The Trump administration’s rhetoric echoes the identical previous fantasy of racial purity that animated the Twentieth-century proper.
On an in any other case unremarkable spring day, the Trump administration’s lawless assault on the rights of immigrants was interrupted by a government-chartered airplane touchdown at Dulles Worldwide Airport. In a revealing reverse-image set piece, some 50 white Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa had arrived, in pursuit of an array of beneficiant resettlement provisions. In February, Trump had signed an govt order granting them streamlined refugee standing and a clean path to US citizenship. The newcomers have been feted with welcoming statements from the president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and scores of MAGA-aligned commentators and pundits.
The identical day that the Afrikaner “refugees” have been getting the red-carpet remedy, the Division of Homeland Safety introduced that it was ending momentary protected standing for immigrants from Afghanistan—lots of whom had assisted the US battle effort there and would thus face potential reprisals from the Taliban ought to they be deported. At a press convention after the Afrikaners’ flight landed, a reporter requested State Division spokesman Christopher Landau in regards to the huge disparity in remedy between white immigrants with doubtful claims of violent persecution of their homeland, and a bunch of their nonwhite counterparts who have been uncovered to actual private and political hazard. Landau replied that “one of many standards” in assigning refugee standing to an immigrant inhabitants is ensuring they are often “assimilated into our nation.”
There’s a world of hidden presumptions in Landau’s response, however its core logic keys right into a long-standing obsession on the MAGA proper: the notion that the members of America’s management caste are the righteous guardians of a Western civilization in imminent peril of contamination from inside and siege from with out. The trade was paying homage to an identical outburst from the proto-Trumpian presidential candidate Pat Buchanan within the early Nineteen Nineties: “If we needed to take one million immigrants in—say Zulus, subsequent yr, or Englishmen—and put them in Virginia, what group can be simpler to assimilate, and would trigger much less issues?”
Buchanan was drawing on a pressure of white reactionary thought that dates again to the late nineteenth century and the early a long time of the Twentieth century, when the overlapping scourges of mass immigration and race-mixing haunted the American patrician thoughts. Madison Grant’s unhinged but enormously influential 1916 diatribe, The Passing of the Nice Race: or, The Racial Foundation of European Historical past, makes an argument that’s successfully indistinguishable from Trump’s continuous plaint that if the barbarian hordes aren’t subdued and/or banished by any means obligatory, “we gained’t have a rustic anymore.”
Because the subtitle of Grant’s tract suggests, the case for racialized exclusion, discrimination, and eugenic guardianship has at all times rested on the parable of a sanitized and glorified racial previous. The notion of the imperiled West seized the right-wing creativeness with acute drive within the Nineteen Twenties; because the cultural historian Warren Susman noticed, that decade’s “nice concern” was “whether or not any nice industrial and democratic mass society can keep a big degree of civilization, and whether or not mass training and mass communication will enable any civilization to outlive.” The non-white and foreign-born populations then migrating into American cities have been the all-too-vivid face of this menace for the self-appointed guardians of white European civilization, resulting in the enactment of harsh new immigration restrictions and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Present Problem
The rationale for the Afrikaner refugee coverage is likewise steeped within the argot of civilizational peril; in saying the arrival of the immigrants, Trump dubbed them victims of a genocide, reprising an empirically vacuous 2018 broadcast from then–Fox Information host Tucker Carlson about alleged racial terror campaigns towards white South African farmers. (Such rhetoric is very grotesque for an administration imprisoning and in search of to deport critics of the particular genocide that Israel is finishing up in Gaza.) Based on The Washington Submit, a State Division memo referred to Afrikaner farmers who have been mentioned to “have witnessed or skilled excessive violence with a racial nexus,” regardless that, the Submit famous, the episodes cited involved “dwelling invasions, murders or carjackings that passed off as much as 25 years in the past.”
However because the Madison Grants of the world have made clear for a century now, confirmable details play no function in grand narratives of civilizational peril. Therefore the spectacle of reformed By no means Trumper JD Vance extolling the necessity for native populations to outbreed the foreign-born competitors and providing a Buchananite gloss on the phony Haitian invasion of Springfield, Ohio: “Ought to we drop 20,000 folks from a radically totally different tradition in a small Ohio city in a matter of some years?”
MAGA’s crown prince of declensionist civilization rhetoric, nevertheless, is South African centibillionaire Elon Musk. Musk, along with the opposite key South African–aligned Trump minions, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, is a sworn foe of all issues woke, DEI-inflected, and in any other case irksome to light-hued Silicon Valley edgelords. He’s additionally a hard-core connoisseur of civilizational doomsterism.
“I take heed to podcasts in regards to the fall of civilizations to fall asleep,” Musk mentioned in an interview with the Trump-pardoned Wall Avenue felon Michael Milken. He urged Milken’s MAGA-loyal listeners to adjourn briskly to procreate not less than 3 times, increasing his personal private breeding challenge—as of publication, the rely was 14—on a vaster scale. The menace to civilization, Musk went on to say, is on the root of his obsession with colonizing Mars. “When you don’t develop into a multi-planet civilization, then you’re merely ready round till you die from a self-inflicted wound or some pure catastrophe,” the self-described historical past buff exhorted.
If Musk had bothered to be taught any precise historical past, he’d acknowledge that rhetoric because the paranoid fantasy of right-wing eugenicists from a century in the past. To quote one other well-worn MAGA chorus: Unhappy!
