WHITE BACKLASH, OR WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN TRUMP COMING A DECADE AGO

Marisa Abrajano & Zoltan L. Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Many scholars contend that the large-scale movement of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Pary that occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s was mainly spurred by racial concerns. From this perspective, African Americans demands for increased civil rights coupled [with] the willingness of leaders within the Democractic Party to support those demands ultimately repelled millions of white Americans from theDemocratic Party and helped Republicans win nationally. In this sense, our book has its intellectual origins in the 'issue evolution' approach that Ted Carmines and James Stimson employed so influentially to explain how racial politics altered the nation's partisan dynamics. Just as their book was about what happens to US politics when race emerged as a political concern, our book is about what happens to US politics when immigrants and Latinos arise as a core political isseue." Id, at 8, "It is also worth noting that current patterns in US public opinion closely mirror many historical episodes of nativist reactions to growing immigrant populations. The United Statees is in both reality abd folklore a nation of immigrants [Note: Those of us of African-American accendary have a history of being "imported" as "chattel;" our ancestors did not "immigrate" to America. So, when one talk about a 'nation of immigrants, one excludes African American from that discourse.], but when the immigrants have arrivedd in large numbers or form distinct shores, they have often sparked widespead fear and concern among the public. Indded, the hsitory of the contion could be told through a series of challenging immigrant-nativist confronation. [Note: The hisotry can only be told that way excluding African Americans and slavery from that history.] The rising tide of German and French migrants at the end of the eighteenth century sparked one of the first large-scale nativist movements. But it was just one of many. It was followed by numerous episodes of anti-Irish discrimination in the 1850s, a populist backlash against Chinese immigrants inthe 1880s, prevalent anti-southern and eastern European sentiment in the early twentieth century, and a long history of animosity toward Mexicans dating back to the Mexican-American War. World War II generated similarly widesperead anti-immigrant concern and the internment of over a hundred thousabd Japanene Americans. One could also include current-day US anxiety about and discrimination against Arab Americans [Note: Anti-Muslim Americans discrimination as well.] in this lengthy list of nativisit movements." "The larger point is that contemporary concerns about Latinos and other immigrants are not new. They represent just one example of a much larger phenomenom. If American have so often rallied in large numbers against immigrants in the past, then there is a real possibility that we should expect the same kind of anti-immigrant mobilization today when the number of immigrants and the racial distinctiveness of those immigrants are at or near historical highs." Id. at 33-34. I am not sure the problem is that we don't learn from history, or that we learn the wrong lessons from history. If we learned from history, we should have seen Trump and his supporters coming. If we had learned the right leasons from history we would confront the anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Latino,, not to mention the anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim sentiments head on. At it heart, it is an anti-people sentiment, unless those people are just like you.).