A Liberal Lament
This week: the President lies about phone calls from Mexico and the Boy Scouts; the White House and Fox News conspired to generate fake news; and more firings. But real changes, ugly changes, are going on in the background; changes that strike at the core of the Liberal/Progressive progress of the past several decades. There are three items that might have missed your attention.
First, the Department of Justice is looking into opening an investigation of discrimination against whites and Asians in college admissions.[1] After over forty years of programs to diversify the student populations of colleges to be more inclusive of race, gender, and other identifiers; the DoJ is now looking at whether white kids are being given enough opportunities. Asians seem to be “thrown in” the mix in order to make this look less racist, but the clear target is to “fix” the problem for white kids.
This is a “dog whistle” issue for the alt-right who consider affirmative action programs taking race, gender, and national origin into consideration as “unfair” to whites. This is despite statistics showing 80% of admissions to the most prestigious and competitive colleges in the country are by white students.[2] That the Department of Justice, for many years the protector of civil rights in the United States, is taking this diametrically opposite direction is of tremendous concern.
The second item seemed like a sideshow, as White House Advisor Stephen Miller re-emerged into the public eye. Miller was hidden away by the White House after his February press outing, where he stated the President’s authority, “…will not be questioned.”[3] Miller appeared in yesterday’s press conference, where he presented a new legal immigration program. The proposal cuts legal immigration in half, and emphasizes English speaking and financial independence for new immigrants. Miller slanted this as a “jobs program for Americans,” though statistics by non-biased sources show that few current citizens would benefit from such a law.[4]
This has also been a “pet issue” of the alt-right, who believe that immigrants are “taking over” American jobs. Right wing “studies” challenge the mainstream, purporting to show immigrants pushing “Americans” out of the way.[5]
In addition, the proposal has a “Northern European” feel to it, with the English language requirement lending strength to that argument. When Miller was challenged about that, he struck back by insulting the journalist and accusing him (a son of Cuban immigrants) as having a “cosmopolitan bias,” whatever that means. Miller even went so far as to argue an alternative history, stating that the Statue of Liberty wasn’t about immigration, but was created as a symbol of the example that the United States could be to the world.
Miller followed other alt-right revisionists by stating that the Emma Lazarus poem (A New Colossus) was simply a belated addition to the statue in an attempt to alter its true meaning.[6] This argument may seem like an historic dalliance, but it is a symbolic reference to the true differences between right and left today. Is the world role of the United States a symbolic one, where the US is the “Athenian Democracy” that others should strive to imitate, but not join? Then the Statue of Liberty stands as a light at the doorway, but it is a safety light protecting those inside from the world. Alarms should go off should the world try to “enter.” The Trump/Bannon strategy of “America First” is the current rendition of this view.
Or is the world role of the United States one where we take a share of the problems of the world, and includes the less fortunate into the American dream? This is the world of the Emma Lazarus poem, “…give me your huddled masses yearning to be free.” The light at the doorway invites the world to come to this better place, and join in the American experiment. This represents the worldview of the Obama administration: working together with the world.
It doesn’t help the alt-right that Lazarus was Jewish, and a socialist as well.
The third issue that has slid under the table this week deals with gender. While the tweet about transgender and the military has been ignored by the military itself, the Department of Justice has made another regression as it now takes the legal stand that work place laws against discrimination do not include sexual orientation, a reversal of the Obama era.[7]
So while we get fascinated with the slow motion explosion of the Trump Administration, don’t lose sight of the fact that they really are trying to changes things, and make “America Great Again” for the alt-right. Liberals should lament.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-universities.html
[2] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/5/report-racial-divide-still-exists-on-college-admis/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/13/stephen-millers-audacious-controversial-declaration-trumps-national-security-actions-will-not-be-questioned/?utm_term=.c996d71fe25b
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/us/immigrants-arent-taking-americans-jobs-new-study-finds.html
[5] https://cis.org/Memorandum/Jobs-Americans-Wont-Do-Detailed-Look-Immigrant-Employment-Occupation
[6] http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/02/trump-advisor-miller-schools-acosta-statue-of-liberty-poem-on-huddled-masses-added-later/
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/nyregion/justice-department-gays-workplace.html
