that I cannot choose my race, but I can choose my beliefs. I cannot shed my skin, but I can remove a hat or a garment. One may find it difficult to give up religion, just as it is for some hard to quit racism, but people do it all the time.

It is a historical accident—our ancestors were still immature in their judgment when they established the rules of civil rights—that religion was put in the lineup of categories requiring special protection. They treated this species of ideology apart from all the other species with which it shares a family connection, giving special protective status to a prejudicial and discriminatory belief system, thereby creating the false assumption that religion was different from its cousins racism and sexism. They committed a category error and flipped the oppressor-oppressed dynamic.

As for free thought and expression of opinion, we already protect that! You can believe and say whatever you want. And you are free to be criticized and ridiculed for that belief. Not special protection is necessary. Want to believe in a god, gods, or no gods? You don’t need my permission.

The differences help us determine how we move forward. Ending racial categories does not begin with pretending people do not share phenotypic traits but by dismantling the system that organizes us on this basis. On the other hand, ending religious categories does depends on personally rejecting religious belief. Religion is a system that each of us can shed because it is upon each of us to give up religious ideology, just as it upon each of us to criticize and ridicule harmful and absurd ideas. Those who don’t want to give up those beliefs shouldn’t get a pass any more than committed racists do on this account. They enable all of the terrible effects of a thought-system that appeals to the transcendent.

The charge of “Islamophobia” is an attempt to delegitimize the critic by suggesting that his criticism is an act of race hatred – as an attack upon a nonwhite people who cannot choose their identity.  Of course, criticism of Islam cannot be racist because Islam is not a race. Islam is an ideology, like fascism; just as it would be absurd to suggest the term “fascophobia” as a species of racism, so it is absurd to offer the term Islamophobia as such. “Christophobia” does appear as a term from time to time, yet the public neither recognizes nor accepts it as a form of racism, if not because they don’t confuse ideology (a chosen or abandonable set of ideas) with race (an imposed and rarely escapable designation), but for the obvious fact that Christianity enjoys adherents spanning the racial spectrum. Indeed, most Muslims in the United States and Great Britain, and in North America and Europe generally, are racially white albeit ethnically Western or Central Asian.

However, there is a form of racism associated with the construct Islamophobia, namely the suppression of the human right of individuals to be free from oppressive culture and ideology that manifests as the illiberal practice of shutting down criticism of Islam with accusations of racism. The racist impulse that underpins this practice is the assumption that individuals in Muslim-majority countries and communities, because they are perceived to be members of racialized minority groups, are on-board with the homophobic, patriarchal, and repressive character of fundamentalist Islam and, furthermore, that it is morally acceptable and even culturally appropriate for them to adhere to such an ideology on account of their racial identity. To put this another way: while it is no good for Europeans to be saddled with Christian fundamentalism or to be told that is it bigotry to criticize the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is not only okay for black and brown peoples to be so saddled, but that it is racist to speak out against their suffering and in favor of their liberation!

Maajid Nawaz, of the counter-extremist think tank Quilliam, a Muslim who supports gay, women’s and free speech rights, has pointed out that those on the left who fetishize Islamic attitudes, dress, and practices – non-Muslims who participate in World Hijab Day or protest against any restriction on extreme Islamic practices or call for incorporation of elements of sharia in western jurisprudence (my examples) – reduce individuals to a stereotype of what it means to be a Muslim, while at the same time fail to recognize or acknowledge the coercive and cultural forces that compel individuals to appear certain ways, and, in so doing, fail the reformers across the Muslim world. By privileging group rights over individual rights (the latter being the proper subject of rights), and identifying as the “authentic Muslim” the religious conservative in the Muslim community, the “regressive left,” as Nawaz calls it, lends tacit support to the Islamic fundamentalist movement, the force of Islamization, what many refer to as “Islamism” – that is, Muslims who resist assimilation with western values and seek instead the imposition of sharia and Muslim culture on the West. (Christopher Hitchens made a similar observation years earlier). Fundamentalist Islam is an oppressive force, and if being a liberal or a leftist means anything it means opposition to oppressive ideology and practice. This is what distinguishes us from those on the right.

