Milbank:
The
unfriendly airwaves of talk radio this week gave us an inadvertently revealing
moment.
Rep. Mo
Brooks of Alabama, a Republican immigration hard-liner and part of what the
Wall Street Journal just branded “the GOP’s Deportation Caucus,” was giving his
retort to the paper’s pro-business editorialists on Laura Ingraham’s radio show
Monday: “They need to be patriots, and they need to think about America first,”
Brooks said.
America
First? How 1940! The congressman went on to condemn those who say the
Republican position on immigration is dooming the party by alienating Latinos.
“This
is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party,”
Brooks said. “And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming
that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama
implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on
sex, greed, envy, class warfare.”
It was
the battle cry of the white man, particularly the Southern white man, who is
feeling besieged. I don’t share the fear, but I understand it. The United
States is experiencing a rapid decoupling of race and nationality: Whiteness
has less and less to do with being American.
The
Census Bureau forecasts that non-Hispanic whites, now slightly more than 60
percent of the population, will fall below 50 percent in 2043. Within 30 years,
there will cease to be a racial majority in the United States. In a narrow
political sense, this is bad news for the GOP, which is dominated by older
white men such as Brooks. But for the country, the disassociation of whiteness
and American-ness is to be celebrated. Indeed, it is the key to our survival.
This is
not merely about a fresh labor supply but about the fresh blood needed to cure
what ails us. To benefit from such a transfusion, we not only need to welcome
more immigrants but also to adopt pieces of their culture lacking in our own —
just as we have done with other (mostly European) cultures for centuries.
This is
the theme of my friend Eric Liu’s provocative new book, A Chinaman’s Chance.
Liu writes about Chinese Americans (Asians, as it happens, eclipsed Hispanics last year as the fastest-growing minority in the United States) but the thesis
is similar for other immigrant cultures. Liu argues that the United States
needn’t fear China’s rise, because the Chinese have already given us the tools
to beat them economically: their sons and daughters.
“America
has an enduring competitive advantage over China: America makes Chinese
Americans; China does not make American Chinese,” Liu says. “China does not
want to or know how to take people from around the world, welcome them, and
empower them to change the very fabric of their nation’s culture.”
The son
of Chinese immigrants, Liu observes that American culture now has an excess of
individualism, short-term thinking and prioritizing of rights over duties. He
calls for “a corrective dose” of Chinese values: mutual responsibility,
long-term thinking, humility, moral character and contribution to society.
“What
Chinese culture at its best can bring to America is a better balance between
being an individual and being in a community,” he writes, offering the example
of Tony Hsieh, the Taiwanese-American chief executive of Zappos who is pouring some $350 million into reviving downtown Las Vegas: “He’s an American gambler
with a Chinese long view; he is supremely confident yet mainly silent; he has
so little of the American need to sell himself, so little extroversion, that he
jokes even his friends aren’t sure he likes them.”
Part of
Liu’s confidence that the United States will triumph over China is that his
ancestral land, in modernizing, is losing some of the best aspects of Chinese
culture — and acquiring our own excesses. He notes that, as the Chinese
extended family frayed, the government enacted a law requiring adult children to visit their elderly parents — the sort of thing Chinese did voluntarily for
millennia.
China
responds with edicts because it lacks the source of continuous adaptability and
vitality that imported cultures give the United States. Creative change is
easier here because we pick and choose from among all the world’s cultures.
That inherent advantage in the American system will continue — if we don’t get
hung up about whiteness.
The tea
party movement was a setback because it elevated extreme individualism over
collective responsibilities and because it tapped into nativism and further
undermined trust in American institutions. Some tea partyers such as Brooks may
never be able to leave the bunkers where they defend whiteness.
But for
other conservatives and Republicans — and, more importantly, for America — it’s
not too late.
