NOVEMBER 24, 2019 – There’s no greater anti-addiction advocate than a former addict. Political addiction, as most forms of addiction, doesn’t “go away.” The addict has to work fiendishly at keeping the addiction “at bay.” This ongoing process is called euphemistically, “recovery.” Backsliding is so common, so likely, that the addict must obsess about it so as remain “clean” as long as possible.
Once the addiction is acknowledged, the addict can work on treatment. What works for one person, might not work for another. What I find effective, however, is a study of history—examination of how things stood generations ago, and how by contrast, our current conditions seem comparatively benign at best or survivable at worst.
The habitual (as opposed to “addictive”) reader of my posts will remember repeated mention of the tome by Stanford (emeritus) historian Richard White, The Republic for which it Stands. In a late chapter, White addresses jaw-dropping views on immigration in the 1880s and 1890s. The prevailing attitudes among academics, politicians, and other influencers of public opinions read almost identical to the most extreme views espoused by today’s exclusionists.
Take, for example, John Burgess of Columbia University. Referencing Burgess himself in an 1895 article in Political Science Quarterly, and a modern secondary source, Michael Frisch, “Urban Theorists, Urban Reform, and American Political Culture in the Progressive Period,” published in the same journal almost a century later, White writes,
[Burgess] declared that the racial genius of the American commonwealth was Aryan and specifically Teutonic, since only the “race-proud Teutons” had resisted intermixture and the tainting of their Aryan blood. Polluting the United State with non-Aryans was a “sin against American civilization.” Only those non-Aryans who had been “Aryanized in spirit” should be allowed to become citizens since only Aryans were capable of democratic government. Everywhere Burgess looked, he saw danger to the Aryan genius of American governance: socialism, European immigration, the spreading scope of government, the extension of suffrage to the unworthy, and last but not least, his younger colleagues in political science both at Columbia and elsewhere, who he thought were infected by socialism. (The Republic for which it Stands, p. 704)
White cites many other examples of nativist charges that immigrants were criminal by nature; a threat to jobs, wages; a burden on society; infected with socialist ideas; a demographic threat to “real” Americans; et cetera et cetera. It’s as if today’s fear-mongers on the immigration front have adopted wholesale, the identical fears—and rationalizations—that fueled anti-immigration sentiments 125 years ago.
I find that this revelation about the past works as an antidote with regard to a present “crisis.” Review of our past affords a perspective that gives relief for hypoxia, a puff from an historical inhaler dissipating current political panic.
The world spins with ferocious speed as it hurtles into “the future,” but in its freneticism, the human condition never escapes its past. “Same old” returns anew.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
