John Kyl and Lindsay Graham: our New Ambassadors of Hate

Following on my recent efforts to work through the implications of today's political stew for our shared sense of common national identity, I come to only one conclusion: This is a fight that is intensifying. Yesterday on Face the Nation, John Kyl echoed Lindsay Graham’s call for a Constitutional Amendment that would eviscerate the 14th Amendment, denying citizenship to children born here in the US if their parents are here illegally. (See here.) It is mind boggling, to me, that all of the progress since the Civil War – the 14th Amendment was one of the 3 post-Civil War Amendments that institutionalized the idea that the US was an inclusive nation – is being challenged by Republicans in order to win political points with the paranoid fringe of America’s right. Kyl and Graham (and John McCain) don’t even believe the hateful rhetoric they are peddling. They just know there is a market for it. There is almost no chance of adopting an amendment of the type they are discussing. It is all agitation and positioning – we hate immigrants (and blacks and everyone not like you) as much as you do. Vote for us! But the deeply institutionalized constitutional shifts represented by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are too important to play games with; if we question their legitimacy we question the widening of the circle of inclusion that has characterized the past 150 years.

I’m more deeply convinced that Sarah Palin is America’s Margaret Thatcher. Just as Thatcher represented Britain’s idealized sense of itself at a moment of national decline (and in the face of a transforming wave of immigration), so Sarah Palin represents our idealized sense of ourselves. She’s the scrappy homesteader from America’s last frontier, independent, uncorrupted by the evils of multiculturalism, urban welfarism, and watered-down Christian faith. The parallels between Britain’s reaction to the twin dilemmas of economic decline and demographic change (as mapped out by Paul Gilroy in his brilliant work) and our current situation are unmistakable. The result in Britain: they navigated through this (eventually) and London now is a proudly multicultural city. But along the way they had race riots, saw the emergence of a racist and violent skinhead culture (still alive from place to place in Britain’s rusting industrial cities and among the nation’s soccer hooligans) and spent years and years in neutral, unable to move ahead while these issues were fought out. I think our result could be even more explosive. We are by nature a more violent society (as recently celebrated by Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court), we have an existing infrastructure of white supremacist hate groups (and an internet landscape to spread their racist rantings), we are consumed by a fear of foreigners exaggerated by our 'war on terror,' and our politicians are more openly hateful and confrontational in their language.