Imagine struggling under the yoke of fundamentalist Christianity and those outside that community accepting as representative of the individuals in that culture the claims made for them by the likes of Pat Robertson and other fundamentalist Christian leaders. Imagine hearing that one who criticizes the homophobic, patriarchal, and anti-science values advanced by such fundamentalist leaders as Mike Pence is guilty of anti-Christian bigotry. It’s not hard to imagine the sinking feeling one would have as an atheist or a free thinker living in the Bible Belt to hear such arguments against his liberty. And while it can often be insulting to hear Northeastern liberals in the US mock Southerners as a bunch of backwards religious fundamentalists, it is far better for the Christian fundamentalists among them to be so ridiculed than it is for the South to be excused from aspiring to rise to the humanistic and secular standards of the Enlightenment and the open society. As a atheist growing up on the South, indeed in a very Christian community, I was always appreciative of those voices who pointed out the absurd and criticized the oppressive elements of Southern culture. When the Supreme Court liberated gays and lesbians from the discriminatory laws that were characteristic of the Southern state, and thus softened up Southern culture for the greater acceptance of homosexuality, they did not exempt the South from having to accept the right of marriage equality. Every individual enjoyed the rights to which they are entitled regardless of culture or ideology.

The reality and truth of oppressive structures do not depend on whether those who are oppressed see or struggle against their oppressors. Oppression is an objective matter. It exists when individuals do not enjoy equal rights, when they are not treated as persons or equally before the law, when their bodies and labors are exploited by others. When we hear that we cannot speak for oppressed people, and on this account fall into silence, we betray the oppressed. To do this on the basis of racial designation is to act in a racist fashion, using the perceived race of individuals against them. In this way, identity politics is a thought-stopping practice, designed (or at least functioning) to deny the individual her human rights and selectively muzzle criticism of oppressive culture and ideology.

There are two principles central to liberalism that we would all do well to follow. First, all beliefs are subject to criticism. It follows that a free society permits the criticism, and even ridicule, of religion. Second, a free society cannot practice or allow discrimination of individuals based on their beliefs. Governments are only allowed to control behavior. So, a man who merely believes in gods should not be subjected to discrimination based on this belief. However, his belief is subject to criticism and ridicule. This is why the term “Islamophobia” to describe prejudice and discrimination against Muslims is so troubling. Islamophobia is a species of ideophobia, i.e. distrust, fear, or loathing of ideas. Obviously confusing criticism, distrust, fear, and loathing of Islam (permitted in a free society) with discrimination against Muslims (illegal in a free society) is an error in free thinking. But this conflation is not solely the product of error. It is also the product of a desire to stifle criticism of Islam by equating it with racism, which implies both prejudice (permitted) and discrimination (illegal).

The left-libertarian spirit flows from the Enlightenment tradition expressed in the work of Karl Marx, the father of modern class politics. To be sure, Marx was critical of the type of liberty that finds a right in individual control over capital, but he believed that censorship did more to further that type of liberty than undermine it. Marx is critical of the property right because of the class interests underpinning it; free speech, when protected, provides access to persuasion for those who do not command the machinery of prevailing ideology. Indeed, for Marx, the liberal notion of rights does not emanate from the property right but rather the property right is the contradictory element in the system of rights liberalism identifies. It is the property right that allows speech to be captured and controlled for the securing and perpetuation of exclusive interests oppressive to labor. Yet many on the left see free speech per se as an oppressive instrument of capitalism (and of racism, sexism, etc.). Those who call for censorship have the substance of their demand precisely backwards: rather than limiting the power of property to interfere with the free exchange of opinion and expression, they support subordinating speech to the property right.

In this essay, Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square, published by Project Censored, I explore the potential application of civil rights protections to public accommodations and utilities with respect to social media platforms, services Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy describes collectively as the “modern public square.”

Did you see Who Joins the Alt-Right? A Look at Charlottesville Anniversary, Newsweek, August 11, 2018? It cites a University of Virginia study that found that white nationalists are likely to be low-income, divorced, uneducated and unemployed. Let me help you understand the situation.

