First, a few clarifications. I identify as liberal. Unrepentant liberal. Not progressive. While I share many values with progressives, the political origins are problematic. For instance, progressives tend to take the traditional stance of assimilation, that immigrants have an obligation to learn the customs of the aristocratic white people in the US. This is a degenerate philosophy that just leads to inbreeding and bad food. The one thing, more than anything else, that makes the US great is that assimilation work both ways. Sure, immigrants learn our customs and our language, but the US also integrates their customs, languages, and values. The US changes as we take the best of the of immigrant culture and incorporate those values into our national identity. I mean, other than Thanksgiving and Christmas, what American eats traditional crappy US food like cranberry sauce. As far as I can see, we like pico, curry, and fish sauce.
Progressives also have great responsibility in the death of ten of thousands of people and the oppression of countless persons through the war on drugs and the framing of the use of recreational drugs as a moral failure instead of a choice or a health issue. We see the evangelical spectre of superstition and bigotry creep into out national debate, completely overwhelming the rational logic of science and empiricism.
Second, as I have mentioned, white nationalism is different from white supremacy. White supremacy is why the cops think they can shoot black kids in that back, then go on the internet and set up funding sites that will reward them. White people no longer have carte blanche to kill black people, but they do have the ability to give the police the right to do so .
White nationalism, on the other hand, is simply the argument that all other things being equal, white people should get preference because white people built this country. This is a issue that pervades politics int he US, and is treated as a reasonable question for debate. It is why a white person feels the need to call the cops on black people when they feel inconvenienced.
White nationalism is why Ronald Reagan fought against ‘quotas’. As a liberal, I understand that non-white people are discriminated against, and the way to help alleviate this is to say, sometimes, when two candidates are equally qualified, and one is white and the other one isn’t, then sometimes white the white one may not be chosen. I, as a liberal, understand that a lot of the time the non-white candidate is going to equally, or more qualified, but social pressure is going to encourage many people to hire the white person. So we are going to counteract that by encouraging society to spread the opportunity out more equally by encouraging them to sometimes hire non-white people.
Yet the debate persists. We continue to talk about hiring of qualified persons, and if white people should get priority. We debate if should ask the white aristocracy to give up privilege so that more people can have opportunity, and how much non-white people ‘deserve’ given that many were brought here as slaves, or are recent immigrants, and so did not build this country. We see this logic in Romney’s ‘statement ‘we built this’. Even though Romney lied just as much as Trump does, and even though this statement is equivalent to all Mexicans are rapists, denigrating the people of color who really did build this country, Romney still got the vote of the 61 million white nationalists that make up a scant majority of this country. This is the identity politics of the US . Not whether the non-white population has equal rights, which it does not and never has had, but who much privilege the white evangelical population is going to secede.
In progressive circles, the question of white privilege is a central theme. For instance, in the last US Presidential election a central question for democrats was if coal miners, who are overwhelming white and male, should have to give up their privilege. Coal, of course, is a major contributor to the environmental and economic disaster that will soon be facing this country. Coal is a major negative factor in the health of people of color who tend to be most effected by the most dangerous coal fired power plants. Coal mining is a pretty good proxy of white privilege versus non-white opportunity.
In the 2016 democratic primary this took a pretty stark form. Bernie Sanders, a representative of a predominately white state, took the side of the white coal miner and ignored the damage that coal mining causes in the non-white community and the environmental destruction in general. On a side note, I have seen this damage personally. Kids I work with received millions of dollars in damages because emissions from properly regulated coal plants damaged their bodies and brains.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the earth cannot tolerate us removing and burning every deposit of coal. She was clear that the the jobs of a few privileged white people, jobs that were not long term in any case, were not more important than the health of children of color. The privileged white people had to get educated, get new skills, and the states that depended on them had to diversify, just like Texas did 30 years ago. The privileged white cannot take a job that they know it going to kill them, then expect welfare when it does.
In return for these clearly honest statements, she was eviscerated for her lack of respect of the white man’s entitlement to high paying job, no matter what damage it causes. The lies promoted by self proclaimed progressives, that coal mining provides good job for America won over the honest reality. And the damage is that Trump is president because we value the privilege of the white man, and the lies of our white nationalist government, more than we value equal opportunity.
But this is not the most revealing evidence of tacit support of white nationalism by some progressives. That honor is reserved for the following tweet:
While I understand the context here, that in comparison to Trump, Reagan was a balanced leader that understood how to grow America, I also understand that this tweet encompasses all the lies and fictions that enable white nationalists.
