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Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2010

I'm American. And You?

TIM SLOAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE - GETTY IMAGES

Several Republican senators are calling for the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which gives citizenship to those born on American soil.

By MATT BAI

ONCE, in what seems like another eon of Republican politics, George W. Bush dreamed of building a multiethnic party that would achieve dominance in a nation where the words "majority" and "minority" were losing their meaning. Mr. Bush was adamant, in the days after the terrorist attacks of 2001, that American Muslims not become the targets of public resentment, and he later pushed a plan to offer illegal immigrants a path toward citizenship.

Republicans are now taking a decidedly different approach. Last week, a group of senior Republican senators called for hearings on repealing the 14th Amendment; that's the one that affords children born on American soil automatic citizenship. At the same time, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich were among those posting outraged Twitter updates over the decision to allow an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the fallen trade center towers.

These stands garnered a fair amount of publicity, and at a moment of voter insurrection, they may well yield short-term advantages for the party. History suggests, however, that the long term may be more problematic.

In both controversies, there are legitimate debates to be had. The 14th Amendment, after all, was enacted in 1868 as a means of ensuring that black Americans would be granted a full slate of rights in the era after slavery. Critics of immigration policy argue, not unreasonably, that it now has the effect of encouraging Latino immigrants to slip across the border and have children who aren't entitled to the opportunities of citizenship. The senator who first raised the issue last week, the moderate Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, can hardly be described as an anti-immigrant crusader.

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The debate over the Islamic center, to be named Cordoba House, is also complex. Critics, including the Anti-Defamation League, said it was simply too insensitive to victims' families, regardless of one's commitment to freedom of worship.

It's hard, though, to make a thoughtful case for anything in 140 characters or in a 30-second cable TV clip, and the way that some Republicans happily pounced on these debates could reasonably be characterized as political opportunism. (Rick Lazio, the Republican running for governor of New York, darkly suggested that radical entities might be behind the building of the mosque, as if the most publicly scrutinized building on the East Coast might strike someone as a good place to locate a sleeper cell.)

Conservative politicians were playing to the moment; in a recent CNN poll, 62 percent of respondents said the policies that made America a "melting pot" in the early 20th century were a good thing, while only 31 percent said the same policies were making the country stronger now.

Giving that resentment an outlet at the polls, some politicians seem to think, will propel them past the Democrats in November - and maybe even right into 2012.

On some level, the reactions to both issues that surfaced last week, or at least the more reductive versions of them that ricocheted online, were about the basic question of who gets to share in the American experience â€” whether that means the experience of citizenship or, in the case of the mosque, the experience of grieving for Americans lost.

A nativist impulse underlies this type of political appeal, and it is not new. It springs, perhaps, more from human nature than from any defect in the American character; when our way of life feels imperiled, we tend to cast a wary eye toward those who embody otherness. At moments throughout our history, when there loomed the perception of a threat to the established order of things, we have sought clarity on the issue of who fully belongs in the society and who doesn't.

Sometimes the threat is economic or cultural. The 1850s, for instance, saw the rise of the American Party - more commonly called the Know Nothings, because that was their response to any inquiries about their secret activities. Like us, they found themselves stranded in a fast-changing society, its economy transformed by emerging railroads and this gizmo called the telegraph.

"If your status was slipping, and if your grandfather had been a general in the Revolution but now you had no access to the new money, you could feel like your country was going away," explains Ted Widmer, a Brown University historian who wrote a book on the period. The Know Nothings responded by lashing out at Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland. Some members supposedly stole a stone meant for the Washington Monument, because it was a gift from the pope, and threw it into the Potomac River.

At other times, the societal peril has been physical and imminent. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers oversaw the forced relocation of more than 100,000 immigrants of Japanese descent. Most were citizens, made suspect by their customs and their language.

Nothing quite so drastic has occurred amid the anxiety of the current moment, one that reflects, perhaps, a collision of forces both economic and existential. First, we have endured the decades-long sputtering of the industrial engine that once powered America's towns and cities, the shuttering of factories and downtown storefronts. This has created the sense among some voters â€” not always illusory, by any means â€” that their jobs and neighborhoods are endangered by interlopers, a fear that has empowered a long line of populist politicians and commentators.

And then came the cataclysm of 2001, when a new era's foreign enemies made themselves known on American soil, leaving in their wake a lingering sense of vulnerability, reminiscent of the cold war.

These trends have opened the door, once again, to nativist appeals - some more subtle than others. And because of the political realignment that began in 1980 (when the term "Reagan Democrats” -meaning ethnic whites - entered the lexicon) and reached its apex in 1994, when the South tipped into the Republican column, the voters who are most susceptible to such appeals reside, at this juncture in our politics, primarily in the Republican base.

When Mr. Bush, a Texan fluent both in Spanish and in immigration policy, advanced a plan to reform the system in 2006, he was going directly into the teeth of that sentiment within his own party. His failure virtually guaranteed that his party - already beset by an unpopular war and mounting distrust from black Americans - would not become the broader coalition he had hoped to build.

This could be a problem for Republicans in the years ahead, as the American electorate rapidly grows more diverse. "You can win elections temporarily by accumulating large percentages of the white vote," says Matthew Dowd, who was a top strategist in Mr. Bush's two elections, "but over time, it's unsustainable."

It's also true that however much the forces of American exclusivity may bob their way to the surface from time to time, the current of our history seems to carry us toward a more inclusive ideal. As Mr. Widmer points out, when the Know Nothings petered out rather quickly (it was hard to hate immigrants when they were dying on Civil War battlefields), some sizable number of them meandered over to Abraham Lincoln and his new Republican Party.

It turned out that what the Know Nothings really detested, even more than immigrants, were two entrenched parties - Democrats and Whigs - who offered no persuasive solutions to the agony of displacement. Leadership, of a more genuine sort, carried the day

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, Week in Review, of Sunday, August 8, 2010.

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