Simply put, and I’m basing this on fairly extensive personal experience (I spent several summers in the company of MMCs, the children of MMCs, etc.), a lot of Michael Moore Conservatives are, well, racist and anti-Semitic. No, I don’t think criticizing the State of Israel makes one an anti-Semite, and I don’t even think believing that, for example, Muslim countries are ill-suited to democracy makes you a racist. The hatred for things American, and it is a hatred in many cases, grows out of a hatred of the increasingly polyglot, multiracial world of London and the Home Counties. Again, I don’t think nativism is the worst impulse in the world. But I think chauvinism is at the very least a likely candidate. It could be that this will strike Larison as too subtle a distinction–what separates good and decent hostility to, say, trade and immigration and modernity from a narrowness that fuels the worst kinds of exclusion, contempt, and (rarely) violence? All I can say is that you know it when you hear it, an answer that I can’t imagine will satisfy anyone other than yours truly. ~Reihan Salam

I appreciate Reihan’s answer to my earlier question, and I likewise feel obliged to to offer a reply to him, as I very much enjoy his writing and appreciate the attention he has given to mine.  But I admit that I am initially unsure what I can say in response, since this description of “loathsome” Conservatives on account of their alleged racism and anti-Semitism comes largely from Reihan’s claim of broad personal experience that I cannot refute (I cannot claim similarly broad experience among these sorts of people, and I haven’t met the people being referred to here) and relies on the categorisation of these Conservatives as racists and anti-Semites according to an admittedly subjective standard that demarcates healthy resistance and anxiety about immigration and cultural and national identity (“nativism”) from more extreme resentments (“chauvinism”) in a very vague way.  No, this isn’t really satisfactory, but how do I go about giving my reply?   

Let me begin by saying that I am initially always skeptical of charges such as these (even when they are based in personal experience, because of the subjective nature of the judgement–see below), since they are the most freely used charges today and frequently have the most amorphous meanings, and they are routinely liberally applied to any and all critics of immigration and multiculturalism.  Second, there is almost nothing more subjective than an impression of someone else’s racism.  For some, to say that race itself is something at all more real than a social and cultural construct is to be a racist (leave aside for now the strange implication of the latter view that something culturally constructed is therefore basically irrelevant to the understanding of identity); for others, the same statement is entirely uncontroversial (and these others are typically regarded by the first group as ipso facto racists for finding it uncontroversial).  For some, to make observations about something stereotypical about another group of people is to be racist, even if the observation is basically accurate, because you shouldn’t generalise about groups of people in this way; for others, someone cannot be a racist unless he actually hates people from another race, and here they don’t mean mild dislike or even slight aversion, but hatred.  It is actually quite a different thing to not want to have other kinds of people coming into your country to stay (which is what I would have assumed was the case with most of these Conservatives) and to actually hate those kinds of people, but under some definitions the former is just as racist, because under some definitions to prefer your own kind (or even to use the phrase “your own kind”) is already to be racist.  These charges are really almost impossible to evaluate unless we know exactly what sentiments or actions prompted using such a label.  

Anti-Semitism is an even more vexing charge, because it takes on so many various meanings and has been so casually and carelessly used by so many that it is not always clear what will draw such a charge.  The other day I saw that evangelicals in Israel attacked the bishops who denounced Christian Zionism because the bishops espoused a “replacement theology which played a pivotal role in the persecution of Jews through the centuries and under-girded the Holocaust.”  Actually, they argued against Christians who use the support of Scripture to cover up and justify the excesses of a secular state, which the Christian Zionists have wrongly identified with the Israel of Scripture–but for the evangelicals the implication is that the State of Israel is not the continuation of the Biblical Israel, which one might otherwise think would not be controversial for Christians.  Any Christian who reads the parable of the vinedressers has a hard time not believing in some sort of “replacement theology”–are all those Christians, myself included, who believe this therefore anti-Semitic?  Of course, there are those who regard the Gospels and Christianity as inherently anti-Semitic, which would make the previous question moot.  It has reached a point where any negative artistic portrayal of a Jewish person is taken not as the portrayal of a character, but almost always as an expression of anti-Semitism–most of the criticism of The Passion focused on this kind of negative portrayal as the “proof” of such prejudice.        

