Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Supporters hold a sign before former President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, September 12, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona.
I’m not an uncritical fan of the 1619 Project, but I will note that our country’s foundational DNA came complete with savage racial hierarchies, as the foundational DNA of most nations did not. It’s only now, with non-Europeans coming in considerable number to the nations of the EU, that those nations are seeing the rise of the kind of explicitly racist and xenophobic tendencies that, alas and alack, are as American as apple pie.
Historically, of course, in the absence of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean immigrants, Europe had to make do with antisemitism, which I suppose goes to show that the need for a scapegoatable “other” can be common to a wide range of peoples and nations.
As a nation of immigrants, America is also periodically a nation of xenophobes. Benjamin Franklin’s railing against the mid-18th-century German immigrants in otherwise Anglo Pennsylvania is as good a starting point as any. Came the Irish, came the Yankee Protestant backlash; came the Italians and the Jews and that backlash took the form of the second iteration of the Klan and, in 1924, the 40-year banning of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Our disparate groups of immigrants haven’t always banded together, either. Having amassed majorities or near-majorities in most American big cities by the end of the 19th century, the Irish used the existing patronage systems to dominate big-city politics and big-city hiring. In New York, Tammany didn’t exactly hang out a sign reading “No non-Irish need apply,” but there weren’t a lot of points of entry for Gotham’s Italians and Jews. It took Fiorello La Guardia, with Italian and Jewish parentage, fluent in both Italian and Yiddish, and who’d previously been elected to Congress on both the Republican and Socialist ballot lines, to unite the city’s Italians and Jews, as they’d not been united before. They came together with the anti-Irish Protestant Brahmins to elect La Guardia as mayor in 1933, defeating Tammany’s Irish candidate. At the national level, the Irish, Italians, and Jews all supported Franklin Roosevelt, whose political skills were such that they all believed they had a stake in his electoral success (which, in fact, they did).
But out-group solidarity, at any level of government, is a very perishable commodity. Blacks were the perennial odd men out, and the rifts between Blacks and Italians in working-class New York are the stuff of history, legend, Spike Lee films, and current politics (and not just in New York).
For a number of recent decades, the politicos who ponder demographics (and the demographers who ponder politics) have particularly pondered the political trajectory of the nation’s Third Wave of immigrants—specifically, those from Mexico and Central America. Would Latinos go the way of Italians—moving rightward as immigrants’ children and grandchildren moved up at least a little on the economic and social ladders? Or would they retain the politics of the victims of racial discrimination and exclusion, and therefore vote like Blacks?
Can Kamala Harris counteract the rightward movement of many Latinos, on which the elections in Arizona, Nevada, and some other swing states hinge?
The answer to that question may be a determining factor in next month’s presidential election, as Latinos now constitute roughly 15 percent of the electorate and their vote has been moving rightward. In 2012, Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 65 percent. In 2020, Joe Biden won 59 percent. And this September, an NBC/Telemundo poll showed Kamala Harris’s Latino support stood at 54 percent, and also showed her trailing Trump among young Latino men.
If nothing else, Trump is one deft “other-er.” When he ran in 2016, the “others” he claimed threatened all real Americans, and whom he assiduously assailed, were disproportionately Black and Latino; they were the Mexican “rapists” he attacked as soon as he got off the Trump Tower escalator. The other “others” he attacked were the amorphous “elites” who’ve been a target of right-wing populists ever since Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George Wallace began attacking the “pointy-head” bureaucrats in the federal government and university campuses who could never understand that smacking down dangerous “others” was required to preserve American civilization.
In 2024, however, Trump has shown he can adjust his demonizations and his “othering” to fit a changing electorate. Many working-class Americans compelled to make do in the lower-wage jobs of a de-unionized (or never unionized) production or service sector would be receptive, he knew, to his promises to debase, expel, or lock up the “others” he would blame for their plight. “I am your retribution,” he vowed.
But Trump could no longer “other-ize” based solely on race. Too many members of historic racial minorities—particularly young Black and Latino working-class men—now had joined the ranks of younger working-class white men who were susceptible to the same politics of misdirected grievance. That left immigrants as Trump’s target (along with the current generation of pointy-head Democrats). And just in case the scope of the harm that Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Fox News, and far-right social media attribute to immigrants seems implausible, if not simply fictitious (which, of course, it is), Trump and his ilk have steadily increased the number of undocumented immigrants in their telling: While the actual figure is roughly 11 million, Trump and Vance now routinely say it’s 20 million, or sometimes, 25 million. As Joseph Goebbels so convincingly demonstrated, if you’re going to lie, you should lie big.
The size of the lies isn’t the only Goebbels-esque feature of Trump’s daily rants. Lately, he says that these criminal/immigrants (the two identities are conjoined in Trumptalk) have “bad genes” that will pollute the American bloodstream. Of course, these Haitian and Mexican immigrant genes aren’t all that different from the genes of the Haitian and Mexican immigrants who are here legally, who’ve become citizens, and, some of them, become Republicans. But science has never been Trump’s strongest subject. (For that matter, it’s clearly never been the strongest subject of today’s Republicans.)
Can Kamala Harris counteract the rightward movement of many Latinos, on which the elections in Arizona, Nevada, and some other swing states hinge? All polling suggests that the issues that matter most to Latinos are the same economic issues that matter most to working- and middle-class Americans across all races. Her proposals to increase the Child Tax Credit and to have Medicare cover the home care of the elderly certainly will help. Her proposal to have the government provide $25,000 for a starter home is smart as well, but she should also emphasize the number of new homes she will push to be built, and the number of new construction jobs that will create. Having the government assume much of the cost of caring for small children and their elderly grandparents should boost her margins among women voters; having the government create more construction jobs could diminish Trump’s margins among working-class men.
It’s also well and good that Harris has pledged to create tax breaks for new small businesses. She also needs to focus on increasing the minimum wage: She’ll help those new businesses get off the ground; in return, she’ll help their employees make a living wage.
Harris has doubled down on her bread-and-butter platform planks in the closing weeks of the campaign; she needs to double down some more. Trump has doubled down on his “other-izing” to a level not seen in the campaign of a major-party presidential nominee since those of the mid-19th-century Democrats who ran against the “Black Republicans”—above all, against Abraham Lincoln. The choice in this year’s election is no less stark or fundamental than it was then.
