On Nativism

I am not sure what to make of Alt-Right.  I'm a third-generation American Jew.  To blacks I'm white and to "Whites" I'm not.  I was born here to people born here.  I am an unhyphenated American.  My ethnicity has nothing to do with it.

"Nativism" has been getting some bad press recently.  But I'm a nativist.  I believe that American culture - a common language, certain common values, a commitment to self-government and individual liberty - is essential to the society to which I belong.  The staunchest opponents of American nativism today seem to me, ironically, to be the Americans least comfortable with how Native Americans were treated in the past.  Can we say that those Native Americans who militantly opposed the European colonists were wrong to do so?  Do we have any doubt that they had a reason to be worried or the right to defend their culture from invasion?  Was Sitting Bull a racist?  What, exactly, distinguishes the noble Native American who fought Custer from the hated racist who would fight multiculturalism today?

European America is a multi-ethnic society, but it is not a multi-cultural one.  (I find the idea of a multi-cultural "society" oxymoronic.)   The USA is a melting pot.  Why should we Americans share our societal bounty with people who do not wish to become culturally American?  ESL, sí, bilingualism, no. Yes, we have subcultures, and that's fine.  If black people want to jump the broom at weddings, that's their business; I recall stomping a flashbulb.  Just so we agree that monogamy is right and wife-beating is wrong.  (The polyamorists among us are outliers.  There's always room for outliers.  That's part of our culture.)

It's easy to see how colonists - real, alien colonists - can pose a threat.  But what are we to make of cultural invasion?  We are already ethnically and spiritually diverse; everyone coming here already "looks like" some large group of assimilated Americans.  And yet, some people coming here are different from us natives.  Shall we not defend our culture from these invaders?

People who come here with no intention of learning English should not be welcome here.  Language has semiotic significance way beyond the simplicity of communication.  Our shared language is how we share our culture.  By choosing not to speak and understand it, you announce that you do not care to be one of us.  Yet you expect us to provide the blessings of liberty to you as if you were the posterity of our founders.  But our founders' posterity speaks English.

Why would we admit anyone who believes America should be subject to Sharia law?  Is the arrival of such a person not an invasion?  This is the problem posed by the horrid Donald Trump.  He has latched onto a form of nativism that subsumes all of what I would call appropriate cultural nativism, and then altered it to appeal to those who don't really understand that ethnicity and nominal religious affiliation are beside the point.

Race and religion become screening proxies for bad ideas because people can lie about their ideas but not their ethnicity.  If we can keep out all the "mud" people and all the Muslims, then we will keep out every non-White person who would not assimilate, i.e., most of those who would not assimilate, which is enough.  We'd keep out a lot of good people, too, but those denied admission are not marked for extermination, just sadly excluded because we have no better screening tool.

But it is in the nature of our species not to believe in proxies.  We are not capable, in large numbers, of understanding that we might choose to ban all Muslims simply as an engineering solution to the problem of excluding bad Muslims.  To resolve this cognitive dissonance, we simply assume that all Muslims are, in fact, bad people.  It's easier that way for a large number of human beings to implement an exclusionary policy that may be necessary to cultural survival.

The flip side of this argument is the claim that multi-culturalism does not threaten native culture but seeks rather to enhance it.  But we come back to human nature.  The concept is fine, but the reality is balkanization and, eventually, a battle for cultural primacy.  People want to be "normal," and that requires norms.  Multi-culturalism eschews norms.

This, then, is the dilemma of philosophical nativism: if it isn't racism, it doesn't happen.  And if it is racism, well, then it's racism.