Money is a chief source of stress in a marriage. Divorce is often the result of economic hardship and arguments over finances. To the extent that people see divorce as a social problem (it is harmful to children; even if most adjust over time, the fact that adjustment is needed tells us it’s a problem), it is in part a consequence of an economic system that cannot provide stability for working families. To be sure, there are other reasons people divorce. But if you want to reduce the prevalence of divorce, then you have to raise the level of social support for working people. I’m not saying that marriage is always the ideal arrangement. The point is about keeping families together. Brutal capitalism breaks families down and tears them apart.

The problem of working class ethnonationalism is this: whites who are uneducated and poor—i.e. low-skill labor—in a society that divides its population into white and black and expects minorities to operate on racial identity, tend to see their exploitation and oppression in racial terms. This is the predictable result of American history, a situation that represents the abject failure of the left to organize workers along class lines. The left today—the left that asks us to vote for one of the two bourgeois parties—peddles token diversity and neoliberal identity politics, things that don’t help the working class irrespective of race, but actually deepen capitalist hegemony among the predominantly white middle class, who are educated and affluent, and look down on the white working class while virtue signaling their concern for racialized minorities. It starts with an acknowledgment of “working class racism” among whites. Soon, the problem of racism is the working class.

Poor whites see this and resent it. They see that those privileged by the history and the needs of economic system, and by birth in well-off families, see them as bigots, racists and ignoramuses, while identifying low-skilled blacks and other minorities as vulnerable, as victims. Poor whites are used car trailer park white trash. They have no legitimate grievance because they are instinctively white nationalist in orientation. They must be imagining their disadvantage, after all, they have “white privilege.” The affluent whites do, too, they admit, but they are “self-consciousness” and “allies”—while still benefiting from the privilege those they look down on don’t actually have. 

Meanwhile, the capitalists whom the white middle class supports by voting for the political party representing establishment interests (there’s some false consciousness for you), ships low-skilled jobs overseas where it can, replaces low-skilled labor with machines where it can, and pulls cheap low-skilled labor across the border to compete for the jobs of domestic workers—all to drive down the wage floor for everybody forced into that class by private control over capital. Since the left isn’t giving low-skilled labor a voice—white or black—some poor whites express their grievances through the distortion of ethnonationalism, while seeking a painkiller in evangelical Christianity, alienations kept alive by a society shot through with elite-shaped race politics. All for the sake of elite control of the masses. And the unwashed masses are to blame for all of this. “Why do they vote against their interests?” the smug liberal asks. 

“Behold,” Newsweek declares, “the real enemy: the poor, uneducated white who can’t even hold his marriage together, who blames others for his problem [because, in fact, others are the cause of his problems]. The white nationalists is the greatest threat to humanity.” Translation: Don’t look at the environmental devastation poor whites have no power to cause (but do keep buying stuff we tell you to with money you don’t have). Don’t look at all the wars poor whites have no power to start (but do keep providing taxes and lives so corporate state can wage them). Don’t look at the establishment poor whites play no role in (it knows better than you what’s good for you). All must fear those who rolled the dice on a man they believed would disrupt what the establishment wishes could be a seamless system of capitalist hegemony, what the news media tells us is “mainstream” and “acceptable” politics—the new media that pines for a “return to normalcy.” What’s normal? Duh, globalism, imperialism, and war. What’s abnormal? A spray-tan combover meeting with the leader of a country armed to the teeth with planet-ending weaponry in order to ratchet down tensions. Show us you’re normal, Donny. Antagonize Russia. More sanctions? Nice. Good dog.

Weren’t the “deplorables” supposed to be too stupid to see this? Why weren’t the “irredeemables” scared of the Orange Man? What happened? The left has moved so far away from class politics that somebody like Steve Bannon can provide a better explanation for what’s happening to them than the left can (and it is a good explanation). It’s happening in Europe, too. The right is listening to the people the left is supposed to represent but is too busy belittling. The left abandons class for identity, or at least reduces class to one identity among many. The ultimate cause of the problem is capitalism. But the proximate cause is the establishment left, the Democratic Party, the Labor Party, the Social Democrats. They have sacrificed working people on the altar of neoliberalism.

The problem is not the poor working class. But don’t expect Newsweek to even suggest that.