First it supports the lie that Regan was elected because the democrats were being irresponsible fiscal agents, just like Trump was elected because democrats were being irresponsible fiscal agents. In both cases, economic anxiety was the reason the white men were elected. They were final conservatives who would save the country through sound fiscal policy.
In truth, both were elected because of white nationalism and evangelical desire to control women and non-white people. With Regan the abortion issue was metastasized as a white nationalist evangelical theme to cover up the basic racism and white supremacy of the white evangelical movements. People were not voting for ending of the civil rights that were given to black people, but to stop the murder of babies. They were not voting because the promised to end the practice of black women having babies for the welfare check, the so-callled welfare queen, so that hard working white people could get a tax cut and afford the big suburban house and second car. No, they were voting because a group of devil worshippers, i.e. agnostics, were laying babies out on an alter and slitting their throats. It did not matter that he was the first divorced president, at a time when divorce was still considered a sin as it was discouraged in the Bible, at least much more discouraged that a man lying with man, nor did it matter that Reagan probably is guilty of statutory rape, which we see is not a problem because Mary was a young teenager, because he was would end the practice of ripping babies from women and then selling them for parts.
Reagan’s welfare queen, at a basic level, is no different from the Tump’s mexican rapist. Both remove the responsibility of failure from the uneducated white man to to an external group of people that who erroneously believe they have the same rights a white man, and therefore steal what rightly belongs to the white man. At a basic level, the lies that this tweet attempts to validate are no different from the lies that Trump engages in every day.
The lie that Reagan was a fiscal conservative, even though he nearly doubled the debt as percentage of GDP, is custom made to validate white nationalism to a generation that did not live the truth. A generation that wishes for the a better and whiter America, just like some in my generation watched Happy Days wishing more a more naive and whiter county. The lie that Reagan was somehow less white nationalists than Trump, that he somehow served the country, and not white people, is very compelling. This is especially true for white people like Warren who likely voted for Reagan and like do not consider themselves white nationalist, like all the Trump voters who hid behind ‘economic reasons’. For the record, many white people, including some of my relatives, knew perfectly well that Reagan was a white nationalist. We did not vote for him because we knew that he primary purpose was to destroy civil rights, end opportunity for non-white people, and return to the white nationalist country on the 1950’s. I was proud to vote against white nationalism and against the Reagan administration when I came of age. I knew what Reagan was about because, at the time, I worked for white nationalists who believed that Reagan was going to make America Great Again by getting rid of the welfare queens.
For those readers who made it this far, let me acknowledge that I realize that I should be civil and not call out allies, even those that promote the white nationalist ideology. I should be understanding because they are doing the best they can to promote a better America in a very tough environment. Unfortunately, I was not really raised on civility. I grew up with stories of white supremacists murdering black people and allies in the street in cold blood. I was recently reminded that Harry Belefonte, who was trying to get funding to people who were working to get the vote for all Americans, was chased down and almost killed by white people, with no cops to be seen to protect him. I am not civil because this still happens today where cops see people of color being attacked and do nothing.
I am reminded that Reagan was responsible for countless deaths of US citizens because his evangelical superstitions made him and his voters believe that AIDS was a judgement from their fantasy deity. He did not address the issue, like the common coward, until he was nearly out of office. Silence equals death, and the only reason that the white nationalists want silence is so they will be the only ones allowed to talk, to call all Mexicans rapists, to call mothers of color welfare queens, where churches are free indoctrinate their children in hate.
I am reminded of evangelicals during the time of Reagan who finally admitted that, although the bible gave them right to kill gay people, maybe gay people were not so bad and maybe they should not be murdered. This mostly came about because these evangelicals had gay children, and even though many threw them to street to die, some did not. These evangelicals, and many gay people who were raised evangelical, were, however, concerned that many of us would not make a choice. I mean, if you are gay, they said, be gay.
While we all appreciated their self control to not engage in their basic instinct to murder people and throw away their disappointing kids, that did not mean that we still did not call out their bigotry. No one has the right to tell another person who to love, or that if they kiss a boy or girl in middle school, then all they can do for their rest of their lives are to fuck boys or girls. That is our choice, just like it is our choice to acknowledge the white nationalism that still corrupts our national politics, or ignore it because we have no skin in the game.
If we are going to end the white nationalism in the US, then we have to call out the white nationalist. We have to make it clear that we appreciate that they are allies, that their work is meaningful, but could they stop spreading the lies that get us killed?