Republicans have enjoyed playing the “liberal racism” card over the years, hoisting the liberals by their own rhetorical petard, and there is no debate where they enjoy using this tactic than when it comes to affirmative action, on the grounds that any kind of racial discrimination (be it “positive” or “negative”) is wrong and inherently racist, which relies rather heavily on the assumption that there are no substantial differences of any meaningful kind between races (if we were ever to admit the reality of such groups) that might necessitate taking such differences into account in policy one way or another.       

These charges are also the ultimate debate-killers, as we all basically accept that to be a confirmed racist or anti-Semite is to be rightly excluded from the debate (whether this should actually be so and why the same is not applied to committed Marxists, Christophobes, oikophobes and universalists might be points to be debated at another time). Thus to say that you know that so-and-so is a racist or anti-Semite from personal experience is also to say that his opinions on any matter where his prejudices might come into play are worse than irrelevant–they are morally beyond the pale and essentially deserve no consideration.   

I appreciate that Reihan isn’t making these charges in such an indiscriminate way as to apply them to all opponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism, for example, but I confess to not understanding how one determines where generic patriotism becomes nativism and where nativism becomes chauvinism (which I assume here carries with it some connotations of supremacism and looking down on non-whites as inferior), especially in the case of the latter, barring explicitly derogatory statements.  The reality that patriots who raise inconvenient questions about the practicability of assimilation of a given group of people are frequently classed together with “nativists,” when for most people who use the term “nativism” is simply a synonym for racism, does not help to make these distinctions any easier.  

It is also doubtful that most people, given their druthers, really want to live in a “polyglot, multiracial world” no matter where they live, especially if they are not accustomed to living in such a world, and it is not only natural but to some extent healthy and reasonable that people would resent being told that they will live in such a world regardless of what they say and had better get used to it, particularly when their objections to this process have never been taken seriously. 

If these Conservatives hate the “polyglot, multiracial world of London and the Home Counties,” I imagine that a major part of the reason they hate it is that they hate seeing parts of their own country becoming for all intents and purposes alien to them and their experience.  For those who see their country as an inheritance they have received from their ancestors and which they are entrusted to pass down to their heirs, seeing that country significantly and in some ways radically changed strikes them at their very core.  These people are going to feel aggrieved; they will become resentful; they may indeed finally come to hate those whom they associate with the transformation of the country, because they feel betrayed and rendered powerless in their own country to preserve the country as they knew it and with it their identity.  Foreseeing this, or indeed perceiving that it is already the case, the wise statesman interested in the peace of his country ought not continue to stoke the fires of these resentments and begins heeding what the people in the country seem to be saying.     

One thing that does seem clear to me is that the decision of the British establishment to ignore many Britons’ “good and decent hostility” to immigration for forty years and more has worked precisely to feed feelings of contempt and create the conditions in the North for the outbreaks of rioting between whites and Asians.  The infusion of large numbers of immigrants into a country is almost surely bound to provoke rather more hostility and even more exclusionary attitudes than would otherwise be the case, particularly when there is the clear sense that policy is being carried out against the will of the majority.  We might argue ourselves hoarse, so to speak, about the likely success or failure of any attempt to integrate successfully large numbers of newcomers, particularly those from markedly different cultures and religious backgrounds, but the scenes from the North in recent years and the recent terror plots–and the inevitable backlash among native Britons in increased support for the BNP–all point to considerable failure in the case of Britain.  That makes me think that if many ordinary Conservatives have indeed crossed a line into actual hatred of people on account of their race or ethnicity (and this is what I take racism and anti-Semitism to mean, if the terms are to mean much of anything), it has been the steady, consistent push to ignore and marginalise these people in the political process when they have expressed legitimate concerns in the past that has pushed most of them over that line.  It is undoubtedly morally and psychologically satisfying to more or less effectively dismiss people because they hold what we consider unreasonable or even “loathsome” views, but in this stance there seems to me to be something of an abandonment of persuasion and deliberation. 

Part of the entire problem rests in casting the views of these Conservatives in general in terms of hatred, which tends to stack the deck against the people in question in any case.  Once you have defined these people, as the original Standard article did, in terms of their hatred of things American rather than their love of things British, it is easier to say that these people don’t just hate what Britain is turning into (presumably because they love their country and the way it used to be) but that they hate what Britain is becoming because they hate people different from themselves.  Perhaps some do.  Perhaps even “a lot” do, as Reihan claimed, but I must remain skeptical until I have something much more definite to work with.